The scene that took me 13 years to write

And why I will write more books, even if no one reads them.

P.C. Etienne Girardet

Hello everyone,

I love writing, but not everything comes as easy as pie. Some parts of a creative project take weeks, months, if not years, to complete. One scene from my novel in particular comes to mind.  I had no idea when I sat down and started writing my book at age 14 that it would take me almost as long as I had been alive to write that scene. The scene that would complete my novel.

Obviously, 14-year-old me could never have written a scene like that. She was nascent in the world—nascent in the world of dating, nascent in exploring her sexuality. Of course, she had already experienced what the scene was about. But never in a million years could she have imagined the transformational arch that she would undertake to become the type of writer and the type of person who would write a scene like that.

I was out there, writing and experiencing things as time crept by over the years, until I sat down one morning in the winter of 2022. That day, I remember arriving at the British Library in Central London. I wrote that scene after I ate a couple of Pret sandwiches. I wrote that scene surrounded by whispering students who were studying over the holidays. I wrote that scene beside a strange exhibition of important historical documents combined with Beatles memorabilia.

I wrote that scene in one take.

Once I started typing it, it poured right out of me. It took me less than an hour to finish it. It required very little editing. I did it in one sitting. But what it took to get me there, and the context and the challenges that I had had to overcome, meant that it could only have been accomplished by 27-year-old me. And even then, it’s a miracle I let the scene be written through me at all.

(Side note: I almost couldn’t write it. I almost wasn’t perceptive enough to understand that this was what my character really needed. And that is why it is so important to listen to the crazy people in your life who give you permission to do weird shit. At the time, I had just started the UnMute class with my incredible writing teacher, Ann Randolph. So, please hold on to the people in your life who give you permission.)

It is a female self-pleasure scene.

The scene that I am talking about comes from Chapter 20 of my debut novel, These Perfectly Careless Things. It depicts a young girl masturbating and having an orgasm. Will I be sent to jail for depicting my character pleasuring herself with a pool house showerhead at 15 years old? Maybe. But it took just about everything in me to write that scene.

I’ve watched plenty of pornography in my life. I’ve also read a couple of spicey books here and there. But until I wrote that scene, I had never come across a female orgasm depicted in literature before. Part of me obviously felt some shame in putting it onto the page. By writing that scene, even if it was from the perspective of my fictional character, I was somehow admitting a lot to the world: I have masturbated, I have had an orgasm, and I have fantasized about my boyfriend eating me out. And I have enjoyed that also.

And yet, that’s why I feel even more strongly that this scene needed to be written. Let’s not depict female masturbation like the literary equivalent of an overly enthusiastic girl with fake boobs riding some porn star’s dick by a jacuzzi somewhere in the hills of Los Angeles. No. Instead, let’s try and get into her psyche. The shame and guilt of being an English teenage girl. Let’s try to get to the heart of what this activity actually means for a young female character from her perspective. Let us see her in one of her most real and honest and vulnerable moments of being alive. Let her take us there, to the moment where, as she pleasures herself, she discovers what she actually wants. Not what she thinks she should want. Not what society or her mother or her school tells her she should want either. Let her discover how she wants her equally inexperienced boyfriend to pleasure her in a way that’s unique to her. This is the moment when she begins to own her experiences and her voice.

It reminds me of a long quote from the recently late Paul Auster,

“The essence of being an artist is to confront the thing you’re trying to do. To tackle it head on…What you have to strive for is to engage with your material as deeply as you can...You have to give every ounce of your being to what you’re doing...I can at least stand up and say at the end of the day, I gave it everything I had. I tried 100%. And there’s something satisfying about that. Just trying as hard as you can to do something.”

That scene in my book is what inspires me to keep hosting the Sex Writing Workshops. When I wrote that shower head scene, albeit through the guise of my fictional protagonist, I also uncovered what I wanted. It healed a part of me. It healed the part of me who was always hiding this thing that I was doing, that I felt was wrong but that I knew I liked a lot. A thing that I felt and, at some level, continue to feel immense shame about. A thing that’s a secret and a taboo in our society. Which is sad because what’s more beautiful than pure joy? Pure pleasure? Why are we so afraid of women enjoying themselves? And young women in particular? Why are we so afraid of having young women know what they want?

This is the point of taking 13 years to write a scene. Only writing a book will enable you to do something like this—to transform this much as a writer and as a person and weave it into a story. What is the point of writing or creating anything at all, if you don’t put everything you have into a piece of work? Take everything you thought you were or what defined you as a human being and wring it out to dry.

This week, there was a lot of talk circling in the book world about whether writing a book is even worth it (after

Elle Griffin

wrote this thought-provoking post). As you can see, from my experience, many weird and wonderful things happened to me because I spent this long writing a book. It took so long that I couldn’t help but intertwine my life path with that of my character. The teenage, 14-year-old me who sat down to write my novel had just as many hopes and dreams as Abbie Chesterton, my 15-year-old character who dreams of becoming a mixed media artist. In the book, Abbie is desperate to hone her craft, just as my younger self needed this book to be finished, published, and shared with the world. And she is happy now. As

Emma Gannon

has said,

“When your book is published, you get to hold a piece of yourself in your hands.”

Who knows when I will get around to publishing the second and third books that I have planned? And don’t even get me started on selling the book. But writing that showerhead scene started my journey as a sex writer. I’ve published a very vulnerable story, and now I’m opening up and sharing the power of writing about our sex lives and owning our experiences with other people. These are just a few of the gifts that writing and publishing my first novel has given me, even if I have barely sold over 100 copies.

From writing that scene, I learned the power of exploring our sexuality through writing. When we write about our sex lives, even if we don’t share it with anyone, we get to own our stories. We get to claim our voices. We get to say: this was what happened to me, not that. We get to own our experiences because we were there. And no one else can take that away from us.

This is how the wonderful

Elizabeth Gilbert

sums it up:

“If you write a book, I cannot promise you that your book will be good. I can’t promise you that you will find an agent. I can’t promise you you’ll get published…But the one sacred promise I can make you is that you will know so much more about yourself, life, and the world at the end of that project...Aren’t you curious to see who you’ll be on the other side?”

Indeed. Of course, I would like some more outward success when it comes to selling copies of my book. Of course, it would be amazing if more people would read it. But even if they don’t, and they never will, the process of transforming from 14-year-old me to the published author of that female masturbation scene has undoubtedly been worth it for me. So, I will write more books, even if no one will read them.

My paid subscribers will get to read the showerhead scene from These Perfectly Careless Things below for free. If you’re not a paid subscriber, you can also buy the book on Amazon here.

Sending love,

Tash

💌 ✍️

An excerpt from Chapter 20 of These Perfectly Careless Things:

Abbie entered the cubicle of the shower. She took off her summer dress and her white lace matching padded bra and underwear. She left them hanging with a towel on the back of the door. She watched the water swirl into the gutter as she turned to face the shower. Its metallic pipe curved upwards to the clasp at the top, holding the head in place. The rings of its flexible pipe looked like smooth scales along the body of a snake. The showerhead was rounded. The water spurted out like a spout of poison-less venom. At times, this sight of the shower made her smile. She was Eve being tempted in the Garden of Eden. The more she thought about it, the more she understood where Eve had been coming from.