101 Fictional Kinks
I've been working on this intermittently over the past few days, in the interest of rewarding myself for progress made on course reading. These aren't necessarily sexual kinks -- rather, they are things I enjoy when reading or writing. They aren't really in any kind of order, but at least they're here! Stolen from stultiloquentia on Dreamwidth.
1. Language. Style. This is horribly general and I don't care; if you can use language creatively and well, if your style is beautiful and apt and convincing, your story probably already has my heart.
2. Narrative awareness that actions have consequences. I love it when the author doesn't soften the blow.
3. Crossdressing. You, uh. May have noticed this.
4. The juxtaposition of intellectual and sexual/romantic engagement. Literary analysis conducted between kisses; philosophical debate in the afterglow. A relationship founded on communication and mutual passion for knowledge.
5. In fact, intellectual engagement in general, whether or not it's combined with romance or sexuality.
6. Languages. Don't look at me like that; Latin can be sexy.
7. Allusions, well-placed and cleverly used and perfectly thematically appropriate.
8. The unreliable narrator.
9. Irony, particularly the tragic kind.
10. Nonsexual intimacy. Chaste kisses; nudity that won't even implicitly lead to sex; snuggling, ohgod.
11. Problems that aren't solved, or even soluble. The star-crossed lovers can't be together; the wound sustained on the battlefield won't ever really heal; the relationship that the characters have been struggling against all odds to repair falls apart entirely at the last.
12. When "I love you" isn't a revelation or a cause for celebration. When it's met only with a resigned sigh and a soft "I know." When it's the worst thing to say.
13. Handkissing.
14. Long-distance relationships.
15. Competence. I love competent people.
16. Period-appropriate terminology -- I am not by any means a historian, but even when I don't immediately spot them and note them, they're the kind of device that quietly builds up a world around the story.
17. Grey and grey morality. No heroes, no villains, just lots of people that want different things that contradict each other, and who work at cross-purposes to get them, and who disagree.
18. Quiet helplessness and desperation.
19. Endurance -- particularly quiet endurance, rather than showy displays. Just get through the goddamn day.
20. Stories about what people do in utterly untenable situations -- the choices they make, and whether or not those choices are moral or right.
21. Ethical people. People who don't bend the rules not necessarily because they're forbidden to do so, or because they can't, but because they choose not to.
22. Characters who are undone by someone else being kind to them.
23. Trans*, genderqueer and androgynous characters.
24. The carefully-handled mixing of linguistic registers. Eloquent, whip-smart takedowns concluded with a short, sharp "Fuck you."
25. Narrative voice. I don't care what you do with it as long as it's interesting and/or beautiful -- preferably both. You can be David Mitchell and speak to me in six different narrative voices, or you can be Jane Austen and sit me down by the fireplace to tell me a story yourself, but do something cool with your narrative, please.
26. Characters who risk intimacy, whether physical or emotional or whatever else, and are rewarded for it.
27. Intimate friendships. It's not really romantic, but it has the depth of a romance -- the closeness, the trust, maybe even the physicality.
28. And to follow that -- characters who don't love in ways that fit boxes. Characters who define love for themselves, and try to apply their definitions to their realities.
29. And to follow that, polyamory. Particularly the functional kind of polyamory, where drama is resolved by talking and negotiation and compromise, where jealousy is handled in a way that works for everyone, and where (my kinks are showing, I know, but that's kind of the point) big affectionate cuddlepiles are not only permissible but regular and welcomed (cf. point 10.)
30. Bones, and their real names. Clavicle, scapula and ulna are so much prettier than collarbone, shoulder-blade and arm.
31. People in isolated, claustrophobic relationships, and the madness attendant to such associations. (There's a bit of a story here. I studied and loved A Streetcar Named Desire a few years back, and one night, despairing of my own ability to ever write something I'd love as much as that play, I tried to pin down what I loved about it. The intensity of the setting and language and characterisation, the characters trapped outside of the boxes they'd really much prefer to fit into, the entrapment and closeness and humidity of it all... please don't ask how I got from there to 'let's write a story about a teacher-student relationship!', but I did. And that, everyone, was what I did last November.)
32. BDSM which isn't rooted in the sartorial trappings; a dom choking a sub where both are sharply dressed in something like tweed. It's not that leather and high-heels-and-fishnets and such aren't fabulous -- if that's your kink, I do not mean to shame it! -- it's more that they're a distraction, for me, from the heart of the matter, and as such I'd rather do without them.
33. Small and intimate groups and communities working in the face of something greater and more dangerous than themselves, sharing their burdens among themselves and surviving together.
34. Characters who treat their own wishes (especially romantic) as secondary to their responsibilities. I like stoicism here -- a kind of quiet resignation at the very most. When a character starts angsting about this, I lose sympathy.
35. Characters who treat their responsibilities as secondary to their own wishes. By contrast, I much prefer these characters to be mad, passionate, rage-against-the-world types -- goddamnit, they want this, and if that makes them selfish then so be it; the rest of the world can hang. Preferably the rest of the world should be screaming "what is wrong with you?" pretty loudly, however.
36. Finding family in unexpected places.
37. Inevitability. When a writer really manages to convince the reader that the story could never have ended any other way.
38. Research. All of the research -- well, not all of it, but show me flashes of specialised knowledge that make you happy and I will be happy, too.
39. Moments of seismic social change. Revolutions, wars, economic collapse, the return of dragons after a ten-thousand year absence. How people react, adapt, splinter into factions, fight back.
40. The moments after the seismic social change. When the revolution seizes power, when the hero's conquering army is beaten back to its own land, when money loses all its value overnight, when all of a sudden there's a bloody great dragon blocking out the sun -- what happens then?
41. Music that's integrated into the story -- not songfic by any means, but traditional songs from your setting, folk songs, murder ballads. By the same token, musician characters.
42. Politics! Diplomat characters and spy networks; kings and queens and emperors; responsibilities and allegiances that conflict; characters who are savvy enough to navigate a political battlefield.
43. Characters learning how to accept and own their desires.
44. Learning intimacy. Characters who are unaccustomed to touch reaching out, or not flinching away, for the first time.
45. Worldbuilding, ohgod. Gorgeous, sensual details that let me see and smell and hear the place you've created. Worlds that cohere and make logical sense; worlds that leave me feeling as though I've returned from a journey when I close the book. (At least 50% of this point stems from my own inability to craft a convincing setting. >_>)
46. Looking back. The story with which we are familiar retold from years in the future as a folk-tale or a history or a song, so that it seems as though time has rendered it almost completely foreign.
47. Ablative absolutes.
48. Communication without words. Body language. Physical tells.
49. Love-letters.
50. Performativity. Characters for whom every interaction, every act is a performance; characters who spend hours dressing and grooming and putting on make-up every morning, just so they can get through the day.
51. Characters who lie, and how the story takes that into account.
52. Doing the right thing, which is also the difficult thing, and sometimes even the thing that will kill you.
53. Teasing and laughing during sex -- when characters start treating it as just a linear progression of acts, I get bored. I prefer characters who don't take things 100% seriously all the time.
54. Tenderness; characters being gentle with one another. Particularly a character taking the time to attend to the needs and wants of a character who isn't accustomed to such consideration, and what hurt/comfort kink do you speak of, I see no such thing here.
55. Crises of faith.
56. Poetry as a part of the story. Bonus points if the characters write poetry and the reader actually gets to read it. With the obvious caveat that the poetry should be at least a little bit good.
57. Tragedy. Fatal flaws and inevitable failure and irony all over the place.
58. Stories where success is not a given. Stories where the potential for failure is always there, and where there's always the sense that the characters are walking a tightrope from which they could so easily fall. Whether they succeed or fail in the end doesn't really matter, in this situation; I just like being convinced that the game really could have gone either way.
59. The sea.
60. Vast, sweeping epics, huge in scope.
61. Close, intense, claustrophobic stories about individuals.
62. Some combination of 60 and 61. Yes, I think they can be combined, and I think the contrast in such a story would be gorgeous. (Hi there, point 68!)
63. Decay. Societies on the brink of collapse; buildings falling into ruin; strictly-enforced moral standards crumbling into glorious dissolution. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.
64. Pathetic fallacy.
65. Alternately, incongruous weather. A peaceful, beautiful spring dawn heralds the epic battle for the fate of the kingdom, or drizzling, neither-here-nor-there sort of rain when the protagonists confess their desperate and undying love.
66. Affectionate scritching.
67. Zombies. Allegorical zombies. (Cf. point 63.)
68. Contrast and dissonance.
69. The realisation of error. A character comes to understand that they've screwed up, spectacularly and catastrophically, and have to at least try to correct their mistake.
70. Forgiveness. Characters who can forgive.
71. Self-sabotage. Characters who actively work against their own happiness.
72. Obsession. Fixation. Whether they're focused on a goal or a person or an ideal, I love people who fixate. The slightly-mad, frighteningly-passionate obsessive is one of my favourite character types; thinking about it now, I've only ever written one story that doesn't feature a character like this.
73. Early mornings; when a character wakes up early and feels all alone in the world.
74. Late nights alone.
75. Precipitous, dizzying, near-unbearable happiness, that sets a character alight from the inside. The kind of ecstasy (nonsexual, I feel I should add!) that makes people want to sing or write poetry or take flight.
76. Dancing. Awkward dancing, for preference.
77. The repressed, tightly-controlled character completely losing it.
78. Not talking about it.
79. Awkwardly trying to talk about it.
80. Airports, or other transportational hubs in which lots of journeys and lives briefly tangle up in one another before separating out once again.
81. Self-reliance that doesn't quite work.
82. Grand, stupid gestures.
83. Control freaks who like to submit.
84. Characters who manage to be sympathetic despite, or even because of, doing mad, awful things. (Vriska Serket, I am looking right at you.)
85. People compelled to do terrible things to survive. (And again!)
86. Academics and scholars.
87. Consistent, well-thought-out systems of magic. A little handwaving is more than acceptable, but I do like my magical-types to practice an art that makes sense.
88. The power of words. Magic that runs on the written word; poetry that answers the riddle that's central to the plot; a speech that turns the tide of a battle at the last.
89. Physical restraint. Pretty much in any context, but particularly in a 100% consensual, loving BDSM relationship.
90. Stupid, screwed-up kids who are permitted to grow up.
91. Choking and breathplay.
92. Stories about recovery and healing. Stories set after the grand adventure is over, wherein Our Heroes have to pick their lives up where they left off and try to adapt to something like normality again.
93. Impossible love. How characters react to loving someone who will never love them back; how that love endures, or doesn't endure, or changes with time and without reciprocation.
94. Mistakes that aren't regrets.
95. Mutual hate plus mutual need.
96. Stories where the end of the world isn't the end of the world. Stories about wonderful things that have their time and end, and about the characters who walk away from the dying light with memories, with joy for the past, and with hope for the future.
97. Syndeton. Also asyndeton. Honestly, both make me equally happy.
98. The moment of connection -- where two characters stumble onto a topic of conversation that lights them both up, or meet one another's eyes after hearing an awful joke and smile, or quietly trade stories over a campfire and realise how much they have in common. People discovering other people, reaching out of themselves, and making friends.
99. "I love you." "I love you, too."
100. Carrying on.
101. Hope.
1. Language. Style. This is horribly general and I don't care; if you can use language creatively and well, if your style is beautiful and apt and convincing, your story probably already has my heart.
2. Narrative awareness that actions have consequences. I love it when the author doesn't soften the blow.
3. Crossdressing. You, uh. May have noticed this.
4. The juxtaposition of intellectual and sexual/romantic engagement. Literary analysis conducted between kisses; philosophical debate in the afterglow. A relationship founded on communication and mutual passion for knowledge.
5. In fact, intellectual engagement in general, whether or not it's combined with romance or sexuality.
6. Languages. Don't look at me like that; Latin can be sexy.
7. Allusions, well-placed and cleverly used and perfectly thematically appropriate.
8. The unreliable narrator.
9. Irony, particularly the tragic kind.
10. Nonsexual intimacy. Chaste kisses; nudity that won't even implicitly lead to sex; snuggling, ohgod.
11. Problems that aren't solved, or even soluble. The star-crossed lovers can't be together; the wound sustained on the battlefield won't ever really heal; the relationship that the characters have been struggling against all odds to repair falls apart entirely at the last.
12. When "I love you" isn't a revelation or a cause for celebration. When it's met only with a resigned sigh and a soft "I know." When it's the worst thing to say.
13. Handkissing.
14. Long-distance relationships.
15. Competence. I love competent people.
16. Period-appropriate terminology -- I am not by any means a historian, but even when I don't immediately spot them and note them, they're the kind of device that quietly builds up a world around the story.
17. Grey and grey morality. No heroes, no villains, just lots of people that want different things that contradict each other, and who work at cross-purposes to get them, and who disagree.
18. Quiet helplessness and desperation.
19. Endurance -- particularly quiet endurance, rather than showy displays. Just get through the goddamn day.
20. Stories about what people do in utterly untenable situations -- the choices they make, and whether or not those choices are moral or right.
21. Ethical people. People who don't bend the rules not necessarily because they're forbidden to do so, or because they can't, but because they choose not to.
22. Characters who are undone by someone else being kind to them.
23. Trans*, genderqueer and androgynous characters.
24. The carefully-handled mixing of linguistic registers. Eloquent, whip-smart takedowns concluded with a short, sharp "Fuck you."
25. Narrative voice. I don't care what you do with it as long as it's interesting and/or beautiful -- preferably both. You can be David Mitchell and speak to me in six different narrative voices, or you can be Jane Austen and sit me down by the fireplace to tell me a story yourself, but do something cool with your narrative, please.
26. Characters who risk intimacy, whether physical or emotional or whatever else, and are rewarded for it.
27. Intimate friendships. It's not really romantic, but it has the depth of a romance -- the closeness, the trust, maybe even the physicality.
28. And to follow that -- characters who don't love in ways that fit boxes. Characters who define love for themselves, and try to apply their definitions to their realities.
29. And to follow that, polyamory. Particularly the functional kind of polyamory, where drama is resolved by talking and negotiation and compromise, where jealousy is handled in a way that works for everyone, and where (my kinks are showing, I know, but that's kind of the point) big affectionate cuddlepiles are not only permissible but regular and welcomed (cf. point 10.)
30. Bones, and their real names. Clavicle, scapula and ulna are so much prettier than collarbone, shoulder-blade and arm.
31. People in isolated, claustrophobic relationships, and the madness attendant to such associations. (There's a bit of a story here. I studied and loved A Streetcar Named Desire a few years back, and one night, despairing of my own ability to ever write something I'd love as much as that play, I tried to pin down what I loved about it. The intensity of the setting and language and characterisation, the characters trapped outside of the boxes they'd really much prefer to fit into, the entrapment and closeness and humidity of it all... please don't ask how I got from there to 'let's write a story about a teacher-student relationship!', but I did. And that, everyone, was what I did last November.)
32. BDSM which isn't rooted in the sartorial trappings; a dom choking a sub where both are sharply dressed in something like tweed. It's not that leather and high-heels-and-fishnets and such aren't fabulous -- if that's your kink, I do not mean to shame it! -- it's more that they're a distraction, for me, from the heart of the matter, and as such I'd rather do without them.
33. Small and intimate groups and communities working in the face of something greater and more dangerous than themselves, sharing their burdens among themselves and surviving together.
34. Characters who treat their own wishes (especially romantic) as secondary to their responsibilities. I like stoicism here -- a kind of quiet resignation at the very most. When a character starts angsting about this, I lose sympathy.
35. Characters who treat their responsibilities as secondary to their own wishes. By contrast, I much prefer these characters to be mad, passionate, rage-against-the-world types -- goddamnit, they want this, and if that makes them selfish then so be it; the rest of the world can hang. Preferably the rest of the world should be screaming "what is wrong with you?" pretty loudly, however.
36. Finding family in unexpected places.
37. Inevitability. When a writer really manages to convince the reader that the story could never have ended any other way.
38. Research. All of the research -- well, not all of it, but show me flashes of specialised knowledge that make you happy and I will be happy, too.
39. Moments of seismic social change. Revolutions, wars, economic collapse, the return of dragons after a ten-thousand year absence. How people react, adapt, splinter into factions, fight back.
40. The moments after the seismic social change. When the revolution seizes power, when the hero's conquering army is beaten back to its own land, when money loses all its value overnight, when all of a sudden there's a bloody great dragon blocking out the sun -- what happens then?
41. Music that's integrated into the story -- not songfic by any means, but traditional songs from your setting, folk songs, murder ballads. By the same token, musician characters.
42. Politics! Diplomat characters and spy networks; kings and queens and emperors; responsibilities and allegiances that conflict; characters who are savvy enough to navigate a political battlefield.
43. Characters learning how to accept and own their desires.
44. Learning intimacy. Characters who are unaccustomed to touch reaching out, or not flinching away, for the first time.
45. Worldbuilding, ohgod. Gorgeous, sensual details that let me see and smell and hear the place you've created. Worlds that cohere and make logical sense; worlds that leave me feeling as though I've returned from a journey when I close the book. (At least 50% of this point stems from my own inability to craft a convincing setting. >_>)
46. Looking back. The story with which we are familiar retold from years in the future as a folk-tale or a history or a song, so that it seems as though time has rendered it almost completely foreign.
47. Ablative absolutes.
48. Communication without words. Body language. Physical tells.
49. Love-letters.
50. Performativity. Characters for whom every interaction, every act is a performance; characters who spend hours dressing and grooming and putting on make-up every morning, just so they can get through the day.
51. Characters who lie, and how the story takes that into account.
52. Doing the right thing, which is also the difficult thing, and sometimes even the thing that will kill you.
53. Teasing and laughing during sex -- when characters start treating it as just a linear progression of acts, I get bored. I prefer characters who don't take things 100% seriously all the time.
54. Tenderness; characters being gentle with one another. Particularly a character taking the time to attend to the needs and wants of a character who isn't accustomed to such consideration, and what hurt/comfort kink do you speak of, I see no such thing here.
55. Crises of faith.
56. Poetry as a part of the story. Bonus points if the characters write poetry and the reader actually gets to read it. With the obvious caveat that the poetry should be at least a little bit good.
57. Tragedy. Fatal flaws and inevitable failure and irony all over the place.
58. Stories where success is not a given. Stories where the potential for failure is always there, and where there's always the sense that the characters are walking a tightrope from which they could so easily fall. Whether they succeed or fail in the end doesn't really matter, in this situation; I just like being convinced that the game really could have gone either way.
59. The sea.
60. Vast, sweeping epics, huge in scope.
61. Close, intense, claustrophobic stories about individuals.
62. Some combination of 60 and 61. Yes, I think they can be combined, and I think the contrast in such a story would be gorgeous. (Hi there, point 68!)
63. Decay. Societies on the brink of collapse; buildings falling into ruin; strictly-enforced moral standards crumbling into glorious dissolution. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.
64. Pathetic fallacy.
65. Alternately, incongruous weather. A peaceful, beautiful spring dawn heralds the epic battle for the fate of the kingdom, or drizzling, neither-here-nor-there sort of rain when the protagonists confess their desperate and undying love.
66. Affectionate scritching.
67. Zombies. Allegorical zombies. (Cf. point 63.)
68. Contrast and dissonance.
69. The realisation of error. A character comes to understand that they've screwed up, spectacularly and catastrophically, and have to at least try to correct their mistake.
70. Forgiveness. Characters who can forgive.
71. Self-sabotage. Characters who actively work against their own happiness.
72. Obsession. Fixation. Whether they're focused on a goal or a person or an ideal, I love people who fixate. The slightly-mad, frighteningly-passionate obsessive is one of my favourite character types; thinking about it now, I've only ever written one story that doesn't feature a character like this.
73. Early mornings; when a character wakes up early and feels all alone in the world.
74. Late nights alone.
75. Precipitous, dizzying, near-unbearable happiness, that sets a character alight from the inside. The kind of ecstasy (nonsexual, I feel I should add!) that makes people want to sing or write poetry or take flight.
76. Dancing. Awkward dancing, for preference.
77. The repressed, tightly-controlled character completely losing it.
78. Not talking about it.
79. Awkwardly trying to talk about it.
80. Airports, or other transportational hubs in which lots of journeys and lives briefly tangle up in one another before separating out once again.
81. Self-reliance that doesn't quite work.
82. Grand, stupid gestures.
83. Control freaks who like to submit.
84. Characters who manage to be sympathetic despite, or even because of, doing mad, awful things. (Vriska Serket, I am looking right at you.)
85. People compelled to do terrible things to survive. (And again!)
86. Academics and scholars.
87. Consistent, well-thought-out systems of magic. A little handwaving is more than acceptable, but I do like my magical-types to practice an art that makes sense.
88. The power of words. Magic that runs on the written word; poetry that answers the riddle that's central to the plot; a speech that turns the tide of a battle at the last.
89. Physical restraint. Pretty much in any context, but particularly in a 100% consensual, loving BDSM relationship.
90. Stupid, screwed-up kids who are permitted to grow up.
91. Choking and breathplay.
92. Stories about recovery and healing. Stories set after the grand adventure is over, wherein Our Heroes have to pick their lives up where they left off and try to adapt to something like normality again.
93. Impossible love. How characters react to loving someone who will never love them back; how that love endures, or doesn't endure, or changes with time and without reciprocation.
94. Mistakes that aren't regrets.
95. Mutual hate plus mutual need.
96. Stories where the end of the world isn't the end of the world. Stories about wonderful things that have their time and end, and about the characters who walk away from the dying light with memories, with joy for the past, and with hope for the future.
97. Syndeton. Also asyndeton. Honestly, both make me equally happy.
98. The moment of connection -- where two characters stumble onto a topic of conversation that lights them both up, or meet one another's eyes after hearing an awful joke and smile, or quietly trade stories over a campfire and realise how much they have in common. People discovering other people, reaching out of themselves, and making friends.
99. "I love you." "I love you, too."
100. Carrying on.
101. Hope.