Wish Fulfillment

I wonder how many writers put stuff in their novels that they wish had happened or wish would happen in their lives.  JK Rowling has admitted that Harry probably should’ve ended up with Hermione instead of Ron but that the Hermione/Ron relationship was a form of wish fulfillment(likely someone from Rowling’s past who she had a crush on at some point).

It’s easy to do – since we’re creating new worlds out of whole cloth, we can re-create our own lives(after all, who among us hasn’t written the story’s hero to be a version of themselves?).  In the past, I’ve written female characters that were thinly veiled women I had crushes on myself(yes, long before I was married or had even met my current wife).  I’ve also taken out grudges on people I disliked by making them a particularly odious villain or a person getting the comeuppance I’d wished my real-life antagonist would’ve gotten.

Fact is that our writing reflects a type of fantasy about ourselves anyway.  No, I don’t actually hunt vampires or try to attack Heaven to trap and kill God, but so much of what we write is how we imagine our reactions to these kinds of events.  And if we’re already in said fantasy, why not include some personally satisfying elements, even if they’re known only to us?  There are tons of authors I’d like to ask this, from Stephen King(“Why did Jack Torrance want to spend a bleak winter writing a play?”) to Tad Williamson(“So who exactly was the demon Casamira, the Countess of Cold Hands, based on?”).  However, I suspect that were I to even get a chance to ask, I doubt I’d get a straight answer.  After all, few of us so willingly divulge our deepest fantasies to strangers.  We may be willing to write them into a story, but we aren’t going to cop to them or lay out their true meaning.