Don't Read and Write

I'm currently in the middle of a short story series called Indulgence Gay Cruises that, and I'm being completely honest here, I think is absolutely fabulous. It follows the adventures of two best friends on a gay cruise ship, and I'm having a blast writing the characters and their backstory and all of the little emotional pieces that tie the story together. There's really only one problem: I'm reading while writing, and it's a goddamn minefield.

Everybody says to write the kind of stuff you love to read, and now I know why. If you read stuff that isn't at all what you're writing, you end up writing something that you shouldn't. I began this series while reading David Sedaris, and I couldn't stop writing snarky little sidebits that did not fit at all into the romantic tone I wanted for the books. I had to go back through and edit out all of the little Sedaris pieces, picking them out like eggshells in a banana bread batter you've already started mixing together. Then I finished Sedaris and moved onto David Foster Wallace.

Have you ever tried to write a gay sex scene while just having read David Foster Wallace? I have. It's impossible. You start out writing about tight asses and end up trying to use those selfsame tight asses to symbolize the post-ironic photoshopped culture of social media. You begin to use words like selfsame. Your sentences run on and on and become paragraphs, and those paragraphs turn into half-page monstrosities where you talk about anything in the scene except for what you are supposed to be talking about, which is cocks and asses and the former inserting themselves into the latter, and you end up throwing the whole thing out in a fit of rage, because you can't write the story like Sedaris and the sex like Wallace, it just doesn't WORK, and then you're back to square one with a blank page and a cock that hasn't so much as throbbed yet, let alone inserted itself into an ass. Jesus.

Authors, tell your children: don't read and write.