Tara Tainton

There's a certain blog entry on Novelspot by self-proclaimed erotic romance author Diane Laurence titled "Diatribe from an Erotica Romance Author: Must Erotica Really Suck so Much?" I have to call her self-proclaimed, because even fellow authors and readers of the genre disagree with whether her writing is true erotica. I guess they just don't find it sexy enough.

I haven't read any of her writing, but she claims it has what the majority of novels in the genre don't. Her writing, she says, has soul, meaningful characters, enlightenment for her readers. None of that matters. What matters is that she's dissing an entire genre and a great deal of authors along with it. Read the entry for yourself. You'll think of a ton of rebuttals in your own head before you reach the end of the second paragraph.

I'm not going to argue with the entry line-by-line. Thorough and honest bloggers have already done that. Check out Jaynie R's Writing, Reading, Reviews, and Rubbish or Gina's One Writer's Rambles. They say much of what I'm thinking, but my opinion can also be summed up in one central thought: literature shouldn't be judged.

Sure, we read and write reviews and generally try to determine if we'll like something before we read it. But that's what should matter: if we like it. No writer, reader, or other is the all knowing deity who's opinion is perfect compared to all others. What one considers weak characters, non-existent plot, too much filthy language, lack of style, or lack of a prolific statement or lesson is just that one's opinion. Nothing more. Yet, Diane jumped in there to tell the world what she thinks is perfect about her writing and lacking in that of others.

And she doesn't stop there. She says these bad authors and their bad writing are "verbal crack" offered to the masses. She's stepping away from why we write and why we read. On both sides of the literature, we're there to be stirred, to feel something, good or bad. We're there to be affected. Does it matter what does the affecting, what characters or story lines move us, or which words turn us on? No. That's up to us, the readers, and to the authors who find that alluring themselves, enough to put it on paper. If you find yourself high and mighty enough to make a generality of what makes good and bad literature, you're actually giving your opinion on what makes good and bad readers, which means you're judging people. And why do you think you're actually any better than they?

We've got to get away from this. We can offer an opinion on what turns ourselves on, what we think fits in the genre of erotica, and what we like to see in authors' styles. We can enjoy reviewing and reading reviews by considering them for ourselves and not stating what's right and wrong for others. But when we venture over the line into stating what's good and bad for others, for all of us, then we're dissing humanity as a whole. And in that process, we take away our own. And being human is the best thing we've got going for us. It's our humanity that calls us to write, our humanity that we want to read in literature. We want to read about it while we assess and redefine our own.

When Diane comments on too many "c words" and sex without profoundness being a reflection of a bad author and an ignorant reader, I have to laugh. I give her as much credit as my own mother who instructed her teenage daughter that open-mouth kissing is bad, utterly disgusting, and serves no purpose but to actively repulse others who happen to witness it. Yeah, I didn't accept the woman's advice for me on my wedding night either, and that's a great topic for another time.

Sex isn't always magical and elevating, and that certainly isn't what turns us on all the time. If Diane really believes in sex being a constant state of enlightenment, I don't want to read her work. It's got to be boring as hell. I want to read the baseness that makes us human; that's what elevates us. I want to read one author's reality of their most honest emotions. By getting in touch with our most primitive motivations and functions and looking at it with a sense of reality, we discover who we truly are. And if that's not enlightenment, I don't know what is.

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Tara's Friends & Fans | 2010-01-30 06:57 doug 05/19/2005 10:57 AM Alluring site. I think I agree with your overall point, that readers get what they're looking for and writers need to give that if they want to be read. Kitty 05/31/2005 04:01 PM I think she sounded just the least bit judgmental... Erotica is what gets you going, what fires your imagination, not what's properly written from a formal standpoint. I tried writing in the classic form & I was yawning while I was at the keyboard O_o We all like what we like, we all have our different kinks, different keys that turn us on. To judge what is good, bad or ugly is personal taste, not to be broadcast as fact. There's a lot of stuff out there that I don't care for but I don't put it down just because it doesn't light my fire. If anything, I look at the 'gramatical' aspect (I'm a compulsive proofreader) LOL But as far as content, if it doesn't blow my skirt up, so what? The world is a wonderfully diverse place & that's the way it should be.

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