‘Underwear Is Pants’ and Other Lies Writers Tell Themselves

Alexander Chee has penned a very clever listicle for The Awl where he compiles 21 lies writers tell themselves. Things like,  briefs are an appropriate outfit for all-day writing marathons. Alexander goes on to encourage writers to face their self-deception, reject their own bullshit, pull off a Victor Hugo and write instead in their birthday suits.

Here are some more of Alexander’s lies, along with my rebuttal reasoning to keep lying.

3. My talent and its demands protect me from the responsibilities of normal people.

Can health insurance be considered a normal person’s responsibility?

5. When I’m not engaged in the process of writing, I’m thinking about writing, therefore I am writing.

It’s called critical thinking, and its indispensable in the creative process!

7. I don’t care that my frenemy from grad school got a million dollars for that literary crossover novel.

I don’t succumb to fostering relationships with “frenemies” because I am not thirteen years old and my life is not The Hills.

12. I’m only on social media because I have to be to promote X.

Despite my ongoing social media identify crisis and being permanently on the verge of self-promoting a nervous breakdown, my love-hate, sardonic relationship with Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr no longer includes the inexplicable need to try and reach potential customers. I really don’t give a fuck.

18. Writing for free for that website will help me get my name out there.

This is a lie I’ve stopped telling myself recently. So go offer your “exposure” elsewhere.

Now an onslaught of fleshy photos of people writing comfortably clotheless:

Okay so this dude is not technically writing but he’s definitely naked.

BOY TOYS TALK BACK: Do you ever write naked?

If You Want to Learn to Write About Sex, Read James Salter

When I try to write about sex, I think back to when I was just out of college and, handy with a makeup brush, took a job to make some extra money doing makeup on a gay-porn film set. On the second day, we filmed a three-way that took up most of the day. The actors struggled: one was hard, the others weren’t, then the others were and the first was not, and so on. After a few hours, the director sent us all out of the room and turned out the lights so the actors could work it out. This was before Viagra—you had to have an honest hard-on to shoot. We waited outside the dark room, the lights out, even the cameramen outside, waiting, until finally we heard the signal, and then the crew rushed back in to film. We turned on the lights.

The actors were made to pause, immediately. I had to touch them up. They were panting, sweating like athletes. They’d rubbed off most of what I’d put on them. As they held their positions, I touched them up. I thought about how something had happened in the dark that we couldn’t see, an excitement that couldn’t be in the film. It was probably better than what we would film, more interesting.Too much writing about sex tries to either make it prettier or more serious, sexier or funnier or shocking, or anything, really, except what it is. On its own terms, sex is information. This I learned from reading James Salter. Reading his sentences, I saw what I knew of sex, that sex is a moment in which you are known and knowable. Whatever it is you desire appears from behind the veil of shame or fantasy or nostalgia, or sheer impossibility, and in its presence, you are revealed to yourself. Porn obscures this; porn is about the fantasy of the viewer, not the mixed fantasies, realities, and disappointments of the actors in the room. Truth might get you off, but porn doesn’t deal in maybes, was never interested in unreliable, unpredictable truth-telling.

– “Sex and Salter” by Alexander Chee [The Paris Review]