Another JUGGS preview!
Today I share another small snippet of my upcoming book, JUGGS: A Writers Guide to Portraying Characters With Huge Cans. And if you thought this book was going to be entirely fun and games, think again! Today we get into the nuts and bolts of boob and writing technique.
Eye Magnetism as a Story Element.
A horny grandfather...
Sexy shopping outfits...
A disastrous family outing to Disneyland...
Is it just me, or does real-life read a whole lot like pervy anime comedy? Indeed it does, which is why it’s no shock that humanity’s unique attraction to boobs has been a source of a lot of great humor. Heck, comedian Cassandra Peterson made a career out playing a chesty, wisecracking, goth goddess in the form of Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. And before her, in the 1950s there was the towering Texan blonde bombshell of humor, Dagmar. In film, some of the best comedies ever made have milked the distracting power of big breasts for big laughs. Animal House, Blazing Saddles, Who Framed Roger Rabbit. All tapped very different veins of breast-related comedy, yet shared one common theme. The busty woman is never the butt of the joke. Writers, take note that the breasts themselves are not what’s funny. The humor is in the reaction of an onlooker. For example, in Animal House it was John Belushi’s character who falls off a roof while trying to peep on some sorority girls in their underwear. Whereas in Elvira’s self-titled film, her larger-than-life “personally” manages to disrupt an entire small town within minutes of her arrival.
In manga, series like Prison School and High School of the Dead takes such humor to the extreme, with boobage so epic they’re forces of nature unto themselves. These are no ordinary weapons of mass distraction! No, these mighty melons can explode clothing, dodge bullets, trigger blackouts, warp the very fabric of reality! As I’ve said before, the Japanese are masters at this kind of stuff.
Outside of comedy, though, eye magnetism should be used sparingly. A little goes a long way. A good example of this is in Bruce Sterling’s classic cyberpunk novel, Islands in the Net, this passage appears...
Laura turned to Andrei. “Thanks for bringing us down here. You've brought us in touch with a genuine problem.” She turned to Prentis. “Thank you, Brian.”
“Sure,” said Prentis. His gaze flickered upward from her breasts. She tried to smile at him.
In this brief exchange Sterling shows Prentis (who is a shut-in) lacks social graces due to his limited interaction with people. It also establishes it’s been a long time since he’s spoken face to face with a young woman. For Laura, it shows just how uncomfortable Prentis makes her. In the novel, this is the only mention of Laura noticing her breasts being gawked at. Anymore and Sterling would have risked making Laura appear overly sensitive, weak, and possibly even narcissistic.
So if a little goes a long way when it comes to boobs, what happens when a writer decides to tell too much? Well, just read this passage from Philip K. Dick’s novel, Gather Yourselves Together...
Her breasts amazed him. They did not jut out and up. They did not swell, pressing forward as the drawings had shown them. They hung down, and when she bent over they fell away from her. They bounced and swung when she picked up her clothes, bending over and reaching down to dress. They were not hard cups at all, but flesh like the rest of her, soft pale flesh. Like wineskins hanging on tent walls in Middle East villages. Sacks, wobbling flesh sacks that must have got in her way every now and then.
Holy crap! What the hell is this?! Overly poetic erotica? Believe it not, this is shoved into what’s supposed to be a drama set in a Chinese mining camp after Mao’s Cultural Revolution. By dedicating a whole paragraph to one man’s admiration of “wobbling flesh sacks,” Dick not only betrays the story’s otherwise bleak tone but paints the male lead as pathologically breast obsessed. I mean, I’m a big fan of the boobs, too, but hanging wineskins?! Really?!
Throughout his career, Dick was notorious for cramming gratuitous descriptions of boobs in his stories—something Hampton Fancher and David Peoples were wise to omit when they adapted Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep into the film Blade Runner. I imagine Harrison Ford as hardboiled detective Rick Deckard would’ve played a lot different if the script had included the line, “...Amanda Werner. I like her; I could watch her the rest of my life. She has breasts that smile.”
Now contrast Dick’s ode to “wobbling flesh sacks” to how William Gibson handles a similar situation in his debut novel, Neuromancer...
He lay on his side and watched her breathe, her breast, the sweep of a flank defined with the functional elegance of a warplane’s fuselage. Her body was spare, neat, the muscles like a dancer’s.
Here, the protagonist is admiring the nude, sleeping form of Molly, a professional assassin. The passage works on several levels, the most important being that it gets the job done quickly and doesn’t outstay its welcome. In two beautifully crafted sentences, Gibson tells us volumes about Molly with a well-chosen metaphor and a few strong visuals. By describing her as being akin to a dancer, we instantly associate Molly with being graceful, nimble, and quick on her feet. But by also adding the comparison to a sleek warplane, Gibson reminds us that Molly isn’t just a toned body. She’s a finely honed weapon.