on private fantasies and id writing

Since I was a very small child, I have had a habit of making up... not quite stories, but sort of story scenarios -- a bunch of character sketches, some world-building, some basic plot overview, a few semi-detailed episodes -- and telling them to myself as I fall asleep, or walk to work, or take a shower, or any other time I have twenty minutes to kill and nothing at hand to read and no proper story I am driven to write. They are always deeply, deeply self-indulgent and generally the sort of thing that's not readily workable as a proper story since they're extremely diffuse and often self-contradictory, because what they are designed to do is hit as many of my kinks (narrative, character, world-building, and sexual) at once as possible, and to hell with coherence if it gets in the way of a particular juicy button.

When I was six, I had a running fantasy about kid superheroes with origin stories ranging from "just born that way" to "it's magic" to "the magic character gave him powers via mosquito bites." (Yes, mosquito bites. No, I don't know what I was thinking either.) From about eight to eleven, it was a thing about an enchantress in a tiny fairy-tale kingdom, which leaned heavily toward elaborate imaginary cartography and genealogy rather than any actual narrative. Around twelve or thirteen, my fantasies took a dramatic turn for the sexual and also started incorporating a bunch of elements cribbed from X-Men comics and Andre Norton. I didn't keep up the habit extensively in high school for whatever reason, but in college I had a few that were probably best understood as expressions of my slow-motion spiritual crisis, because they all had heavy religious elements and a distinct undertone of "but what does it all mean???" -- filtered through elaborate no-water or all-water secondary world fantasy settings, reincarnation, linguistics, and sword fights, of course, because I love a good sword fight. :-)

I still create that type of fantasy and invest a lot of time and mental/emotional energy into them, which is perhaps one contributing factor to my periodic bouts of not-writing -- my imagination is tied up elsewhere for a while and all the metaphorical phone lines are busy.

I sometimes wonder if I should try to shake those fantasies into writable form, because there are some really interesting ideas tied up in them... and then I get the screaming heebie-jeebies, because they are basically a window into my rawest id and while it may look like I am willing to spill my guts all over the internet, there are actually quite a lot of things I would prefer not to be showing the entire world. Or at least not without a fair bit more clothing and some pretense at structure and theme. Then again, id writing hits a hell of an emotional live wire when you get it right, and it's not like I haven't written some other stories that are basically raw id all over the wall ("Knives" is probably the best example), so...

Eh. I dunno. But I have been way heavy into a particular fantasy lately that started as a sci-fi Homestuck AU and has been gradually accreting more and more kinks and id fragments as I play with it (and has shed a couple others, because I do occasionally pretend at coherent world-building), and sometimes the best way to get an obsession out of my head and free up my brain for other tasks is to share it.

Maybe I will try writing it up this week. :-)