edenfalling | 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. :-)

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I am glad I'm not the only one who's always done that! And there's nothing wrong with 6-year-old you having superheroes with mosquito-bite origins, it's less stupid than many actual superhero origin stories!

I think private narrative (or at least semi-narrative) fantasies are probably a lot more common than people would tend to think -- humans are storytelling animals, after all. :-)

The mosquito bite thing amuses me in retrospect mostly because of the rationale behind it. The idea was that the magic character wanted to give the other character super-strength, but this required actually giving him more physical muscle mass before using magic to sort of... compress it into pocket space or whatever? But if she'd just put extra muscles on him, people would have noticed the process and figured out the newly strong character had superpowers, so instead she had a swarm of mosquitoes attack him and then layered the muscle on under cover of the swelling from the bites so nobody could see what was happening to him.

I dunno, it made sense to me when I was six. *wry*

Oh, the id fantasies. Yes, indeed. I do find they /inform/ a lot of my 'real story' writing, and once you get a live one that manifests a bit of plot I think that's making itself a good candidate for writing it up. It's a sliding scale.

Also depending on how much you're willing to show other people the fantasy! Took a while for some of those, for me.

Yeah, obviously there are id buttons layered through many things we write! Just generally in a much smaller proportion and also often those particular tropes are, hmmm, the more socially normative ones? I mean, the Apartment Manager AU for example, plays really heavily on my love for tropes about found/created family, the power of dreams, the power of hope, etcetera: what TV Tropes refers to as Crowning Moments of Heartwarming. It does a lot of other things too, but mashing those buttons is a large part of what drew me to create the story.

The thing is, while those id buttons are powerful, there are a lot of equally powerful buttons I am very happy to mash privately that I think would be... um... somewhat embarrassing at best if I wrote them into an actual story. But the particular fantasy I've been mainlining the past couple weeks could probably be modified to not dwell at length on the most blatantly sexual bits and instead lean more heavily on the weird anthropology and alien psychology stuff (which is nearly as interesting to me anyway). *ponders* It would still be pretty weird in terms of narrative structure -- more a collection of shorter fics than a continuous story -- but... oh, I can at least type up and organize the world-building and character stuff. You know, for reference. *resolve face*

At least you're creative enough to do your own worldbuilding, cribbing or no cribbing? I tend to insert myself as a mary sue into other people's worlds instead.

I got bored with inserting myself as a character into the stories, because I am an astonishingly boring person, at least from a narrative perspective. In order to make myself of any interest whatsoever in a story, I had to make my self-insert less and less like myself until around... well, sometime between twelve and fifteen, I just quit bothering. It's more fun to fantasize about people who actually do stuff. :-)

The only thing I can tell you is that an idea is perfect when it's locked in your head. Once you get it on paper, you see how flawed it is. Working through those flaws and polishing it up often morphs the idea into something completely different. At least how it works for me.

Oh, absolutely things change when you start locking them down into cold hard words on the page! For example, the enchantress in a fairy-tale land I mentioned above? After many years and an awful lot of changes, the world that sprang from that fantasy became the setting of Finding Marea: Truth and Change in the Circle of Kemar, an original novella which I summarize as follows: "Listen, and I will tell you a story. Do not write the story. Writing will freeze it; writing will kill it. Everything always changes; what does not change is dead." A meditation on the nature of truth and faith, refracted through generations of women and stories. Contains implied suicide of historical figures; implied historical (and possibly present) human sacrifice, voluntary and/or involuntary; historical and continuing religious persecution, inter-religious tension, and religiously-inspired violence. Also theology. Not quite the same thing at all. *wry*

You should do it. If only to get it out of the way. Then you can put it in a drawer and leave it. (Nobody's really going to know how much of your id is in there if you do show it.)

Besides, something interesting might come out of this process for you.

Have you read Hradzka's analysis on this? It's not required reading or anything, and the books he reviews sound horrifying, but he comes to some interesting conclusions.
OH JOHN RINGO NO!
http://hradzka.livejournal.com/194753.html

Oh yes, OH JOHN RINGO NO. I love that post; it is both an excellent review of the books in question and a useful meditation on the nature of idfic in general. :-)

I can pretty much guarantee that my id is visible in this fantasy; the proportion of "this must be one of your kinks, isn't it?" material is too high to be explicable any other way. However, not all of the id buttons are necessarily embarrassing -- there's a bunch of fighting stuff that's practically socially acceptable, and a bunch of weird anthropology/alien psychology stuff that's perfectly within the boundaries of normative sci-fi traditions, so... maybe I will just focus on those elements rather than the sex stuff. *wry*

Another thing - if you need to post it, you could always do it under a sock. Who's going to know?

I could, I could... but I have a form of storyteller's pride (and/or storyteller's narcissism?) that makes me extremely reluctant to post something I am not willing to put my name and reputation behind. I have yet to convince myself to even write anything anonymously on kinkmemes, which are actually designed for such things. *headdesk*

Just saw this and thought of your post: http://fuckyeahfanficflamingo.tumblr.com/post/44446400017/hurt-comfort-fic-revealing-of-deepest-id-fandom

Ha! :-)

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