deep dark secrets
Apr. 20th, 2002 02:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mamajoanI'm damning the torpedoes and posting this *without* specifying friends-only. Any of y'all ex-coworkers or whomever reading this, will just have to deal.
The very interesting stuff that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
liviapenn wrote about the nature of livejournal ("a censored version of the uncensored side of me") got me a-thinkin' about what I expose in my fiction.
I've given this a fair amount of thought in the past anyway. What it boils down to is this: Sometimes when I'm writing a, *ahem*, sexually explicit scene, I start to worry that I'm exposing something embarrassing about myself; that the things the characters are doing reveal to the reader my personal kinks and predilections. This, btw, is part and parcel of my other worry that my sex scenes are starting to get repetitive (not internally but across the body of my work).
I'm sure it's true that if one read all my stories, one would start to discern patterns. Certain tropes or themes would become apparent and one could reasonably extrapolate from there to an analysis of my psyche and my particular kinks. But I guess it's arrogant to suppose that anyone's reading my stuff that closely, looking for recurring elements in the sex scenes. I gather most people just read it and go "whew, yum, cold shower now." Which is cool too. ;)
So why bother worrying about it? If I'm going to write sex scenes at all, shouldn't I be thick-skinned enough to handle whatever people are going to assume about me? It's not like people are emailing me to say "aha, I see you wrote X, this means you enjoy sexual practice Y, now I know all your intimate secrets mooohahaha!" And isn't writing all about exposing one's inner workings anyway? I'm sure there are things my writing could expose other than sexual, that would be equally embarrassing if someone were to make the connection.
And anyway, what one writes about isn't necessarily what one wants to do. Writing a particular sex act just means that it turns me on -- or, not even that; that I think it makes sense for the story I'm telling, for the characters I'm writing. (It relates to what I was saying inmunoz's lj too, about rape fantasies. A woman can fantasize about rape and be turned on by it, but it doesn't by ANY stretch of the imagination mean she wants to be raped.) Fantasies -- and fiction, especially fanfic -- are just that: fantasies, a way of working out things in one's psyche that are best expressed in that medium, a harmless medium. I've written about a lot of stuff in fanfic -- sexual and otherwise -- that I wouldn't ever want to actually try. (And stuff that I might someday want to try, but never have yet.)
So if anyone's really making assumptions about my sexual predilections from reading my fanfic, they're probably wrong. At the least, incomplete. Which relates back to what Livia was saying about being uncomfortable with the idea of people forming their impression of her from reading her livejournal....
I'm rambling, but my basic point is this. There's a lot that I share about myself on lj. There's a lot that I share about myself in my fiction. But if you put all that together, you're still not even close to getting the whole picture of the person that is me. I think most of us lj'ers / fanfic writers / fanfic readers realize this and are okay with it -- to the extent that we know our lj friends, we realize we only know a part of them, and to the extent that we feel we know someone from reading her fic, we realize that we really don't know her much at all. But one can't be sure that everyone who reads one's livejournal realizes those things, and hence the tension between our censored and uncensored selves.
The very interesting stuff that
liviapenn wrote about the nature of livejournal ("a censored version of the uncensored side of me") got me a-thinkin' about what I expose in my fiction.I've given this a fair amount of thought in the past anyway. What it boils down to is this: Sometimes when I'm writing a, *ahem*, sexually explicit scene, I start to worry that I'm exposing something embarrassing about myself; that the things the characters are doing reveal to the reader my personal kinks and predilections. This, btw, is part and parcel of my other worry that my sex scenes are starting to get repetitive (not internally but across the body of my work).
I'm sure it's true that if one read all my stories, one would start to discern patterns. Certain tropes or themes would become apparent and one could reasonably extrapolate from there to an analysis of my psyche and my particular kinks. But I guess it's arrogant to suppose that anyone's reading my stuff that closely, looking for recurring elements in the sex scenes. I gather most people just read it and go "whew, yum, cold shower now." Which is cool too. ;)
So why bother worrying about it? If I'm going to write sex scenes at all, shouldn't I be thick-skinned enough to handle whatever people are going to assume about me? It's not like people are emailing me to say "aha, I see you wrote X, this means you enjoy sexual practice Y, now I know all your intimate secrets mooohahaha!" And isn't writing all about exposing one's inner workings anyway? I'm sure there are things my writing could expose other than sexual, that would be equally embarrassing if someone were to make the connection.
And anyway, what one writes about isn't necessarily what one wants to do. Writing a particular sex act just means that it turns me on -- or, not even that; that I think it makes sense for the story I'm telling, for the characters I'm writing. (It relates to what I was saying in
munoz's lj too, about rape fantasies. A woman can fantasize about rape and be turned on by it, but it doesn't by ANY stretch of the imagination mean she wants to be raped.) Fantasies -- and fiction, especially fanfic -- are just that: fantasies, a way of working out things in one's psyche that are best expressed in that medium, a harmless medium. I've written about a lot of stuff in fanfic -- sexual and otherwise -- that I wouldn't ever want to actually try. (And stuff that I might someday want to try, but never have yet.)So if anyone's really making assumptions about my sexual predilections from reading my fanfic, they're probably wrong. At the least, incomplete. Which relates back to what Livia was saying about being uncomfortable with the idea of people forming their impression of her from reading her livejournal....
I'm rambling, but my basic point is this. There's a lot that I share about myself on lj. There's a lot that I share about myself in my fiction. But if you put all that together, you're still not even close to getting the whole picture of the person that is me. I think most of us lj'ers / fanfic writers / fanfic readers realize this and are okay with it -- to the extent that we know our lj friends, we realize we only know a part of them, and to the extent that we feel we know someone from reading her fic, we realize that we really don't know her much at all. But one can't be sure that everyone who reads one's livejournal realizes those things, and hence the tension between our censored and uncensored selves.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Censored/uncensored.
Date: 2002-04-20 12:57 pm (UTC)I've never really thought of writing in terms of censored/uncensored selves, although now that I've got it in my head I can see how that plays out. I haven't written any erotica in years, and when I did I pretty much put all the kink on the table. In my regular fiction I tend to oversubmit myself to my reader; often I actually have to cut back for the sake of the *story*, not because of any internal embarrassment. But what's REALLY strange is that there are things I'll put in my fiction that I won't tell my therapist. (I got to thinking about this after the Kissing Jessica Stein trailers came out.) In fact, there are things I put in my fiction which I won't actually say out loud to certain people (certain friends, family members, etc.), even if those people and my readers are the same group.
(Then again, most of my kink has been out in the open to my family for over 3 years, so who the hell knows what they think...)
This all leads me to think that self-disclosure has a calculated risk/benefit analysis built-in.
Interesting...
Date: 2002-04-20 07:48 pm (UTC)The stuff I write in those worlds, as well as any sexually explicit Bufffy stuff, is just shared with one friend, the one who invented those universes and got me to start writing after she shared her stuff with me. Non-explicit Buffy stuff, I'll happily post to the dot-creative newsgroup -- but I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea of strangers being able to someday say, "hey, this guy coaching our kid's soccer team, I did a google search, and Christ, you should see this Spike/Dawm stuff he wrote."
Not that I have, really, just an example.