Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens

In a talk before the Romance Writers of America conference in 2018, prolific author and neuropsychology professor Jennifer Lynn Barnes exhorted her audience to stop editing the pleasure out of their books.

(Link is to download-for-purchase, well worth the six bucks if you're a writer.)

Barnes's earliest published books, she says, were selling better than later works, though the later works were "objectively better," showing more craft, skill, and discipline. She set out to discover why, and what she found was an uninhibited delivery of pleasure in the earlier books that she had self-consciously edited out of the later ones.

This reminded me so much of the fanfic-to-profic writer's journey that I checked, and yup, she's a fanfic scholar as well as a doctor of psychology. Fanfic is pleasure. It is all about hitting the pleasure button over and over and over again. It's probably why almost everyone I asked said that fanfic is the one kind of reading they still have attention for in these troubled times.

What does Barnes mean by "pleasures"? She identifies a handful of universal pleasures:

• Sex
• Touch
• Beauty
• Wealth
• Power
• Danger
• Competition

There are, presumably, others. (She acknowledges that "universal" here means most people in most cultures.)

She analyzes three stories--The Hunger Games, Titanic, and Twilight--to show how all those pleasures are abundantly present in huge mega-hits.

Then she goes into the smaller, less universal, more personal pleasures, which she calls Your Personal Id List. These are little story elements you love to encounter in your reading, and love to add to your own writing--things that scratch specific itches that you can't necessarily consciously explain.

These are the things Professor Barnes was editing out of her later books, thinking they were repetitious, unprofessional, somehow not original or literary enough.

Your Personal Id List can include absolutely anything. She reveals several of her own, then asks the audience to share some of theirs, and they run the gamut from twins, to eating ice cream, to "there's only one bed". From big important jewels, to long haired men, to forbidden love. From dining together, to scenes in the rain, to siblings.

Most of us can instantly name a dozen or so of our favorite things--things we've included in every story, things we adored in our childhood reading. Our bulletproof kinks. My writing community avidly jumped all over this concept, and it turns out, giving ourselves permission to include that one thing yet again makes writing hard scenes easier and more fun.

Here are some of mine:

• Competent craftsperson
• Weaving, knitting, spinning, dyeing--fabric stuff
• Making physical things
• Fluent in another language
• Portraits, painting
• Tailoring
• Men wearing earrings
• Home, coming home, arriving in a comfortable place
• Rings (especially magic ones)
• Liminal places
• Albatrosses
• People from the stars, people who are stars, stars in general

What are some of yours?