Why «Red» and Not Some Other Word

Every story in this book needed a safeword. That part was never really up for debate. What took longer, a lot longer than I expected, was landing on which one. I went through a few before settling on this one, and I dropped most of them for the same reason — they sounded like procedure, like something out of a manual, not like something two people who actually know each other would say to one another in the middle of the night.

The words I ruled out first

“Stop” does the job in a lot of writing because it’s blunt, no room for confusion. But used as a dedicated safeword it starts to blur into every other stop someone might say mid-argument, mid-anything. I tried a couple of softer options too, things that leaned more tender, and none of them held up either — too easy to say by accident, too easy to mean something else entirely depending on the sentence around it.

Why red doesn’t get lost in translation

Red barely gets used on its own in everyday speech. People say “red car,” “red dress,” but almost nobody just says “red” and leaves it hanging there with nothing after it. That oddness bugged me at first. Then I realized it was exactly the point. When someone says it out of nowhere, with nothing attached, you notice immediately. There’s no way for it to slide past unnoticed.

The color that already meant something

That’s not the whole reason, though. The word already meant something before I ever used it for this. It’s blood, it’s an alarm, it’s a traffic light that everyone understands without having to think about it. The body reacts to it before the brain catches up — nobody needs the mechanics of a red light explained to them, they just stop. That’s exactly what I needed from this word. Something that works in the worst possible moment, when there’s no time left to think carefully before saying it.

There’s a part of this I’m not sure is entirely comfortable to say out loud, but here it is anyway. Red is also the color that rises to skin with wanting, with shame when it comes on too fast. In a way, it’s the color of most of what happens on these pages before anyone ever says the word. Using it as a limit interested me precisely because of that double life it has — the same word that names what’s happening is the one that can stop it, if it needs to be stopped.

It wasn’t a fast decision. And it’s not the only signal like this in the book either — there are quieter pacts, gestures that do the same work without needing a word at all. But this is the one holding the whole thing together, showing up in one form or another across most of the ten stories, though never quite the same way twice. The psychological cost of desire also lives in the choices that keep working long after the scene.

If anyone ever asks why the book is called Say Red, the short answer is more or less this note. The long one only makes sense once you’ve read it.

Explore Say Red

If you want to keep reading: how I write literary erotica.