“Motives get lost in the passage of time, subject to the ravages of memory and revisionism. What stays—and therefore what matters—is what you do.”
—NEIL ABRAMSON, UNSAID
As a multipublished writer of romance fiction, I get asked about sex a lot.
Is this the chapter we discuss it?
No.
We’ll get to sex later.
Writing naked is the necessary state of mind for translating the mess of raw material in your brain into words on a page. Most people think you need to be able to make sense of the junk first. You don’t. Instead you need to feel it, connect with it, and then write it. The mess is the structure and meat of the story. Even if you are composing a love letter, the best way to connect is to spill your deepest, darkest, embarrassing secrets. Reveal the stuff that terrifies you and keeps you awake at night. Talk about the monsters in the closet, and the ones hiding under the bed. Get in touch with the kind of emotions that drive the fear of abandonment, failure, and pain.
This is the good stuff.
A reader wants to feel something. A reader doesn’t want to be intellectually stimulated or to be able to skillfully talk about your work in a book club. She doesn’t want to check off your book on her list of smart reads, feeling nothing but mild admiration for your writing expertise.
Failure to connect on an emotional level with a reader is the kiss of death for a writer.
I want a reader to pick up my stuff and get dirty. I want her turned on during the sex scenes, choked up during the black moment, and blinking tears at the ending. (The black moment is what happens when the hero or heroine needs to change, or risk losing the other forever.) I want her yelling at the page because of the asshole hero and laughing out loud at the characters’ banter. Hell, I’d rather have a reader say she hated my book (many have on Goodreads—and, yes, it still hurts), than be apathetic toward it. I’d rather her say she loathed it, wanted to rip it up, and tell every one of her friends to never ever read me again. At least that’s passion. I may have missed the mark, but I got the emotion right. Lukewarm comments are the worst insult to the success-driven writer. Okay. Fine. An average read.
Kill me now.
Trust me, you don’t want to pat yourself on the back for sounding smart, cool, or savvy in your writing. The best way to connect with your real self is to get naked. Strip your soul bare and throw it out there. Don’t try to make sense of it until the ink dries, because you can always go back and tweak, tidy things up, or edit, which we’ll talk about later.
When I finished Searching for Beautiful, I was a wreck. I had to quickly turn around and start my newest book to make my deadline, but I felt emotionally drained and unable to connect with another character for a while. My characters haunted me, keeping me up at night. I told them over and over to go away, that their story was finally done, to just leave me the hell alone so I could get some much-needed sleep. But they didn’t. I heard their voices, and their story lingered in my fingertips as I tried to dive into my next project. My newest hero seemed just a flicker of a personality. My heroine had the same characteristics as my previous one. I couldn’t move on, and I didn’t know why this book affected me so deeply.
After a long talk with my editor, I had my lightbulb moment. Searching for Beautiful was about a runaway bride who was in an abusive relationship. The novel had flickers of truth from my own past. I married someone I shouldn’t have—someone who was emotionally abusive—but I never ran out on my wedding. Fighting my own panic attack, I sucked it up and married him. We divorced within six months. It was an emotionally painful experience and I had many regrets. Why hadn’t I cancelled the wedding? Why hadn’t I been brave enough? What would have happened if I had run away, blown up my life, and watched the pieces scatter?
I realized that was the theme of Searching for Beautiful. My heroine flees her wedding through a church window—because her gut screams for her to run. I didn’t listen. But she did.
I was able to play out those what-ifs in my fictional world, but doing so left me vulnerable. I opened up old wounds, examined them, and explored. The book reeks of emotion because I poured myself into the story.
My editor advised me to read the finished book one last time, as a reader, to fully grasp the emotional journey I’d travelled. When I reached the end, I was finally able to put my past to rest and move on to my next story. I needed to experience my own sense of closure with the characters before I was truly able to take on new ones.
Many experts in the writing field advise us to write what we know. When you write naked, you’re doing this each time, allowing the reader a glimpse of yourself.
Not everyone is going to like who you are. That’s one of the hardest parts of the business. But not everyone is supposed to like you all the time. By practicing the act of writing naked, you will begin to connect with your true voice and touch readers on an emotional level.
Great books have great emotion. I’ll talk more about writing emotion in a future chapter. But in order to get there, you need to write naked. Strip to your bare skin and write your book in the glorious, raw mess just as nature intended. You can sort out the good stuff from the junk later. But when you’re writing that first draft, you need to go for it.
I always remember that scene from Romancing the Stone where the heroine, Joan, is shown as a successful romance writer. She was finishing her book, writing the final scene, and weeping uncontrollably over her desk.
When I finish a book, I always cry. It’s my own sign of realizing it’s good, that I’ve given it everything I had, and the foundation is firm enough not to crumble under any edits.
Right or wrong, that’s how I know I’m writing naked. It may get a bit chilly, and a whole lot vulnerable, but the result will be worth it.
That result is the best book you can possibly deliver, and that is what every reader should expect from you.
You are naked when you share your work—make no doubt about it. The good news is you will become more and more comfortable without your clothes the longer you write. There’s something freeing and wild about telling the world the way you see things.
When you sit down to create, you must be brave enough to rid yourself of societal expectations and the crushing cliques civilization force on us. You may hurt and embarrass your family. You may need to hide your books from your children. You may find people from your past rise up to confront, judge, or mock you. You may face harsh reviews from a world that wags its finger and admonishes you to get dressed and write nicely. Fully clothed.
But great risks mean great rewards. When people are asked about their regrets in life, they often list the things they didn’t do. The book they were afraid to write because it wouldn’t sell, or because the writing was too difficult, or because they were too busy doing things that were safe or marketable.
Writing naked is the only way to write. And as a writer, your only regret will be looking back and realizing you wrote with a giant fur coat, boots, and—horror of horrors—too tight underwear.
Burn the bra. Burn the boxers. Burn the regrets.
Write naked.
Take off all your clothes ... nah, just kidding! Write about an event that was extremely personal to you. Just grab your notebook and let it rip. This is for your eyes only. Make sure you go deep and expose everything you felt during that moment. Read it over, and see if you can connect to the experience. This isn’t about grammar, spelling, or well-constructed sentences. This is about the emotion on the page and how it feels reading your story.
During your next writing project, try to remember what it felt like to write something deeply personal without any barriers between you and the reader. The more you practice writing naked, the easier it gets.