You’re really not proud of this story? It’s brilliant!

It caught my attention because it’s such a challenge to make something that’s ‘supposed to be’ unattractive into something sexy. To write it as something lovely (‘cute, endearing, with a hint of ginger’) so readers start to covet it at the same time as being revolted by it. To make readers wonder why they were so against that thing in the first place, just because someone told them they should be.

One of the best exercises I’ve been given at a writing workshop was on finding beauty: we were given a character that wasn’t conventionally beautiful, and challenged to write about her beauty in a love scene. I was tasked with an amputee and immediately found myself writing around the issue: the person was beautiful despite the missing limb. Wrong! The facilitator showed us her example, which was a sex scene between a bony, flat-chested girl and a pasty, overweight boy as watched by a sexually awakening young woman and it was amazing.

I discovered that everyone and everything can be beautiful if you look upon them with eyes that seek beauty. Even farts. Farts are a great topic for this, because they’re universal.