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: 2010-05-25 02:12 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-25 05:29 pm (UTC)*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).
no subject
Date: 2010-05-26 05:12 am (UTC)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.