She Blinded Me With Science - On Research, Realism, and the Ridiculousness of Caring

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a research chemist. I did do chemistry as part of Learning Science at school, but I suspect this may have been a faintly pointless exercise (not least because nearly all I have to show for my teacher's troubles is the dim recollection that F=MA, that mitochondria are important for something or other possibly to do with generating oxygen out of leaves, and that in spite of all the rumours, putting a pencil sharpener marked W GERMANY into a bunsen burner does not actually make it explode). 

Nevertheless, I did end up trying to do some research on research chemistry in order to write a moderately-convincing world in which Her Submissive Experiment could sit, and it only really occurred to me later that the job of an erotica author is perhaps faintly weird. 

Because, obviously, I do not expect anyone reading any of my books to go "Aha! Anna Voss said RLS-18, the orgasm-inhibiting formulation of the serum, had impure salts!! It's all so obvious now!" and sprint naked from their bathtub to go and invent nuclear fusion or triangles or whatever it is scientists do these days.

But at the same time, I do not want anyone reading my books (in the bath or otherwise) to go "Mm. Mmmm... Oh... yes this is a good bit, oh, mmm- wait, what? What?! It's P₁V₁ = P₂V₂, not P₂V₂ = P₁V₁!! This facesitting scene is terrible and my immersion is ruined!!"

Alright, I do not actually imagine any of my readers would do that - they ought to be too carried away by my imagination, for one thing, and for another I have a nagging suspicion that those might not be so much opposite formulas as the exact same formula turned around in the middle...

...but that's sort of the point. I don't know. Definitely one of my teachers used to bang on about the need to balance an equation so that whatever your actual answer was it was the same either way, but I think the textbook for that lesson might have been green, in which case it must be what you do in maths. 

The point is - well. 

The point is that I try pretty hard to write well. I like my characters to be exciting and enjoyable and, at least sometimes, kneeling. 

But I also like them to kneel on a firm enough floor that the reader can believe in them and the rules of their universe. 

There is More Than One Kind of Mistake

There are some errors I suspect you can mostly get away with: if your character hops into a private jet and zooms, unethically, all the way from London to New York for The Big Dramatic Showdown, most readers are probably going to ignore the fact that the prose describes the aircraft door closing, delivers a scene-break, and then picks up the narrative with the line five hours later, the jet pulled to a stand at LaGuardia. There may be one or two who are curious enough to start digging around on Skyscanner to work out whether it can be done, or what specific jet may have been involved, but even they will probably let it slip. If the reader has already accepted a premise like 'Playboy billionaire Cormorant Steele could have everything he wanted except the secretary who kept laughing at his name', you can get some leeway from their internal model of the jet stream headwinds and Air Traffic delays even if they're a professional pilot - although god help you if you foolishly specified the aircraft type.

And there are some errors which you do not necessarily get away with, but which people will, in moderation, overlook, even though as a reader they're annoyingly bloody obvious. 

A perpetual issue I wrestle with is the Curse of the Wandering Comma, in which the end of a clause or a dialogue tag vanishes from where I originally put it down, only to reappear several lines down the page because I proofread everything, made certain it was fine, and then later came back through on a different editing pass and decided to add in an additional bit of depth and texture. Whereupon my readers are left with an awkwardly mangled formation like '"Yes, Miss she shook her head, her throat suddenly tight as she considered the possibilities ," she nodded'.

Often, that one gets me right in the middle of trying to get the final version of the manuscript (which by this point has an already-embarrassing name like "Final_polished_FINALv3.8.docx") distributed to publishers and I only spot it in the proof and have to stop everything to come back with a v.3.9 or v4 or something. It is a terrible, terrible thing to know what you intended to appear on the page; it makes it so much harder to see what you actually wrote.

Those errors, however, are by the way.

Because there are some errors which, I think, genuinely spoil books. And these fall into two categories, the first hopefully theoretical. 

This first, in my nightmares, is a blatant copy-pasting error or printers' mistake where a fat finger or a misplaced tray of lead type might accidentally lead you to have Page 5 of your book say "the Wizard took a long drag on his pipe and The great king knelt before the humble farmer, and shook his massive head. "My child," he declared, "I have done you a great wrong and shall abdicate in your favour." puffed another smoke ring, fingers brushing his magic wand. "Tell me, Florence," he said hesitantly, "did your mother ever tell you who your father was?"'

This post is not about those errors (sadly, because now I've invented it, "Florence And The Crown of Submission" might be genuinely entertaining. Possibly too thematically close to The Ruritanian Pretender though...)

No - my concern is with the other kind of errors that spoil books, the kind where, if you have the misfortune to know about the same subject the author is touching on, their astonishingly hamfisted bungling of a topic on which you are pretty much an expert, absolutely ruins the immersion. 

The problem, of course, isn't exactly that the author doesn't know the subject as well as you do, because - trust me - authors often happen to know a very little about a lot of things, and it isn't automatically a problem.

An author might write "It was a dark and stormy night, and the water in the third-deck pool sloshed across the scuppers, the huge rear paddle wheel of the SS Veronica thrashing madly as the twin-funnel steamer battled bravely through the storm engulfing the North Atlantic towards the jetty at Witches' Island," and even if the reader is not a shipbuilder, they may well know enough about boats to have their immersion broken while they think "uhmmm?". 

Of course, if the reader happens to actually be a shipbuilder, they will move beyond mild suspicion of the prose and probably into actually asking awkward questions like "how is this Mississippi riverboat cresting those waves, exactly?" and "where's the centre of mass on this, then?" and "if I buy you the Children's Big Book of Boats, will you please just fix this abomination of a scene next edition??", but (pointed emails notwithstanding) they may well not mind: I'm afraid authors are just wrong sometimes, and readers who are experts in a subject can often cope.

After all, plenty of people have been able to enjoy books about - for example - unusual schools of magic regardless of the fact that the author may be a gigantic fool who simply threw in a steam-powered vehicle in a random attempt to add colour and excitement, without ever actually thinking 'gosh, maybe my entire understanding of what categories are for is completely backwards?' An author can be confidently wrong without immediately ruining the book itself.

But where I think author error goes seriously wrong for readers is when Captain Archibald Pike, the grizzled old sea dog - who the author has carefully established has been sailing for approximately a million years and can handle everything from a coracle to the QE2 - turns to the plucky young adventurer, claps his pipe between his teeth, and declares, "Why, the two of them ruffians have hotwired that old galleon, the swabs! Come, Jim Dawkins, let us leap aboard my fishing smack and fire the boilers! Why, with the tide coming in we shall catch them in barely three knots time - just be quick, lad, and tally onto that mainsplice!"

And the reason for this is that while the author is obviously responsible for both mistakes, the SS Veronica is a mistake which happens in the narration - which might puzzle readers without derailing them - whereas the other is the character of Captain Pike making a mistake. And that is not fine, because it Makes The Character Wrong. 

Characters can be wrong, of course. They can make mistakes, they can have blind spots, they can have flaws. But they cannot be wrong in ways which break character.

Knowing What My Characters Should Know

I do not need to know how to be a research chemist in order to write about Becky and Jameela's growing kinky relationship in Her Submissive Experiment. I don't - thanks to Robert Louis Stevenson - even have to be very specific about what is wrong with early versions of the formula; Dr Jekyll himself never articulated it better than "impure salts," and so I am perfectly within my rights to have a line like, 

Becky hadn’t been able to find any specific cause for the problem, at least none that she’d reported to Jameela. 

“The compound sample we used to develop the serum must have been impure,” she said after several weeks of painstaking research, and she’d shrugged as if that explained everything. 

And then I can be on my way, smugly happy in the knowledge of a cheap shot well done.

But I cannot have Becky be bad at research chemistry. She has to actually know her stuff. Hell, she does know her stuff, she is frighteningly intelligent. So is Jameela. Part of the joy of Experiment is that they are both pretty damn brilliant but also incredibly bad at communicating with each other about what they actually want (which... actually, that does sort of match one or two chemists I have known, now I think about it).

Similarly, I wanted to be clear that Becky has a life outside the lab. Jameela... well, not so much. She has a huge and somewhat stressful family (I sketched a family tree, even!) but they don't show up in the actual text because a) if they did, it would've given Jameela a healthier work-life balance than she wanted, and b) they are Hard Work, which is partly why Jameela has such an iffy work-life balance in the first place). But it's important to show that Becky has a life outside the lab, however devoted she might be to work, and so I ended up with her playing board games partly because it felt like a good way to show she has a really good strategic brain in general...

...and then I lost about four hours to watching Youtube videos of people not even playing but simply explaining the rules to board games, which it turns out are now way, way more complicated than "you go up ladders and down snakes". Because to show Becky being good at games required me to understand what Bad At Games looked like so that I could not write that.

Spotting the Pattern

This happens to me a lot. 

Writing that, I am not completely sure that it happens to every writer of literary erotica a lot, but I have to assume it does. When I was working on Anna Voss Writes The Classics I spent more time than I wanted to working out the neighbourhood of Edgley for Tess and Temerity so that I could be relatively confident that, yes, you could get from Edgley Hall to Chetmond Park on foot or by horse, so yes, it made complete sense that Sir Richard might let the D'Ascoignes shoot on his land for the sake of keeping in with them, and yes, Edgley might well have an Assembly Rooms... I sketched out a map and everything, although if I am completely honest "traced over real places" is probably more accurate than "sketched," which implies creativity.

When I wrote The Honourable Boytoy I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to find out how Cold War spies communicated, and how One Time Pads worked (and trying not to laugh at one-time pads as a concept, sue me), and then I not only had to explain it in ways that made it clear Jimmy Easterly broadly knew what he was doing because he is not a bad agent at all - however morally dubious The Association's methods are! - but also in a way that made it clear to readers who had no desire to be taught 1960s cryptography what he was doing in cryptographical terms.

And that was important because even though I imagine not a single reader of my books comes into the experience thinking "Oho! Now Anna's gonna write about Numbers Stations! I can't wait!" (reader: you can wait. Waiting is good for you...) I equally think that even without a Lincolnshire Poacher Fetishist among my audience, the exact moment I have Jimmy pick up the phone to just ring The Association with an update, literally any reader of my books would think "now, wait a minute - he's a spy in Vienna in 1964 and Moscow are after him, that's stupid!"

It is important to the plot that Jimmy is not stupid. He just has a desperate need to be told that he's useful. And he doesn't need to be a cryptographic genius either - but he does need to be written well enough that the reader buys that he knows what he's doing.

I don't have to write the precise way Becky manipulates RLS-86 - but I need the reader to believe that she could. 

There is an old joke that is usually about fixing printers, or cars, or typewriters or some other vicious, impenetrable mechanical contrivance: the machine breaks. An engineer or repair technician is called. They walk around the bloody thing, pull out a hammer, and give it a good solid blow. The machine springs back to life, and the mechanic hands over a bill for £200.

Naturally, people object. "£200?! All you did was whack it with a hammer!" And the mechanic or engineer or whoever - can you tell yet this is a joke invented and told by mechanics and engineers? - they grin, and nod, and say, "Yeah. It's £10 for hitting it. It's £190 for knowing where to hit it". 

My experience of writing is a lot like that, although without people gleefully shoving £200 my way, more's the pity. (Did I mention that my books are available to buy from Smashwords, Kobo, and other platforms including Amazon? Just saying...).

The thing is, while I do my best to avoid a rogue comma or a missing close bracket, I have to accept some may slip through and - annoying as they are - I hope they'll be forgiven. But I cannot possibly expect my readers to look past nonsensical characters, and therefore I have to avoid mistakes where my ignorance is carried through.

I don't expect readers to be expert chemists, and I don't research how labs work in order to fully explain the precise biological mechanisms of RLS-86.

But I need to be able to outline the broad way that RLS-86 might work, and how Becky and Jameela might describe its effects, not for chemical veracity but because I need you to believe in Becky and Jameela as real. Because the second they stop feeling real they just become... empty.

If the individuals I write don't make sense as characters then I've ceased to tell a story with people, and I'm just scattering nouns in among the kinky scenes. For me, at least, that's neither fun to write nor read. 

This Matters For My Smut!

The thing is, a lot of what I write, a lot of the heat from what I write isn't just mechanical descriptions of whose tongue was where and whose hips strained upwards or whose arms writhed against their bonds. I do write that, of course I write that, but I write it in ways that are deliberately embodied. I spend quite a lot of time inside my characters' heads. Obviously I spend a lot of time dwelling on what is happening to their bodies because that's often, necessarily, very sexy... but it's not always as sexy as what is happening in their minds. 

Her Ascendant Intern is told almost entirely inside Hannah's head because it is entirely about her thoughts and feelings and responses to what Beverley is doing. Hannah's struggles and her desires and her growing arousal and submission aren't separate from her panic and her self-soothing by curling under the duvet binge-watching an old familiar sitcom (which I don't specify, but it's Brooklyn Nine-Nine): instead, her sexual desires are enhanced by those other things, not because the other things are inherently sexy in themselves, but because they are all part of who Hannah is. Hannah feeling like a real - or at least a plausible - person is what makes her physical desires sexy. Not that she gets wet or feels hot or goes breathless in the abstract, but because those things are happening to her as a person whom the reader knows. Her realness, albeit within the heightened bounds of realism in erotic fiction, is part of the key that lets a reader properly understand (and enjoy!) her surrender to Beverley.

Edge Close has some fantastically hot scenes, but I still think some of the sexiest moments are when Ellen realises that she has power over George and that he wants her to use it - and she makes him slice a cucumber thinner. The interiority is what gives it charge. Elsewhere in the book she complains about her work as a librarian at a hospital and I had to track down a friend and make them complain at me so I could get the tone right. That adds nothing to the specific erotic charge in itself, but it makes Ellen real, and because she's real, everything else she does with George becomes more real too: it's easier to be in the heat with her, because she is already a person rather than a placeholder.

Even in The Ruritanian Pretender, I had to go to some trouble to explain that, yes - Ruritania still exists and still operates by Late Victorian Adventure Romance Rules: that's why Rudy falls in love with it; it's unique, it's a country he instantly loves when he sees it, and so when he sees Flavia he's predisposed to love her even before she's had him moulded into a useful little puppet... and when Flavia sees that she discovers that, perhaps, she can still feel love after all...

Because the downside of writing deeply interior and embodied smut, aside from a regrettable tendency to bang on about your own thought process and method when probably people just wanted to read a spicy blog post, is that people are really, really good at spotting when a person's narrative fails to match their actual story. I guess because we all spend so much time in our own heads. 

People will accept that Becky Stevenson is a submissive, and that she's butch, and that she's a genius, and that, yes, the way the light hits that side-fade sometimes absolutely is enough to make Jameela forget how to speak (obviously; Becky's a smokeshow with attitude). They'll accept that, yes, for this woman, desperate to submit to that woman, it makes sense Becky would dose herself with experimental serum, even though that's clearly a horrifying plan. Nothing in there contradicts itself.

But if I then accidentally write "Becky Stevenson frowned, set her safety glasses down, and leaned in closer, squinting carefully at the beaker into which she was pouring a mixture of hydrochloric acid and caustic soda. She was so close to a breakthrough, she knew, but... Hm. She dipped a finger in the mix experimentally, and tasted it. No. Not quite strong enough..." 

Well, then the whole thing collapses. Nothing about her makes sense, she's ceased to be real. And the collapse doesn't require the reader to be a chemist: as humans we can tell pretty well when a character doesn't make sense. (This, I swear, is why Hamlet has to bang on so much about not wanting to kill Claudius praying in case he goes to heaven: the obvious, obvious thing to do is to just knife the bastard then and there, and the audience absolutely knows that, so they have to be given a whole speech to explain why they are in fact mistaken and the play should carry on a while longer).

And in erotica - especially the kind of deeply interior erotica I try to write, all nested sensations and thoughts and hopes and needing - then a character that doesn't make sense isn't simply jarring; they ruin the effect.

A reader picking up one of my books knows that what they're getting is going - regardless of the precise premise or setting - to explore power and surrender and the psychology of both; they probably know that someone is going to get edged until they're an incoherent mess. Happy yet kinky endings tend to be arranged with an almost Wodehousian devotion to tying up loose ends. 

And however outlandish the setting might be, even if it's something as daft as, basically, A Femdom Christmas Carol In Space - readers will tend to accept that sort of thing as long as the characters in the book feel real.

But the second the characters break and start talking nonsense or acting in ways that specific character would not act in - then everything falls to bits. 

A result of this is that a lot of what I research doesn't even go on the page.

(I spent ages working out if Becky has opinions on American vs Japanese selvedge denim - she doesn't. Or rather, she doesn't precisely care, because what she's interested in is the shade and the weight. I think she has some American denim she prefers as softer, and some heavy Japanese stuff she appreciates because she thinks it fades better and there was something or other about slub and none of that made it into the book even - but there's a whole scene where she regrets how stiff her own jeans are as she tries to undress for Jameela, and she wishes she'd worn an older pair, and that's because she's wearing a heavier Japanese indigo pair rather than her softer old Cone Mills ones and that was because she was privately hoping to impress Jameela with the weight and depth of colour of them and I knowwww nobody actually cares. They have no reason to care and it isn't actually relevant to the scene... 

...but it does underpin it, because if I'd not thought it through and just written "her fingers nimbly popped open the button of her jeans and in her excitement she kicked the denim effortlessly across the room," then I think people would sense that the narration didn't quite feel right for who Becky is. She doesn't wear comfy elastane jeans; the description of the action would fight their understanding of Becky.)

Most of the research I do ends up like that: as negative space that is, somehow, load- and character-bearing negative space.

And it is probably a little ridiculous that I care about that so much; certainly even I think it is a bit much to have just written, effectively, 3,500 words on The Things I Often Don't Put Into My Books.

But I do think it's a pretty key element of making my characters believable, and my characters' interiority is a key part of making my books, well, mine. 

And besides...

Well...

Sometimes, after I've done all this damn research, it might be nice to say so.

(The post title, incidentally, is Suzanne’s fault. I wish I’d thought of it first.)