The id(iot’s) guide to writing

For some of us, writing is the ultimate narcissism, fuelled by the pleasure of seeing one’s name in print (if not in the seductive neon lights of Broadway, the ultimate achievement some would say). In Freudian theory, the id, which I think often drives the writer, is that part of the personality which is the source of instinctual and primitive needs. According to answers.com (one of a trillion sites where you can find definitions of anything, including the word “anything”) the id is “entirely non-rational and functions according to the pleasure-pain principle, seeking immediate fulfilment of its impulses whenever possible”.

Now for many of us the immediate fulfilment of an impulse can be satisfied with a splurge on a new pair of expensive shoes, a chocolate croissant (immediately followed by a cup of green tea to restore a semblance of karmic balance), a hurling of an insult to a taxi driver, or even a dip into a porn shop (porn site, strip club, you name your poison). But for the writer the fulfilment comes with the receipt of the byline, immediately followed by the calls and text messages from friends and family as the penny drops and they realise that indeed those are your bon mots in the local paper or obscure website. 

So desperate are some of us (yours truly excluded of course) that we call our loved ones to tell them that we are in print. Isn’t this humiliating to admit? That not only do I need to see my byline, I insist everyone else must too? Oh and the ways one must find to manufacture a conversational gambit so that the latest blog, letter to the editor or article can be casually dropped into the conversation. Of course this can be experienced vicariously too as parents, partners and family members climb onto the bandwagon (did you know that this originally meant a large ornate wagon for carrying a musical band as it led the circus parade?).

There is something pitiful and pithy in this definition isn’t there? Something vulgar and needy about wanting to be seen, as if one is invisible without a loud and colourful sign to call attention to oneself. And so yes I’m saying there is something vulgar and needy in wanting to call attention to ourselves through our narcissistic outpourings as writers. But you see the id is irrational and this need to be seen, to not be missed or overlooked, may be essential to our survival. The pups that are the most vocal survive, leaving the silent runt to wither and die.

But, confusingly, there is more complexity to us humans. With the pleasure of seeing one’s name in print, there is also the pain of rejection. I’ve recently written two very personal stories. One made it into print, the other got a polite but clear shove: “sorry this isn’t for our target audience”.

So you’d think that I would be most distressed by the one that failed to make it. Wrong! When something I write gets published, even in the mysterious ether of the world wide web, I agonise about how it will be received. Was I too vulnerable, was I too obscure, is that quirky joke just a bit too off colour, do they really want to know what I think about men or dating or crochet (I don’t think about crochet)? It’s so bad sometimes that I avoid buying a publication so that I don’t “accidentally” see my own piece. This is the equivalent of slowing down at an accident scene: “dear lord please don’t let me see blood, dear lord OK just a little”. One is drawn to and repelled by vulnerability. On the one hand there is the vain thrill of recognition, on the other the sweaty anxiety of scorn.

So to tie this all up neatly, as every good blogger should do (here the crochet analogy could also be woven in), the id of writing is the narcissistic pleasure of attention and the sense of survival this comes with. But you have to be an idiot to expose yourself, unless masochism is your thing, in which case we start right back at the id!