Monday, April 13, 2009

Passion on the Page

You've invested years of blood, sweat and, in my case, HB pencils in the British Library to construct your tale of deep passion and pent-up desire and now – at last – your central characters are edging towards the bedroom. At which point you start to suffer from writer's droop. How are you going to encapsulate the earth-moving wonder, the erotic arousal and tender protectiveness of the longed-for moment?
We've visited the topic several times before but Maeve Haran's piece in The Telegraph asking why is sex so hard to put into words, is well worth a read. The character she needed to plunge into the thick of the action in her latest novel The Lady and The Poet is no other than John Donne :
... perhaps the greatest erotic love poet in the English language, whose poetry glitters with clever seductiveness, carnal longing
and clearly a tough act to follow.

7 comments:

dreameridiot said...

Ah, John Donne...

Drachen said...

I think I can write porn. Who wants to pay me? :-)

Anonymous said...

A modern day porn star would call himself John Dong.

- Poppadumdum

Unknown said...

I just discovered your blog and love it. I've written a post about it on my own blog. You can find it here:
http://www.uninvitedwriter.com/2009/04/bibliobibuli-literary-blog.html

Anonymous said...

Lovely posting, Sharon and Maeve Haran is absolutely right. Too much of 'heaving breasts' and 'shafts' makes everything so - trite and ridiculous! And the scene turns out to be a farce instead of tender erotica. Trying to put into words what is heightened sensations and emotion without diminishing the beauty of the moment - are there any magnificent passages out there, you think? Maeve haran couldn't find any. What about others?
saras

bibliobibuli said...

uninvitedwriter - thanks so very much for kind words and the entry on your blog. you are warmly invited back here any time you like, and if you ever feel like guest blogging, are most welcome.

saras - oh yes i did find one or two. my most sizzling hottie is the ménage a trois in Jill Paton Walsh’s dark religious fable Flight of Angels

Anonymous said...

What about the one in Ulysses? that one really worked for me.