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darkemeralds) wrote2022-01-24 02:23 pm
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
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
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It's fun to think about, isn't it? My current Personal Id List is at 68 items and I'm nowhere close to feeling like it's complete. I suspect it'll change over time, too.
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And it sucks - and kind of shows how books become boring when these things that give the author pleasure (and thus are probably written about more passionately) are self/edited out.
Me, I like....
Found family
Long hair on men
Friends who are physical (but not sexually intimate, particularly same sex friends)
Horses
Competence in a job, particularly if the person seems like they wouldn't be (like, for instance, a pre-serum Steve Rogers being really good at self defense, or woodworking or something)
Characters that cuss like breathing
Completely consensual but not exhaustively discussed rough sex
Artists (particularly artists who do art that involves a physical aspect, like how some abstract expressionists would climb ladders, fling paint, smash things, etc....)
A bit of PTSD or some sort of trauma in general that makes a character prickly and untrusting, but not completely cut off from life in general
I have, in fact, written probably close to a million words of my favorite thing in an original character/shared universe with my bff. It is awesome to do so. :D
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I have long hair on men too! (The popularity of Chinese wuxia dramas tells me that we're not alone.) And 100% on the PTSD/trauma element. Isn't it fascinating what we like that we weren't necessarily even conscious of liking?
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Basically, we talk about a story we like, or a scenario, then we opan up a Google document and one or the other of us starts. We tend to see something online, like a cool house, a neat event, whatever, that makes us go 'ooh, what if (character) did this?' or 'omg, that is such a (character) song!!' Then we're off. Depending on what we're writing, we'll put down fairly big chunks of story by turns, moving the plot along, reacting to the other character, etc.
If/when we write smut, it tends to be a little choppier, but we still take turns. :D
Omg, the historical Cdramas with all that HAAAAAIR!! I love it.
I have loved the PTSD/trauma thing since I was a kid, really, and it was firmly cemented in the mid-to-late seventies when i started reading more things by and about Vietnam War veterans.
If i were to get a college degree at this point in my life, it would be a history degree, specializing in the Vietnam War era.
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The Vietnam War era is a powerful, pivotal time in American history (and the history of southeast Asia, of course). Depressing in many ways, but a time of incredible ferment.
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Our shared universe basically changes with whatever we're interested in writing at the moment. We've done 'real life', modern sort of things, and stuff set in the far future in spaaaaaaaaaaace (i love sci fi, and i love world building), we've done pure smut, we've brought in character from movies/tv....we basically just have fun, write what pings the loudest in our brains at the moment. The characters remain, the setting/'verse is ever-changing.
It's a great way to relax; we spend about half the time chatting on ICQ about the story and about life in general, and the other half just typing furiously away, heh.
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We used to use a very old version of Yahoo Messenger, which was actually really awesome, then the last update was basically complete shite, as well as disabling all older versions, so we had to find something new. We both hate FB and won't use that messenger platform, and while Google .docs is a...useful platform for a lot of things, casual chatting is not one of them (usually).
We found ICQ and now i have my daughter, her bf, the exSO, my little brother, and a couple other friends all on it, so we can chat and share pictures without going through FB or anything. :D
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It's run by Russians now (or maybe always), and they have a phone app, as well as PC software.
You DO have to give them your phone number, but I've been using it for years, and they never text or spam me with ads, or anything else. You log in with your phone number, essentially.
https://www.icq.com/download
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*mentorship
*bad ass woman warriors
*textiles
*domestic labor
*moms
*big family meals
*swoosh
*fights in restaurants
*cool fictional ecology
*characters feeding people
*legacy
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What does "legacy" mean to you?
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Hollow trees
Bodies of water touched by magic
Dreams
Weird weather
Altered perception/under the influence
Epistolary-style communication (might include texting or social media these days)
Relationships that contain awareness of sexual/romantic interest but aren't necessarily sexual/romantic in nature; intense friendships
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I'm working on a historical novel now whose main character is asexual and doesn't know what that is (because...1820s) but he develops a strong love relationship with someone and they have to kind of negotiate the intimacy part. It's been challenging.
Thanks for sharing your Id List!
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Your novel sounds like something I'd be all over. Exciting!
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Power dynamics
Competence
Angst wth a happy ending
Mutual pining
I keep telling myself i'm going to write...this is the year...here I go... But it's like the end ing of Waiting for Godot up in here ("Let's go" "Let's go" [stage direction] they do not move)
So I made a long list of just the sort of thing you're talking about, in the spirit of "more cake" as a step toward perhaps, maybe actually writing something.
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It's interesting (not surprising) how many people have a "competence kink." It's certainly on my Id List, especially when the competence is surprising or out of character.
Fanfic has taught us so much. :D I hope you get to writing soon!
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Magical objects such as a ring, tool or ....
A character who does a non-traditional job well (or is learning that job).
Tea
Sacrifice of tea, scotch, beer or food in a ritual way to honor the unseen world.
Water or stone that is transformative in a magical way.
Textures of and in the natural world.
The feeling of being in a sacred space in nature (such as walking in an old grove of redwoods).
Non sexual intimate moments.
The expression of joy in fleeting moments.
Animal companions with whom characters have BELIEVABLE interactions with.
Puzzles
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Snark
Literary allusions
Lingerie
People cooking meals for someone they love
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Cooking and food combined with love seem to be almost universal Id List items. I'm rewatching "Sleuth of the Ming Dynasty," a Chinese "historical" drama featuring a clever and very pretty young state official with a gourmand streak, and his stoic, traumatized military protector/friend.
The military guy finds solace in cooking, and we get some marvelous scenes of him tying back his considerable sleeves and going to work in the kitchen with a cleaver and a wok and some steamers, and setting wonderful meals in front of the titular Sleuth and his found family around a lively dinner table. Sheer Id!
I hope you're well. Must go seek out your journal and see what's been going on.
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The military guy sounds sort of like Spenser in the Robert B. Parker novels, who is an excellent cook as well as a tough guy. (As Spenser leaves the house one day, his girlfriend says "Try not to kill more than five or six people today" which might also be true in Sleuth of the Ming Dynasty.
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It's quite a good show, but as with other Chinese dramas I've watched, it takes me two viewings to get to know the large cast of characters, all with multiple names, and figure out what they're up to in the long, complex, multi-plot.
Sleuth, in addition, features an inordinate amount of cross-dressing, so the reliable markers of costume go out the window. It's a lot of fun.
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