10,000 Words

It's not that many ... right?

Adult movie set, North Hollywood, Calif., 2000 | Photo credit: Susannah Breslin

As I mentioned previously, I’ve been working on this 10,000-word essay on what I’ve learned as a journalist who has spent almost 30 (!) years writing about the adult movie industry. Or maybe it’s about how the adult movie industry has changed over the last 30 years and how what I saw there changed me. Or maybe it’s about something else altogether. I’d tell you the working title (which has changed), but it’s too good. Sometimes you have to keep the best stuff for yourself.

Anyway, one of the biggest challenges of this essay was figuring out the structure. I tried chronological, which fell flat. I tried non-linear, which was chaos. I tried free-writing, which was a mess. I tried 100-word numbered sections, which was disjointed. I tried starting over and over again.

Then the other day, I was driving, and I realized that one of the 100-word sections I’d written was actually the perfect doorway into the story as a whole. And I know when I write, if I find the doorway, I can enter the house. If I can’t find the doorway, I stand around the house, banging on the walls, knocking on the windows, sulking on the front porch. The point is, this doorway worked.

Another way in which the 100-word-sections model was helpful, although ultimately abandoned, was that it got me remembering things I had encountered in the Valley but about which I had forgotten. Like the adult actress who told me about how when she was a toddler, her father killed her mother and then himself in front of her. Or the time I was interviewing an adult director at his home, and his young son wandered in the room, stood in front of the mirrored sliding closet doors, considered his reflection, pronounced “I hate you!” and then hit his mirror image. Or what it was like to be on a sound stage in Canoga Park when I witnessed something really beyond the pale happen, and how that kind of changed my life outlook forever.

One thing that’s proved informative is reading Elizabeth McCracken’s A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction, which my pal Lydia Netzer gifted me for Christmas. The book is about fiction, sure, but really it’s about writing, and how you can find your voice, and subject matter, and style. McCracken is really out there and kind of all over the place, a flouter of rules, and a nose turner upper at the supposed to’s of being a scribe or what have you. The only way through is with words. So it goes.

The last thing I’ll note is that if your writing is stuck, you probably don’t understand what you’re truly writing about. For example, I thought I was writing about the adult movie industry. But actually I am writing about love and sex, Eros and Thanatos, the things we forget and the things we remember. Those are universals.

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