Wish Fulfilment in Fiction

Why do you read stories? What keeps you turning the page?

Wish fulfilment is one possible answer! Tune in to hear other reasons, alongside a chat about wish fulfilment in romance and dystopian fiction, the story problems it can create, and how wish fulfilment links to the oppression of marginalized groups.

Enjoy!

Links mentioned:

Call of the Camino: https://www.suzanneredfearnauthor.com/copy-of-where-butterflies-wander-1

Falconsaga: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/222253066-falconsaga

Mythcreants (candy and spinach): https://mythcreants.com/blog/the-best-characters-eat-their-spinach-and-their-candy/

Mind-melding with fictional characters: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/time-travelling-apollo/202104/mind-melding-our-favorite-fictional-characters

Transcript

Hello, and welcome, folks, to the Free Lancer. This podcast discusses all things publishing through a social justice lens. My name is Andy Hodges. I'm a cultural anthropologist turned fiction writer and editor, and I own a book editing business called the Narrative Craft. 

Make sure you subscribe to the show so you never miss an episode, and sign up for my fortnightly newsletter in the show notes if you want more regular updates. 

Today, I'm going to be talking all about wish fulfilment in fiction, and I'm going to start by touching on what I call the drivers of story as well. 

These are things that keep the reader turning the page, and the biggest one, arguably, is tension. When story tension is managed effectively, the reader will want to keep turning the page. They don't necessarily want high tension all the time, but oscillating between high tension and lower tension scenes and increasing the tension over the course of the book is stuff that works very well in genre fiction. 

And I think that would work well in a lot of literary fiction as well. Although in literary fiction, they sometimes use other techniques to pique tension, such as relying on trauma to create tension, which honestly I find a little bit icky [sometimes]. 

Then you've got curiosity. Curiosity is another reason that readers keep turning the page. If there's a story mystery and the reader's interested enough and wants to find out what is going on there, they will keep reading until that story mystery is revealed. 

This is why reading outside of the genres that you write in is also really helpful and important. If you read a bunch of mystery novels, you'll get really good at planting the seeds and the breadcrumbs for a really good reveal, for a really good story mystery. 

And you might want to include that as well in a romance novel, a horror novel, a spec fic novel, a lit fic novel, whatever. So read outside of the genres that you write, edit, whatever. 

Then you've got insight. 

Now, insight is another reason that people will keep turning the page. This one really applies to non-fiction. Typically people read non-fiction to learn about a topic, to gain insight into something. 

But there are novels, especially lit fic novels, but not only, that offer insights into things outside of the story as well. For example, I recently edited a book that was about the Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage route. 

And as you read, you would learn lots of tidbits, lots of factoids about the Camino de Santiago as well. So that's one way in which an author, even when they're writing something fictional, can package in insight. 

And that can be a really compelling reason why someone keeps reading the story. 

Another example, I worked on a novel that was set in Iceland. It was a romantasy book, but it had lots of references to Icelandic folklore as well. 

So not only were you getting the story and the plot, you were also learning about really cool Icelandic mythological creatures. I'm going to put a link to those books in the show notes so that you can check them out for yourself. 

But insight is often a reason why people keep reading a story. And the final one, I've only got four. I know this from the Mythcreants team who are amazing. And in many ways, this is another episode that is basically footnotes to Mythcreants. 

They've talked about tension, curiosity, and number four, wish fulfillment. There may be other reasons out there. If you know of any, please contact me and let's have a conversation about it because I'm really interested to know. 

But wish fulfilment is another reason both why a writer writes a story and why a reader enjoys reading it. And I think just the incredible popularity of romance as a genre speaks to the importance of wish fulfilment, as romance is very often, if not always, about wish fulfilment. 

If you write a romance novel, you're creating beings from your own imagination, characters. If it's your first novel and you don't have much background in fiction writing, it could also be really quite raw contents of your imagination, like raw products of your imagination. 

Idealized versions of the lover, the person that you would like to fall in love with. If you're a highly experienced romance reader and writer, then it's less likely to be quite so raw because you're used to writing stories with characters who have lots of different qualities. 

And you just, you've been exercising that muscle for a while, that creative muscle, and it's more flexible because of that. But the wish fulfillment aspect is one reason why writing a romance novel can be a really enjoyable thing to do. 

You'll also have in a romance novel, quite often but not always, one character in the pair, assuming it's a pair, could be a throuple, could be more than that. But then it could get complicated with POVs and stuff like that. 

Who knows? I would read it. 

So very often you'll have an author-insert character. So if I was writing a romance novel, maybe I'll call a character, I don't know, Adam or something, or something that sounds a little bit like my name. 

And then you'll have other characters that are more the kind of the other aspects of that, the projection, your projection, your dreams, the person that you want to fall in love with. So, as a writer of a romance novel, that can be a lot of fun. 

As a reader, things can get a little bit tricky. So if a writer's totally out there in wish fulfilment zone, one of the problems that can happen is that their writing might not be very interesting for the reader. 

I've read novels where early drafts have had almost no conflict in them at all. For example, amazing author insert character meets and falls in love with gorgeous other person. They slowly get together and that's it. 

They stay together. Happy ending. Happily ever after. Beautiful. That is a nice thing to write. It's a nice experience to have, right? But it's A, unrealistic because most relationships don't run that smoothly the whole time. 

And second, it's not very satisfying for the reader because there's no story conflict there. There's no edges and hooks that the reader can dig their teeth into. That kind of a character is sometimes called a Mary Sue character. 

And again, following Mythcreants, I want to point out that the very name Mary Sue and the association with the feminine gender is misogynistic. I don't like that word either. Mythcreants actually have their own system. 

They call it, they have these words candy and spinach. If you're interested, I'll put a link to that in the show notes as well, but I'm not going to go into that now. See how I piqued curiosity there?

But a Mary Sue character is basically a character who just doesn't have any character flaws or weaknesses and everything's perfect and everything's nice. And that can serve a great important psychological function for the writer, but it's just not satisfying to read this sort of idealized character. 

So it's really important to bring conflict into it as well. And writers, when they're writing romance, there's a whole bunch of tactics that they need to use to get the reader interested. Some of them apply more widely to genre fiction. 

You want to promote reader attachment to the character. So maybe this happened to you when you were younger. You read a novel and incredibly identified with a character. This often happens to children. 

I can remember a couple of novels like it where I really, really strongly identified with a character. And it can be incredibly powerful and you go around and you're experiencing the world through that character's eyes. 

This is actually a psychological phenomenon. I'm going to link to it again in the show notes. Can't remember off the top of my head what it's called, but it's really interesting. So you actually go around and experience the world through this character's perspective. 

But this doesn't happen very often in fiction. And just like a kind of a book or a topic striking a chord with an audience, which can happen at a random moment, it's not a good idea to try and make this your goal for the book because it's so unreliable. 

So you want to instead use a bunch of tactics like promoting reader attachment to a character through getting them to do small acts of kindness, through putting them in situations where the reader can feel empathy for their situation and so on. 

So there's a whole set of techniques that you want to use to get the reader interested and excited about a character. And then you need some conflict and obstacles as well. Character flaws, obviously, are really helpful for this. 

And in all of the guides to writing a romance novel, there's this big emphasis on character flaws. So yeah, there's a whole bunch of fiction, craft, literary techniques, whatever, that can help the reader find a particular romance story satisfying. 

And you can work those in if in your first draft you've written very much a kind of author insert, idealized wish fulfilment story with no conflict at all. 

Wish fulfilment is not just about romantic relationships or nice things happening, etc. 

It's also about social relationships. So a dystopian novel where like a group of people bring down a really evil government, that is also wish fulfilment too. And that's important because oftentimes, sometimes I notice that editors come down hard on authors who are writing these kind of simplistic wish fulfilment styles of drafts and so on. 

And I want to say that, okay, those stories, they have issues, those drafts, they do. But this whole act of wish fulfillment is coming from a place of imagination. And it's particularly important for people who are in some kind of oppressed situation. 

Because this power to imagine a world where particular wishes come true is incredibly important. I think one of the reasons why romance novels are so popular amongst feminine readerships is because of this imaginative identification. 

So there was a study that was done many years ago, like a sociological study in schools in the USA, where masculine students were asked to imagine what it would be like to spend a day navigating school, et cetera, as a girl. 

And students of other genders were asked to navigate, to write a story imagining what it would be like to navigate school as a boy for the day. And the masculine students basically refused to engage with the activity and wouldn't write those stories in general. 

And when they did, they were full of very kind of simplistic depictions and characters. The other gendered students wrote incredibly nuanced and interesting kind of stories about what it would be like to spend the day in the body of a boy [edit: as a masculine person]. 

And this was done a long time ago, and I'm not sure of all the details, et cetera. But this speaks to kind of the power of imaginative identification and wish fulfillment. My basic point is, and this comes from Mythcreants again, do not be too harsh on people who are writing as a form of wish fulfilment. 

It's an incredibly important activity that people engage in as a way of dealing with handling oppressive systems of power and social relations. So it's really important. The crux of the problem is if you want to turn it into a story that's satisfying for readers, there are certain things you have to do with that early wish fulfillment draft in order to make it kind of viable, satisfying for a significant audience. 

But it's incredibly easy to polish a shitty first draft. It's much more difficult to create that shitty first draft. So kudos to anyone who's written one of those kinds of wish fulfilment stories as a first draft. 

And romance novelists are very familiar with this. And as they write more and more novels, they're just aware of these kind of problems and when particular aspects of a character are coming from a wish fulfilment part of their imagination. 

So that is a wrap on this very short episode on wish fulfillment. I hope you found it interesting. I will be back in a few weeks with two new podcast guests. I will be discussing authenticity versus aspiration in fiction. 

And I will also be discussing the literary landscape and publishing system in other countries in Europe as well. See if we can break out of this Anglo-American bubble and look at how things are being done in other countries too, which I think is really interesting and important. 

So I hope you'll stay with me. If you found this episode interesting, pretty please subscribe to this podcast. As you know, I have said goodbye to all social media and this podcast and my blog are the main ways and my newsletter are the main ways of keeping in touch with me. 

So I would be very grateful if you hit subscribe or even hit reply and send me an email letting me know what you thought of this episode. Apart from that, I don't have much more to say except enjoy these kind of moody, foggy days.

We've hit the fog here in Scotland right now, weeks of autumn, and I will see you again very soon. Until next time.