why I won't be doing the id meme

[lotesse]

1. Because I value the emotional freedom fandom has taught me to value my id and the contents thereof.

I love the awareness of my id I've been building in fandom. I look back at my baby fic, and the thing that strikes me most isn't how badly written it is - and it is! - but how tragically unaware that little girl was of what she wanted. My baby stories dance around my id, and sometimes they just miss it altogether, because I had no idea what I was doing. No one had ever talked to me before about the erotic pleasure of (nonsexual as well as sexual) stories. I just knew that some bits of books made me really happy, and I was trying to figure out how to replicate that feeling.

I'm happier for having a name to put to my id. It means I spend less time chasing it, and more time experiencing pleasure. My feminism values women's pleasure pretty highly.

2. Because I love all of your ids, and I love knowing and seeing them.

Even if they're not my own. You read anyone's work for long enough, and you'll end up knowing quite a bit about her. cesare gave the example of narrative emphasis on advanced degrees in a porn story, and that's pretty much exactly what I mean. We're writing to please ourselves here, and if you cross fandoms with somebody you're going to see her reapplying tropes and being attracted to similar stories and yeah, that's going to give you some information about her.

But when I think about the phrase "my id is showing," I think of prowriters who don't know how to approach or harness their ids. There's something very uncomfortable about reading someone's book and both seeing their kinks and knowing that they didn't mean for you to see their kinks. Um. Lots of dudely sff gives me this feeling: Orson Scott Card, (occasionally) Frank Herbert, Stephen Lawhead. It's awkward, because you can tell that they're not doing it on purpose, their ids are just creeping out and they can't get them back in the box. They're not doing anything with that id pleasure, just flailing. In contrast, writers like Tamora Pierce or Baroness Orczy, heck like, Tolkien, who knew how to use the id if ever anyone did - the ones who know what they want and tie the power of their ids to some pretty masterful purposes - I love seeing their ids. Not a problem. Their ids work for my benefit.

And I love seeing fandom's collective ids in particular, because of that thing mentioned above re: women's pleasure. You guys, I think our id vortices are so cool. I think it's so cool that we have language for all this stuff that critical communities don't - woobie? that's our word. Literature's jam-packet with 'em, but academia hasn't been over-arsed to name the phenomenon. I love that we have structures and spaces that let us really get to know our pleasure buttons, and that uncritically celebrate our happy feelings. And, y'know, that whole thing where "good" writing is totally a narrative kink anyway. So.

If your id is showing, it might not gel with my id. I might scroll down or backbutton out. But unless your id is talking about, idk, Indian princesses - Sherlock Holmes kinkmeme, I'm looking at you - I'm not going to have a problem with that. If your kinks are really obvious in your writing, I'm actually pretty likely to think it's cute, and to grin when I see them pop up. I don't feel the need to police either your id or my own.

3. Because I just can't see us resisting all the baggage about ids and good writing bouncing around our culture. telesilla's already been burned. It's inevitably going to be more panopticon than we want it to be, I think.

Comments

[ineptshieldmaid]

Because I value the emotional freedom fandom has taught me to value my id and the contents thereof.

I love the awareness of my id I've been building in fandom.

YES THIS.

Although that's partly why I was *thinking* about doing the meme. I know my id is showing! Mostly I put it there on purpose! Sometimes I put it there on purpose and then it did things which I kind of didn't expect. And I wonder if anyone else ever notices.

And when I look back on things and think "HOLY SHIT I DIDN'T NOTICE MY ID THERE", I wonder if anyone else *did*. Did anyone else notice that I was using poor ole Susan Pevensie to articulate a bunch of sex-related distress that I wasn't even consciously aware of?

I'm tossing up w/r/t to the meme, because, on the one hand, it'd be an opportunity to find out what other people have found out about me via my fic. On the other, yeah - I don't like it's wording, or the implication that one's id shouldn't go near one's fic.

[lotesse]

Here's my question: why shouldn't we be using Susan to articulate our own sex-related distress? You know? We have all this distress we need to talk about, and I kind of think that subverting Jack Lewis's abandoned queen to do it is an awesome move.

Also - would we think of that as id-ful if it was a dude articulating some sort of dudely thing through fiction? I'm not sure we would.

[elspethdixon]

would we think of that as id-ful if it was a dude articulating some sort of dudely thing through fiction?

I have rarely seen a dude articulate some kind of dudely thing through fiction in a way that wasn't Id-full, though that might be a factor of how much comics and SF I read. (Though... does Starship Trooper qualify as Id-fic? It's more about the satisfaction of the author's political views being vindicated than emotional or sexual satisfaction. But there's also a sense of "hah, take that, you stupid wrong people who are stupid and wrong!" that I get when reading fiction that disagrees with or questions particular kinds of viewpoints that's deeply emotionally satisfying edited to clarify: and I suspect Heinlein was getting this from Starship Troopers the way I get it from other some fiction, not that I found Starship Troopers to be a satisfying excercize in "hah, take that!").

[lotesse]

Yeah, but that kind of politics is totally about the id, trufax. Because they are the Libertarian Supermen, superior to all of us mere mortals. Bluh.

[ineptshieldmaid]

why shouldn't we be using Susan to articulate our own sex-related distress

Can't see any reason not to! In fact, as far as *I* can tell, subjecting Susan to my distress produced *really good writing*. I'm just wondering if the reason no one stopped me and said "um, hey, are you ok?" is that they didn't see my id in it at all, or that they saw my id and went "hmm, id, i'll leave it alone and pretend to give it some privacy!"

These days, consciously writing my id *works* for me. Which means my Narnia writing ends up tangled in layers and layers of medieval subtext, but hey, so's the canon! But after putting so much of my id out on show I wonder how many people *notice* it? I'm curious as to just how transparent I am, I guess.

There are some things I *can't* do, though, because I don't want to see my id there. My attempt to write girl!Spock/Uhura went dead in the water because I can't keep a straight face writing about a Very Sensible Linguist and her girlcrush on her language teacher who is so pretty and awesome and yet TERRIFYING. I mean, what if one of my (three, now!) pretty-awesome-terrifying girl language teachers ever found it????

[schemingreader]

Ha, I just posted to participate in that meme! I was going to do it both on LJ and on DW.

I wasn't thinking of it as one of those, "here's what I hate about your writing" con-crit memes or one of those "who is the most popular fangirl" love memes. I was thinking, "I have some readers who read all my stuff because it pushes some button or other, and now I can bond with them about it."

Well. Let's see what really happens.

[lotesse]

See, I don't know if that confluence of pleasure is always id-ful. You can totally like someone's fic despite the fact that it shows her id, because it speaks to yours in some different way. But I don't think I'd want to tell that person that I love her plotting but regularly scroll past her porn, or whatever! Just because it didn't get me off doesn't mean it didn't work for someone.

[melannen]

Have you seen the DW version that eisen posted? She re-worked it to be much more id-postive and more about conscious harnessing of id, and I would love it to see that one getting traffic to equal the LJ one.

[lotesse]

I did, and - step in the right direction, but - I'm still not sure I want to, you know?

[elspethdixon]

I posted on the meme, figuring that I already know and deliberately write to fulfill my biggest kinks (I look into Elspeth's Id and see... characters being terrible misjudged and then beaten up real good, and then there's h/c and everyone is sorry, and also there is fanatically partisan OTPing) then locked the post linking to it to my widest flist/access list filter when I had sudden flashbacks to last spring, when one women in my main fandom had an especially nasty troll follow her from a hatememe to several other pan-fannish memes, including a concrit one where they posted out-and-out bashing of her fic because she wrote kidfic (I never knew fictional characters' imaginary children angered people so much).

Thus far I've gotten no answers, though, either positive, negative, or neutral, so I suppose in light of the response telesilla got, I've come out ahead.

[lotesse]

Ugh, that sounds awful.

I wonder if folk aren't answering because it's hard to figure out how to say those things without them sounding like judgments. You can tell me that your writing contains partisan shipping, and that makes me grin and recognize that same impulse in myself and it's all good - but if I were to tell you that your fic contained the same, I'd freak about it sounding like an accusation! As per point three above, it's a major problem that in our wider cultural shorthand id=bad writing.

[elspethdixon]

I wonder if folk aren't answering because it's hard to figure out how to say those things without them sounding like judgments

*nods* I haven't responded to anyone's meme posts yet, on lj or dw, but think I'd probably have an easier time pointing out the Id-fic qualities in someone else's fic when they're impulses I share (and thus things I'd mention positively when reccing the fic to a third party, a la, "OMG, you have to read the Lymond Chronicles! Lymond is horribly misjudged by everyone and nearly dies in every single book and is deliciously woobie-yet-a-magnificent-sarcastic-bastard and at one point he actually goes blind from sheer force of angst! It's awesome! And there's lots and lots of quoting from Renaissance literature.").

Dorothy Dunnett is kind of the ultimate rebuttal to the "Id=bad writing" idea. It's just that the ranks of John Ringos and Stephanie Meyers are so numerous that they tend to drown the non-trashy Id-writers out (at least Ringo owns his Id rather than trying to pretend that he's writing deep, serious SF where the plot just happens to always involve hookers. I find his Ghost books less creepy than some objectively less WTF books by other writers, because he openly acknowledges that they're basically the unfiltered spewings of his Id, and that he initially didn't think the first one was publishable because he knew how awful it was).

[jack_of_none]

That is an amazing point about Dorothy Dunnett (one of my favorite writers of all time).

And, yeah *raises hand* I had initially thought of answering the meme, but I didn't want any authors I cited to take it as an insult.