This week I want to delve into two questions – a question I’ve been asked a few times, and a question nobody asked.

The first is the question, “Why are you not writing about more sports events if you write about American high school drama?” It’s fascinating to me how so many readers think that being involved in sports and being surrounded by sports 24/7 are integral to the North American high school experience. As I’ve said before, I wasn’t involved in sports at all when I was in high school, so I didn’t want to write about what I didn’t know. That was, in essence, my main reason for never writing about it. They say “write what you know,” so I wrote about shy, thoughtful yet careless idiot teenagers. Take from that as you will.

I had mentioned in a previous blog post that I’ve been employed at several high schools since graduating. At the last high school I worked at, I decided to dedicate extra energy to observing the sports presence at the school to truly understand, in part, what some of my readers were saying. After all, so many of them were so confidently saying that sports were the main thing people in high school did, and after observing sports events, I don’t know what to say other than, “I still don’t get it.” I’m not ready to say I disagree with them, per se, and perhaps the landscape in high schools have changed since the 2010s, the 2000s, or possibly even the 1990s as my readers are fondly remembering, but the sports community in high schools seems rather… secluded. There is a passionate and dedicated community, but it’s pretty isolated from the rest of high school life. Even the sports events themselves were populated by spectators, in name only, filling the bleachers and just… talking to each other. At most, I’d say half of them were actually watching the game or seemingly caring about it. This observation fueled the sports scene from Follow the Leader. It was seen as just another social event; it seems that unless the school is a sports-oriented school, a sports event carries as much weight as a talent show. And unless you’re in the movie Chronicle, the talent show isn’t exactly where the most popular kids in school go.

Given this, why is sports culture so ingrained in North American high school media, yet so clearly absent from its reality? I honestly have no answer to that. I suppose it’s possible that out of all of the schools I’ve attended, both as a student and a staff member, each one deliberately undermined its own sports department. It’s possible, but, in my opinion, not likely. I think that sports in high schools (at least nowadays) are like fancy galas with secret backroom dealings in spy movies – uncommon or small portions of the experience that get ballooned in importance in movies because they make for good scenes. I’m willing to listen if I’ve got it wrong, but I’m less inclined to listen to the insistent words of a few readers who remember decades-old high school memories than I am to the experiences of my own eyes and ears. A huge emphasis on sports seem to belong more to high school movies than high schools themselves.

But what’s even less hyped than sports in high schools? Trivia teams. To be honest, that’s a big part of why I wanted to write about it. When I started the story, the commissioner wanted me to make it, among other things, about a student who joins an extracurricular club. It’s honestly a great premise that scratches a lot of itches. It allows the POV character to be the stranger in a new social situation; always a good start. It allows an explanation for why a few new characters are suddenly appearing in a protagonist’s life at once, allowing for relationships to develop. But… why did I pick a trivia team?

It’s because of how underrepresented they are. People have asked about why I haven’t shown sports when so many other stories and movies and TV shows have shown sports events. In effect, they’re answering their own questions – especially if I’ve not attended many high school sports events myself, why the heck would I waste your time and mine writing about these events when, as has been established, so many other storytellers have already done this? I’d rather delve into topics people hadn’t even thought of before. Sometimes I like to rely on clichés one readily sees in porn stories, such as a new hire being vetted based on how well they seduce the secretary, or a movie night turning sexual during a lockdown, or even a meet cute on a hiking trail. These are all trope-y. But when’s the last time you saw a story about a trivia team, let alone an erotica story about one?

That to me is interesting. A chance to delve into the unknown, the unseen, and represent the experiences. When we talk about representation, we often think about minorities who have been disadvantaged, such as black and other racial minority groups in North America, or porn from a woman’s perspective, or gay stories in a heteronormative world. But representation can also mean uncommon experiences. I’ll give an example that I’ve never written – bald characters. How many sex stories have you read where the protagonist’s hairline is receding? When it comes to men 18-29 years old, 16% of them are experiencing hair loss. For some of them, there’s a stigma attached to this condition. Given that there’s a call for more representation of certain groups, why isn’t this minority represented more? (The full answer to that delves into complicated issues of what representation means, how some minority groups are needlessly demonized and/or belittled even in writing, etc., but it’s still a fascinating thought to have).

While I rely on tropes at times, I also like experimenting. Sometimes that’s with my style, as you see here every so often, but sometimes it’s with weird or unusual scenarios. I think it’s very clear at this point that as a general rule I don’t enjoy writing the usual type of erotic stories, especially since a lot of them, possible due to their repetition and reliance on tropes to be exciting, just become predictable and boring to me. Oh wow, a high school boy joins a sports team or beats up a school bully then everyone loves him and he gets the girl, huh? Wow, he ignores consent while with an insecure girl and she thinks that’s confident and hot, huh? (Because that’s definitely how girls view boys in real life, and that kind of behavior totally leads to long healthy relationships and lifelong success with sexual partners.) Yawn. Me writing about trivia teams of all things is just another way I like to go, “Hmm, what else is out there?”

It does come with drawbacks. Not every story I write is going to be everyone’s cup of tea. Not every chapter I write is sexy. That’s becoming more and more apparent the more I write. Maybe someday I’ll run into the very real danger of being too experimental and losing the ability of writing a story/chapter with any mainstream sex appeal at all, with no chance of recovering the ability. I trust you all will be honest with me when that time comes, and I’ll just pivot and write non-erotic stories and sell them on Amazon or something. I’m not ruling that out, but we’ll see. For now, I’m very much committed to the work I do here. I’ll talk to you all next week.

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