Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

The Sizzle Class

The Sizzle Class

This class I’m taking is called “Sustaining the Sizzle.” The instructor is SoCalScribe… unless he is dressing up his title with a seasonal motif which is the rage these days…He has teamed with Gissel d’Octobre who is currently running the “Weekly Quickie” helped by Mara who is a student, competitor and judge of the form. The Sizzle Class has brought in 10 additional writers and has really amped the variation and quality of the submissions….some of the traditional contributors have dropped out in the surge of new blood.

This surge seems to be taking Erotica in a new direction….Suddenly the story line is as important as the erotic content and instead of a standalone vignette designed to titillate, the class is forcing a new dynamic. Since the characters must stay the same over a six week course period, what is emerging are serials that will be connected by a common story line….This means readers are actually going to see some sensual prose with application to a more traditional work rather than a flash in the pan designed to stimulate the glands and hormones. Please don’t misunderstand….I am not trying to denigrate the stand alone contest vignette. I think the form is a great tool for teaching writers how to write sensual prose….It requires authors to ruthlessly cut back on nonessential adjectives, adverbs and redundant threads that do not bear on the central theme of the work… Working with this form makes a writer better….as long as they stay true to themselves and follow the thread in the direction their muse leads, rather than focusing exclusively on pandering to judges or winning contests…. I have said this before but it bears repeating.

If sensual prose is ever going to take hold on this site, it is going to have to be sold as a tool which will enable a writer to take a traditional genre to the next higher level. I invite readers to follow the submissions to the “Weekly Quickie” contest as it takes a traditional genre story line…(Action adventure, Science Fiction, Mystery, Romance.) and imbues it with the power and excitement of sexual energy. You can judge for yourself what is working and what is not….Is the writer getting carried away….is the writer too timid, is the attempt successful in controlling this powerful force... Would the work be better off without it?

My experience so far is that an effectively written contest vignette would be a scene lifted from a chapter that has been smoldering along for a few chapters and then bursts into flame…even when this happens the scene must be rewritten from the form of the novel into the form of the contest vignette. What in a novel might take the form of an impassioned kiss in the Vignette, by its nature will become a full blown act of intercourse. Still the material can be worked backwards from the novel into a vignette and from a vignette forward into a novel using much of the same verbiage.

This should be fun to watch and while what the reader sees might not fit their style of writing it should offer a glimpse of what might work when the traditional writer sees the need for a love scene that goes behind the closing of a bedroom door.