S is for SIREN as in SEX DOESN'T SELL

Ghost of Raymond Chandler here.

I'm carrying on the backwards stroll
started by Twain, that buffoon.

I see your brow wrinkle at my name.  I am forgotten ...

which is hardly a surprise.

This is now a culture of bells and whistles, of Lady Gaga (whose name is too easily made into the butt of a joke) and her meat dresses, and pornography for bored housewives.



 

 

Sex truly does not sell ... even as steak does not sell ... it is the sizzle which whets the appetite for both.

Take my time with Hollywood and Bogart.  It was the promise and tease of sex to come which sold films and the novels which gave birth to them.

I remember the first time I met Veronica Lake:

Her blonde hair was glossy under a Robin Hood hat that might have cost 50 dollars and looked as if you could have made it with one hand out of a desk blotter.

Now, women no longer wear hats or much of anything else with style.

I remember seeing Gloria Swanson the last time:

From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.

Most of you who visit Roland's blog dream of writing a bestseller.

Amazon Best Sellers


I will help with that:

Ability is what you're capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it.

Remember that and you may have a shot ... a long shot ... but a shot.

Take time to take note of the world and all its lush details.  Put them in your writing, in your dialogue, in your descriptions. 

Tell your tale like no one else can.  How many ways have you heard Obama described.  Let me:

Obama has as much charm as a pair of steel-puddler’s underpants. 

Now, even if you have no idea what a steel-puddler is, you know how I feel.

I am known for my dialogue but after years of exile in England, I felt I had to learn American just like a foreign language. 

I even invented a lot of the slang in my books myself ...
hence steel-puddler.

But reality and fiction have to be balanced.  Take my P.I., Philip Marlowe. 

The real-life private eye has about as much moral stature as a stop-and-go sign.

 But I felt that by creating an incorruptible hero I gave my work the “quality of redemption” that all true art required.

When Time magazine called Marlowe “amoral” I was furious, writing that my novels represented

“the struggle of all fundamentally honest men to make a decent living in a corrupt society. It is an impossible struggle; he can’t win.”

But to end with what I started ... to write a siren well there must be that quality of redemption that is the hallmark of all worthy literature.

Yet tempered with the harsh reality of sex.  Let me illustrate with the catchword:

Blonde.

There are blonde and blondes and it is almost a joke word nowadays. All blondes have their points, except perhaps the metallic ones who are as blonde as a Zulu under the bleach and as to disposition as soft as a sidewalk.

There is the small cute blonde who cheeps and twitters, and the big statuesque blonde who straight-arms you with an ice-blue glare.

There is the blonde who gives you the up-from-under look and smells lovely and shimmers and hangs on your arm and is always very, very tired when you take her home.

 She makes that helpless gesture and has that damned headache and you would like to slug her

except you invested too much time and money and hope in her. But the headache will always be there, a weapon that never wears out and is as deadly as Lucrezia’s poison vial.

There is the small perky blonde who is a little pale and wants to pay her own way

and is full of sunshine and common sense and knows judo from the ground up and can toss a truck driver over her shoulder without missing more than one sentence out of her love for Lady Gaga.

There is the pale, pale blonde with anemia of some non-fatal but incurable type. She is very languid and very shadowy and she speaks softly out of nowhere and you can’t lay a finger on her

because in the first place you don’t want to and in the second place she is reading the Wasteland or Dante in the original.

What am I saying?  Sex is supposed to be fun.  It begins that way in real life but eventually becomes a prison. 

Make it fun and original in your novels, and your books will sell.

So, you out there, do you think sex sells in novels?

Do you consciously add it in your story? 

Do you look for it in the novels you are considering  to buy?