Friday Write #077
Good Ideas will be on spring break next week, but you can find plenty of craft notes, writing prompts, and good-natured rambling in the archives.
Greetings, writers—
I promised another post about strategies to make writing fun—inasmuch as that is ever possible, of course—and here it is.
Today is all about creating your Id List.
The term comes from psychologist and writer Jennifer Lynn Barnes, whose YA novel The Inheritance Games has been on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year and a half.
Barnes is something of a phenom. Okay, delete “something of a.” She wrote her first published novel (she’d written unpublished ones prior) when she was nineteen, and she sold five books while she was still in college at Yale. She was a Fulbright Scholar, and she has a master’s from Cambridge and a Ph.D from Yale.
If that doesn’t make you feel like an underachiever, I don’t know what will, but Barnes seems like a perfectly lovely person, and she has a lot to say about psychological theories of fiction and fandom (she has degrees in psychology, psychiatry, and cognitive science) as well as what do do when you don’t want to write something.
Barnes argues that humans are hardwired to enjoy stories about sex, beauty, power, competition, and danger. But each of us has our own, personal pleasures as well, and it is the individual, idiosyncratic ones that should make up our Id Lists.
The Id List is everything you love in any kind of storytelling, as well as in life itself1. Think pleasure. Even guilty pleasure.
For example, as a kid, Barnes loved Party of Five, Parent Trap, and The Outsiders. Accordingly, as an adult, she loves stories of identical twins and kids being raised by older siblings. They go onto her Id List.
She also likes clones, robots who don’t know they’re robots, waifish assassins, characters who live in hotels, comas, game nights, evil children and the parents who love them, amnesia plot lines, and secret passageways. She likes conversations on rooftops, too, so if there’s a scene she doesn’t want to write, she’ll set it on a rooftop to make it more fun. She digs characters eating ice cream, which is why all of her books have a scene of people having ice cream or milkshakes.
There is no trope too familiar, no idea too humble or weird, for the Id List.
Do you like dogs? Put them on the Id List. (The brilliant writer Amy Hempel loves dogs, and many of her stories feature them.) Judging by their fiction, I’d guess that J.G. Ballard would’ve put empty swimming pools on an Id List. Don Carpenter: the game of pool. Rachel Kushner: motorcycles.
You get the idea.
Today, take an hour and think of all the stories you love the most. What appeals to you about them? Put it all on the list. Think of places you love and would like to revisit in your imagination. Put every fun and/or fascinating thing you’d ever want to think or write about on the list. Write this today, but keep adding to it. Forever.
When you can put things you love into your stories, it brings energy and excitement to your prose. And what gives you pleasure to write often gives others pleasure to read.
Happy list-making,
Emily
A Few Writing-Related Links:
“[S]ome folks are sniffy about ghost-writing, as though it’s somehow unseemly or immoral. Which is silly. Ghost-writing is the most morally sound thing I will do on any given day.” As a former celebrity ghostwriter, I really enjoyed this piece in The Guardian. I wish there were a union, and I could hang out with this guy at meetings.
Remember? Remember
wanting to play
every minute, as if that
was why we were born?—A lovely poem about childhood innocence and its loss.
What if you wanted your final, unfinished novel burned, but your kids published it after you were dead?
Last week I shared Kelly Link’s list of prompts, which including talking animals. Here’s a poem that features a talking bird and, because I just now remembered it, that talking cat video we all saw in 2007. Oh, Don Piano!
Some very nice people are making a documentary about Portland high school speech and debate teams, and they could use your support.
I’m teaching at a big weekend writing workshop at Clark College, and it’s free.
Yes, I touched on this in last Friday’s post. But that was more about Link’s prompts.