What Are the Rules for Writing Sex?
And do they change if you know your Nan is reading?
News & Reviews Magazine
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The piece you’re reading now is by Patrick Lenton. Patrick is an author and journalist living in Melbourne. He is currently a reporter for ABC Everyday. His most recent book of short stories is called Sexy Tales of Paleontology, and he writes the pop culture and comedy newsletter
with Rebecca Shaw.When I was young and stupid and studying creative writing, my first ever published short story won a prize. I was incredibly excited. It was one of the first concrete signs that the ridiculous path I’d set myself down was actually viable for me. But when I learned that part of the prize was being published in The Age—an actual newspaper that gets delivered to people’s doors—I got cold feet.
The story was about a sad man who turned into a tree at a family funeral, a kind of Australiana magic realism, Kath & Kim meets Isabel Allende. The very first version of the story, written for class and published in a youth literary mag, also had a scene where one of the aunts in the family gets fingered behind the shed by someone who is not her husband. The idea of my own family—of my favourite grandma especially—reading this brief, two-sentence description of unsatisfying digit-focused sex filled me with utter mortification, and I was able to beg to have it removed before it hit newsstands around the country.
Afterwards, I was chatting to my Nan on the phone and she was telling me about the ballet she’d seen the night before. ‘Not quite my cup of tea’ was her verdict, ‘but the dancers were so talented and we had a wonderful night’.
When I went online the next day I saw outraged articles about the ‘disgusting’ ballet performance which featured performers dancing naked and smeared in period blood. People had walked out. I realised then that my Nan was actually much, much cooler than I was, and my innocent fingering reference would have simply been menses off a duck’s back to her.
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