https://thesewaneereview.com/articles/mind-fuck-writing-better-sex

Because what they already knew, likely more from being lifelong readers than MFA students, was that one of the requirements of memoir, and perhaps of all satisfying or authoritative writing, is that the writer know more about their characters than the reader does. Simply transmitting my impressions of an experience at the site of their happening was not nearly enough. My early drafts suffered from the worst sort of dramatic irony: the unintentional kind. Not only did my readers know things that my protagonist didn’t—that in fact not every waitress in Manhattan would have been a pro-domme if they’d known it was an option—but also things she hadn’t entirely realized.

My mother has been a practicing clinical psychotherapist herself for over twenty-five years. Once, I asked her if she ever gets sleepy during sessions. “Rarely,” she said, and explained that, for the most part, she finds listening to her patients inexhaustibly compelling. Over the years, she has come to understand that the only time she gets drowsy is when her patient isn’t telling the whole truth, mostly to themselves, or when they are not fully awake in their telling. If they are performing a persona or telling her the story they have told themselves and not reaching for the greater truth of an experience, she begins pinching herself. I related, not as a listener to people’s stories but as a reader of them. There are many beautiful and acclaimed books that I have begun and found astute in any number of ways. However, if such a book strikes me as asleep to its own biases, if it lacks that glint of authorial awareness amid the characters’ self-delusions, my attention drifts. I wish there were a more technical way to describe this recognition, but it is largely the function of experience. I have written work that is dishonest in this way and, in literature as in life, we who have recovered from a thing are often the best detectors of it.

The power of scripts is that they are easily transferable, whereas sexual intimacy is entirely specific and cannot easily be simulated. Porn is probably the lowest quality entertainment I can consume, made possible by its reliance on these internal scripts, which don’t require (and which to some extent foreclose) imaginative nuance. In my opinion, the highest forms of art do the opposite: they disrupt our internal scripts and force our thinking to become creative, like the third or fourth round of writing your sexual life story in five sentences. They upend the familiar story and insist on a truer, more interesting one.

We are all ultimately writing about the same four or five things: death, trauma, love, loss, recovery. Mostly death.

It means that I refuse to let the narratives that once colonized my thinking also colonize my art. This requires a different kind of rigor—in thinking, living, and creation. Whereas writing was once an exercise in transcription, it has become an exercise in transformation. I urge you to hold your own life and work to this higher standard. As Lorde writes, “This is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.”