Author2Author: Helen Ellis & Joshilyn Jackson, pt. 3

Helen's enthusiasm for Joshilyn's debut novel, gods in Alabama, remains strong as their conversation continues...

Helen Ellis: You write particularly well about bad sex. Do you find it easier to write what's difficult--either for your characters to experience or for you as a writer to write--in the face of what yo' Mama might think?

Joshilyn Jackson: You never realize exactly how much sex (and swearing! and violence! and perversion! and, and, and...tackiness!) is in your novel until the day your Belle of a Mama calls you and says, "Daddy and I are just lovin' your book, sugah. We're reading a chapter aloud to each other every night at bedtime." The idea of my mother reading some of those scenes, saying some of those lines, out loud, in bed, to my father...I must shudder and avert my eyes from what's tantamount to a literary primal scene.

Also, I hate writing "good" sex scenes. Bad sex is much easier to write. It isn't personal. I had distance from it because my main character , Arlene, also is distant. She's practically in Alaska for a few of those hay rolls, so she has room to be cynical and funny and clinical and observant. The much harder scenes were the ones where good sex happens. I must have rewritten those scenes thirty times because, hey, sex is nice, people like sex, we have it as often as we can manage it and it usually works out for us. So I was describing something that most people have experienced and have read about nine thousand times, and it is much more personal. I'd catch myself hiding in cliché and overblown prose and have to start over. I am horrified by florid lurve-prose, and if I got too purple I don't think I would respect myself in the morning.