why I won't be doing the id meme
May. 24th, 2010 07:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotesse1. 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.
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.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-24 12:43 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-25 02:03 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-25 05:36 pm (UTC)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!").
no subject
Date: 2010-05-25 06:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-25 10:53 pm (UTC)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????