Recent searches
Search options
Writers are taught not to write wish-fulfillment—it's too easy, boring, or low stakes. But that reasoning is wrong. It only seems that way because we've all already read thousands of wish-fulfillment stories about cis het able-bodied white males, so they're very... predictable.
For every other demographic?
Readers actively, desperately crave wish-fulfillment stories about themselves, because they rarely if ever see them.
What's more, wish-fulfillment stories about characters who aren’t part of the most dominant demographic often feel fresh & original, even to people outside their target demo, just because they're seen so infrequently.
So, if you aren’t seeing the kind of wish-fulfillment stories you want, go right ahead — write them to your heart's content. Just follow all the other rules you usually would for making your own stories good.
This revelation brought to you by the time I tried to explain the problem with wish-fulfillment stories on a panel at #Rainfurrest by coming up with an example, pulling things off the top of my head—
"uh, a unicorn... with a kitten... on a rocket to the moon..."
—and found myself staring at a room desperately eager to read the story I’d just conjured.