I was in elementary school when I first started “writing” stories—I would take the Hot Wheels toy cars I’d collected since I was a toddler, name them all after my friends, and then construct a narrative that used the whole house as a setting, usually an action-adventure story in which a group of us had to fight off evil villains and rescue treasures from enemy bases, a pastiche of Stars Wars and Indiana Jones (seriously, is there any writer who’s had a greater impact on young boys of my generation than George Lucas?). Invariably, I was the hero of these stories—the “coolest” car (whatever that meant at the time), who always saved the day, found the treasure, defeated the villain, etc. etc. Looking back, these early stories were obviously just childish wish fulfillment fantasies—everyone wants to be the hero of their group of friends, to feel they are somehow special, that in the narrative of the universe, they are the protagonist (this self-centeredness might be unhealthy in an adult, but in a child of six or seven, I’d argue it’s harmless, and even natural).
In high school, I continued to write, only now I’d spend years with multiple word documents and hand-written outlines instead of just a day with some toy cars—yet while the protagonists of these later stories were now much more heavily fictionalized and the stories themselves (somewhat) more sophisticated, the element of wish fulfillment didn’t go away. I wrote a science fiction novel (part of a planned but never completed trilogy) about a brother and sister who find themselves lost on the other side of the galaxy and have to find their way back to Earth, along the way battling aliens, saving planets, etc. etc. I wrote two novels in a fantasy trilogy set on a Lord of the Rings style continent where Elves, Dwarves, Wizards, and Humans (for some reason, I envisioned “Wizards” as a racial category equivalent to the others) battle for control over a magical scepter. I wrote a dystopian novel (again, part of a planned trilogy) in which a group of student revolutionaries tries to overthrow a corrupt oligarchy. And I wrote the first novel of a planned epic fantasy trilogy (apparently, I could only think in trilogies at the time) in which the children of a family of peasants find themselves involved in different ways in a complex Game of Thrones style dynastic conflict.
What all these stories had in common (besides the fact that they weren’t very well written) was that I used them as an opportunity to imagine myself as a different person in a different world—a boy traveling the universe in an Odyssey-like adventure, an Wizard who could do magic and fight with a sword, a student who was fighting to make the world a better place, a commoner rising in status due to intelligence and skill. Every one of these characters was a world away from my reality as a middle-class kid living in suburban California, destined for what felt like a safe, boring job as either a doctor or a lawyer, like all the other children of immigrants I knew. It was obvious now why I would spend hours after school writing 200+ page novels about these characters rather than about myself.
In college, I began to turn to literary fiction, abandoning science fiction and fantasy for stories about my high school life, about college students finding themselves, about young people struggling to challenge life’s expectations. At first, it might seem like I’d finally moved past writing fantasies of wish fulfillment—but looking back, it’s obvious that these narratives were simply wish fulfillment of a different kind. I no longer wanted to be a revolutionary in a dystopian world or a peasant who’d managed become an adviser to an Emperor, but I did wish for a clarity of purpose, a confidence in what I was doing, the will and resolve that my college student characters all possessed. Creating narratives about my high school life, meanwhile, reflected a wish for clarity of identity: it was a way of looking back at the complicated events that had brought me to where I was and selecting a key few that could explain aspects of myself—a single failed relationship, for example, that formed the basis of my romantic philosophy or a single experience at the mosque which helped me realize I no longer believed in God. Life rarely has these key, shaping moments, but stories often do—and I’ve realized now that the desire for clarity was a wish-fulfillment fantasy as powerful as the desire to be a hero in another world.
And so, ultimately, I don’t believe wish fulfillment can ever be fully separated from fiction writing—and nor do I believe it should be. Even my published novel, Portrait of of Sebastian Khan, which I wrote after college and rewrote once I’d finally properly learned how to actually write fiction, is in its own way a form of wish fulfillment: I created a character who is less moral and less kind than I am, but also more attractive, more intelligent (and also taller)—in many ways a more interesting version of myself. He may do bad things, but in their own way, the bad things are a fantasy too, a dark inversion of the wish fulfillment of childhood, the fantasy of pursuing a hedonistic and carefree life, and the fantasy of suffering for it and then becoming a better person. Even if my ultimate moral purpose was to critique my character’s behavior, it would be wrong to say that I didn’t enjoy indulging in his more wicked moments.
Therefore, let’s not look at wish fulfillment in fiction as a purely childish tendency that we must avoid if we want to become more mature writers—all fiction, the good and the bad, is in its own way a wish fulfillment fantasy. Romeo and Juliet might be a commentary on the folly of youthful love, but it’s also Shakespeare’s fantasy of indulging in such an all-consuming passion. Paradise Lost might be a moral tale about human frailty and divine power, but it’s also Milton’s fantasy about rebelling against God, like Satan. Frankenstein might be a cautionary narrative about the folly of scientific ambition, but it’s also Mary Shelley’s fantasy about having the power to create life. I could go on and on, describing every work of literature from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Infinite Jest, but you get the idea. And so, let’s recognize that all fiction inevitably has a component of wish fulfillment, the same wish fulfillment that compelled many of us to first write stories when we were children. Once we understand this, we can harness our fantasies into something profound and insightful.