Writing from the hips

[maculategiraffe]

I'm alive, just very busy with RL. Apologies and many many thanks to you all for your wonderful, kind, thoughtful, thought-provoking comments. Going to need to do massive weekend catchup again to respond to them all properly.

In the meantime, here's me rambling about which bits of the psyche write the best fiction, plus thoughts on why Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series doesn't exactly work for me but also doesn't enrage me the way certain other badly written insanely popular books do (*coughDANBROWNIWILLDESTROYYOUCOUGH*).







I was reading all the (EPIC) wank going on over at Fandom Wank over the Twilight books, and came across this comment, and a reply thereto, which I thought were both very interesting. khym_chanur said:

I can't wrap my head around how such an utter amateur got so popular.

Maybe being an amateur actually helped? With no writing experience there was nothing to get in the way of directly transcribing the fantasy world of how she wished her high-school life had been, and that fantasy resonated with the inner lives of millions of teenage girls?

to which esther_a replied:

That's more or less my theory about it. The books are total id fic, but she has a bland enough id that lots of women connect, instead of going Oh, John Ringo, No.

[Helpful link to Oh John Ringo No added by yours truly.]

I haven't heard the term "id fic" before (bad on me if it's something well known/widely used), but I'm going to interpret it as meaning the same thing as a phrase I often use when discussing my own writing especially with my shrink: "writing from the hips." The hips, of course, house the swadhistana chakra, which maps to Yesod, dreams, on the qabbalistic tree of life; the hips are irrational and primal, the home of urges and cravings and turn-ons and squicks. Along with manipura, the solar plexus, which is the will/intention, and muladhara, the base of the spine, which is the root, it makes up what Freud called the id-- the "it"-- as opposed to the ego, which is the "I," and the superego, which is the "I am a good person."

The id is the "I don't KNOW why, I just [DO/DON'T] [like/want/enjoy] it!" area of the self. Then there's the ego, which is made up of anahata (the heart, in both senses), vishuddha (the throat/speech/words/typin'-fingers), and ajna (the third eye, thought, perception, visions). That's the "I" that "doesn't KNOW why" the id does what it does and likes what it likes. It's the part of you that sifts and filters and thinks about and explains things, and decides whether a fic is actually good, as in well written and thoughtful and interesting on that level. It's perfectly possible for the id to adore a fic (or a published work, for that matter) and the ego to think it's awful. We call that a "guilty pleasure," but there's really nothing guilty about it; there's nothing wrong with the id liking things that the ego doesn't. If you're reading a fic and your ego is like, "OW, the SPELLING, the GRAMMAR, the [lack of] PLOT, my EYES," and your id is like, "Fuck that, dude, this shit is AWESOME!" and if your id and ego are good buddies and watch each other's backs like they do in the well-integrated psyches, that's not going to start a fight.

(Guilt is the province of the superego; that's the part of you, if any, that's going, "This is so wrong. I can't believe my own id is getting off on nonconsensual sexual torture between twin brothers. HEY, ID, YOU ARE MAJORLY FUCKED UP, DUDE." And then your ego's like, "Hey, it's sure a good thing there's such a thing as fiction, so our good buddy id here can get his jollies without actually hurting anyone. EXCEPT GRAMMAR, WHICH IS SOBBING FOR MERCY RIGHT NOW OH MY GOD." And then your id's like, "Pipe down, guys, this is the good part." And then your shrink compliments you on your skill at doing the three different voices and you say thank you, you were in the high school drama club.)

And just like for reading, everybody in the psyche gets in on the fic writing, too. So, for example, here's the process I'm imagining for the Twilight books, based on what I've read. Er, this little play contains spoilers for Breaking Dawn.

ID: *writes busily*
EGO (entering and looking over id's shoulder): Hey, sport. Whatcha got there?
ID (reads aloud proudly):

Girl.

Boy!

Boy say girl: "You very pretty and perfect. You best girl in world. Me very very strong, dangerous, but me never hurt you."

Girl say boy: "Yay!"

Pretty boy and girl kiss and have sex! Pretty boy and girl have very very pretty nice smart strong baby! The end.

EGO: Uh, that's great, buddy. So, what makes this boy so strong and dangerous?
ID (dreamily): So strong. Bruise girl at a touch.
EGO: Uh, okay, good. Superhuman strength, dangerous-- okay, maybe he's a vampire.
ID (doubtfully): Vampire?
SUPEREGO (hurrying in): Vampires are evil.
EGO: They don't have to be. They have free will. They could choose not to kill people-- just to eat, like, animals and stuff. Of course, it would be difficult... vampires who made that choice would have a constant struggle against their own monstrous natures...
ID (pleased): Boy struggle. Boy hurt. But then girl make happy.
EGO: This could be interesting, actually-- like, how do they function in the world without getting found out? What are the dangers? I think-- well, for example, I'm pretty sure vampires usually can't go out in the sun. Maybe there's some kind of tell-tale sign, like their skin is sort of like marble-- really cold and hard-- and in direct sunlight, it sort of-- sparkles.
ID (ecstatic): Boy SHINY!!!! Make girl shiny too!!!!
EGO: What, have him turn her into a vampire too?
SUPEREGO: Uh, that's not very nice, if the life of a vampire is such a constant struggle for him.
ID (singing very softly to itself): Shine, shiny, shine...
EGO: Maybe there's some good reason, like she'd die if he didn't. We'll figure something out. But wait a minute-- if he turns her into a vampire they can't have a baby. Vampires don't have, like, sperm.
ID (lip trembling): No baby?
SUPEREGO: I don't think it would be very nice to deliberately bring a vampire baby into the world anyway.
ID (eyes welling up): Id want baby. Pretty, soft, smart, shiny baby. Name Renesmee.
EGO: "Renesmee"? ...oh, hey, hey, buddy, don't cry, don't cry. We'll figure something out.
SUPEREGO: Look, why don't you two just write this thing up and I'll troubleshoot later?
ID (sniffling): Fuzzy wolf boy love Renesmee.
SUPEREGO: ...or I'll just... go now...?
EGO: I think that might be best.

I'm not making fun of Stephanie Meyer, exactly (okay, my superego would like to point out that I most certainly am making fun of Stephanie Meyer, and also that I'm one to talk)-- I'm saying, her problem isn't so much that she writes from the hips, as that she lets the hips jerk the rest of her around. Because the thing is, you have to write from the hips. Or at least I do. Every time I've tried to write something just because I wanted to kick around an idea, or I thought a certain piece of fiction should exist, it's sucked mightily. It just isn't satisfying to write from the prefrontal cortex and cut the amygdala out of the action, and it isn't natural, either; anybody who still bothers to write when nobody's grading them on it (or paying them a decent ongoing hourly wage) is writing because they want something written, on a level as primal as an itch.

I guess my point is that I think "id fic" is a good description of what doesn't work about Stephanie Meyer's work, on a literary level and even for a lot of her fans who are disappointed in Breaking Dawn-- but I also think it sort of unfairly maligns the id, which is a really important element in fiction and which should be listened to. Just not obeyed implicitly, yanno? You should write from the hips, but you shouldn't stop there; you should write from the hips on up.

I think ultimately that's the "artistic merit" that's so hard to define but that distinguishes between pornography and erotically graphic art-- that porn never rises above the level of the hips-- although I also don't want to conflate the id with the sex drive. Sexual desire is an id thing, and a swadhisthana thing, and a hip thing-- but it's not the only id thing. For me, my interest in slavery and slave fic and a particular kind of (fictional) power dynamic is-- well, it's sexual, but it's not just sexual. In general, I think what we write-- we slaveficcers (and prisonerficcers and powerficcers and so on)-- is id-driven to the same extent as anything anybody else writes, successfully.

For example, to shift to the other end of the literary spectrum from Steph Meyer: I think one of my favorite books of all time, Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, works for me so profoundly (when very little of his other work works for me at all) because in The Corrections, he was finally writing from the hips. He let his id yell and scream about what was on its mind ("Boy fail, fail, FAIL!!!!") and then he egoed and superegoed it up, and what you wound up with was an insanely intellectual, postmodern, ethically complicated, culturally steeped book that slightly overused the word "vitreous" but also just... felt true. Felt like it was about real people who mattered. (To me, at least; YMMV.) Because for all the complication and verbiage, the book is jam-packed with id, it's about giving a voice to id. There's a line where the mother describes listening to her husband yell at her son for refusing to eat the meal she's prepared as "almost tasty and almost sexy... standing blamelessly by while the boy suffered for having hurt her." That's the id. It's not about sex, but it is about things as deep and primal and inexplicable and amoral and tasty as sexual desire.

(I also think this is the disconnect I was talking about here: I think it's J.K. Rowling's id that has a problem with water, and I don't think her ego or superego are remotely aware that that's the story she was writing.)

I've been thinking lately about why it is that BDSM fic doesn't do it for me, at all, any more than vanilla porn does-- BDSM fic being fic that depicts a realistic, consensual BDSM relationship between social and legal and economic equals. I think relationships like that are awesome, and vanilla sex is awesome, and pad Thai with tofu is awesome, and I am frequently thrilled to partake of all three, but a drawn-out dramatized depiction of someone else partaking of any of the three is not at all likely to hold me spellbound. My id just isn't there for that story. It's there for the thing itself, but not for a fictional depiction of it, whereas it's there for a fictional depiction of actual, nonconsensual slavery, but not the thing itself. I don't know why, and I don't even think there is a why, necessarily, because the id has its reasons of which the ego and superego know not.

And I respect that-- the vagaries of my id-- because without my id, I can't write anything even I want to read. Without my ego and superego, I'm sure I could write stuff other people would like to read. If the internet has taught us anything, it's that enough people out there share your id-iosyncrasies that somebody else's id would enjoy pretty much anything you chose to write. But it wouldn't be the best I could do, and although God knows the best I can do on my very best day is not Jonathan Franzen, I like to think that I at least try to write from the hips up, to wit:

SABRINA'S ID: Boy scared. Boy shiver in master's arms.
SABRINA'S EGO (scribbling in notebook): Okay, great. So what's he scared of?
SABRINA's ID: ...bad guy?
SABRINA'S EGO (still scribbling): I'll whip something up. Then what happens?
SABRINA'S ID (happily): Ego said "whip"!
SABRINA'S SUPEREGO (to ego): While you're at it, do something so the sympathetic master isn't a rapist or taking advantage of the kid's Stockholm syndrome.
SABRINA'S ID (wistfully): Id love Stockholm syndrome.
SABRINA'S EGO: We know, sweetie. Look, superego, cultural relativism is our friend, am I right? It's possible, in a society where a certain evil is almost universally accepted, for a good man to accept that evil.
SABRINA'S SUPEREGO (sitting down): Well, that depends on what you mean by "a good man"...

Comments

I reced this

[eileenlufkin]

seperis is talking about id fic here:

http://seperis.dreamwidth.org/39974.html?view=499238#cmt499238

so I linked to this.