How Refreshingly...Original?

Originality is the bane of any creative individual's existence. No matter what you chosen medium, sometimes being original is a major pain in the but-tocks, and when it becomes a major pain in the but-tocks, you try anything and everything to cure it.

Oh sure, you can take the lazy way out, which if your chosen field is blogging, you can paste a couple of pictures to a blank screen, and viola, instant post.

Not.

Did you somehow forget to write a short blurb to the picture, so as not to leave your readers in the dark and make yourself look like an idiot? Of course you did. Which brings you back to square one.

Again.

So you sit quietly at your desk (or cubbyhole, or cube, or park bench, or credenza, or foyer, etc. etc. etc. etc.), staring at the wall, or in my case, a calendar (Winnie the Pooh, thank you very much), trying to refill that empty noggin with any useful tidbit of information that you can latch onto.

Eventually, after squeezing and poking, prodding and cajoling, and even applying the Valsalva maneuver, you come up with the following piece of originality.

A man is standing outside, leaning against a post and looking miserable. He nods at a passing co-worker, before turning and walking up the ramp to go back inside the building.
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Once again, as you can plainly see (it's cliche time doncha know?), I'm scraping the bottom of a scuzzy sea barnacle infested barrel trying to come up with something original to write. It seems as of late, the more I get into writing my latest book (which in and of itself, is a very good thing), the more problems I have trying to come up with original content for the blog.

Funny how things fall into new places as you strive to improve your craft, be it writing stories or blog posts. The way I see it as it applies to me, if I try to improve one area, the other area has a tendency to show withdrawal symptoms, and vice versa. When I was blogging up a storm last summer (refresher: last summer I wrote about 30 posts out by hand, which took me from about mid-July to late October to use up), my writing output dropped considerably.

But once I started concentrating on my writing, it became a little harder to write good blog posts. Right now, my blog posts are/have been for the most part, pretty pedestrian and/or head scratching. To give you a f'r instance, this particular blog post would fall under the realm of head scratching (hence, the tag down below called "Brain Squeezins"), because although I wanted to write about originality being the bane of a creative person's existence, I also wanted to somehow dovetail the first part of this post into something about the problem of writing a graphic scene without being graphic. The problem with that, is how to write about it on this blog without completely turning people off.

So.

Without a doubt, the biggest challenge in writing a story about a woman who gets involved with the adult movie industry, is how to write the required sex scenes in such a way as to not turn off any potential agent (from what I understand and please correct me if I'm wrong, most agents will not handle material that contains even a whiff of hardcore. Softcore, yes. Hardcore, no) or potential publisher.

Obviously, if I didn't particularly care about who was receiving it on the other end, I would write it pretty much as graphic as humanly possible (my first book contains some pretty graphic sex scenes, some of which surprised even me). However, since I do care who receives it on the other end, I have spent quite a few hours while writing, trying to find that perfect balance between graphic description and appropriate word substitution for said graphic description.

For instance, to describe one of two set activities that all of those films feature, I wrote it like this: She loosened the strings to his bathing suit and took out his cannon. Giving it a half dozen gentle strokes to get it solid again, she raised an eyebrow and opened her mouth. Todd exhaled, took three steps in and carefully began to make passionate love to her mouth.

So I try to get the point across without sledgehammering the reader with details about whatever activity is going on at the given moment. More often than not, it seems to be working as I'm making a conscious effort not to turn this story into something hardcore, at least for the time being. Like I stated in a previous post, the story is written in such a way that it would take about a good hour to rewrite certain parts if required.

Originality.

Is it the bane of creative person's existence, or simply a case of sour grapes being uttered by people who don't have the mental strength to rise above the formulaic drivel that seems to pepper the vast wasteland that we call "The Arts"?