You Have to Hear It
A post about my writing process.
My name is Alexander Cheves. My nickname is Beastly. I write about sex. I wrote a sexy book.
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Most of you do not know this: I am half-deaf. I do not have an audial nerve on my right side so that ear has been stone-deaf since birth. In this way, I feel I am between two worlds — hearing and deafness — and my experiences in both are rendered more difficult by being halfway. Other hard-of-hearing folks share this struggle. It is doubly hard for us to focus on what others are saying, and our focus drops every time we have to ask someone to repeat themselves. When I'm very tired, the light just turns off. I get tired. I'm done listening. Gone.
I think this is why I write. Words on a page have always been my easiest communication method. My half-deafness means my ability to be fully present has always functioned at half-strength. This disconnect is where my writing starts. I write to be understood, to communicate a world that, for most of my life, has not been easy to communicate with.
Over the years, I have gotten a few messages here about my writing process. Since those questions have little to do with what I do on this blog — they are not about sex or gay culture — I have mostly let them go, though once I did answer a reader's question on starting a sex blog. When it's time to actually sit down and write, I start talking out loud. That's all writing is to me. Just talking. I talk to the empty room and just transcribe my own words. Writing for me is transcription.
Writing is storytelling, and the most natural way humans tell stories is by talking aloud. We sit at bars and tell friends what happened that one time. We sit around bonfires and tell ghost stories. We do this without thinking about it. We’re just talking, just doing what people do. Writing should not be viewed as an elevated version of that. Writing, when it's good, should sound as good as it reads. It's not just the transcription of speech: it's tightened, cleaned up, without all the word blah and half-starts and filler words. It runs at a slightly tighter, faster clip than speech, but it should mimic the natural cadence and lyricism of how someone (the writer, in most cases) talks.
Once upon a time, traveling bards roamed across Europe telling stories to illiterate villages. Those stories were told over and over and became our great fairy tales and epics. Before those bards, an ape on two feet formed language — and, if some theories are to be believed, consciousness with it — by telling stories. As far as we can tell, humans are the only animals to fictionalize and historicize our own experiences. We are the only storytellers we know of in the universe.
When I write, I don't stop talking. I have to write in privacy because I must be an odd sight: a grown man mumbling to himself in front of a computer for hours. This is my writing process, and I doubt it's an uncommon one. I imagine many other writers do this. It is strange to me that my method of writing so necessitates the ability to hear — a diminishing feature of my life.
My hearing loss is degenerative. Someday I will be fully deaf, and what I fear most about that day is not the loss of music or dancing, but the loss of my ability to write. My great teacher in college, the novelist Jonathan Rabb, told me many times that writing is about training the ear (in my case, only the one). You can hear grammatical errors you would miss visually, and you can hear, to borrow his phrase, when the text is "singing" — when you know it's working and the writing is good.
When he said "ear," I don't think he meant the physical ear, but some kind of mysterious inner one. Still, I've taken his advice literally. I edit my work by reading it aloud, over and over, to myself. Writing a book made me go hoarse because I talked so much. In those weeks under deadline, I discovered my breaks were when I needed to rest my voice — my physical one, my actual throat.
The book is now on the shelves. You can buy it everywhere books are sold. If your local bookstore does not have My Love Is a Beast: Confessions, please ask them to order it, and understand that there is a global paper supply chain issue happening now thanks to COVID-19, so you might wait a bit longer for it. This thing I mumbled aloud to myself can now be held in your hands.
The book tour is mostly wrapped, with only two more official readings left — a virtual one hosted by Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor on November 3rd, and an in-person one at Nasty Pig’s new headquarters in New York City on November 5th, though this latter one is sold out. These are not the last readings I’ll do, but these are the last ones we officially have on our tour schedule.
I love reading the book aloud. Doing so feels natural because the book started its life that way. Being half-deaf, I can't hear the crowd, the shuffling in the seats, the sounds of boredom or discomfort, and that's probably a good thing. I can only hear my own voice.
This was, I suppose, a post about my writing process and about the book that process made. I am so proud of this book. I have never loved anything more. Welcome to my author era.
Love, Beastly