Ultimate Fantasy

I am good at fantasising. All right, I’ll say it: I’m really good. Growing up I spent way more time arsing about inside my own head (that sounds horrible) than I did in the real world. I thought I might leave behind this wistful-sighing-while-staring-out-the-window-and-wearing-a-glazed-expression-and-dreaming-of-outrageously-cheesy-and-far-fetched-love-stories in the annals of my pre-teen weirdness, but I haven’t. And this is helpful, right? Because where would an author be without fantasies? Where would a bonk-author be without LOVE and SEX fantasies? Books are great big fantasies, they’re fantasies all written down. The nice thing about this is that you can share them with other people.

It’s not the same as daydreaming. Daydreaming doesn’t require concentration, but a really good fantasy does. It started with my girlhood crushes, of which there were many, oh yes there were many, and each one was the absolute be all and end all and surely I’d curl up in a ball and die if I never got to hold their hand or kiss them… Beyond that, I didn’t think too much about what I’d do. I was an innocent then. Early fantasies were about meeting and falling in love and that’s kind of where it ended. Occasionally he might stick a hand under my T-shirt (in my fantasy I was ‘of age’, of course, and bore a suspicious resemblance to Stephanie Zanoni out of Grease 2) but then it was a quick skip-to-the-end dot-dot-dot – all very chaste.

Anyway. Jared Leto, Mark Owen, Joey Joe McIntyre, River Phoenix, Michael J Fox (Will I ever meet a man like Michael J Fox? I lamented to my sister while lying on the spare room bed), Kevin Costner (yikes! for five minutes in Prince of Thieves), Eddie Furlong, Vanilla Ice… OK, that last one is especially bad, but I was eight. Once, I fantasised that Vanilla rescued me from the top of the water tower in our village – the glamour! – and his spiky hair with its little rat-tail braid advanced like a bloody soldier into battle as bravely he scaled the rust-caked ladder to secure my safe return… These were always troublesome fantasises because I never liked calling him ‘Vanilla’. It was silly. You can’t have a boyfriend called ‘Vanilla’.

I have just eaten four Bourbons in a row while thinking about this.

I used to like nothing more than to get into bed with my cranky old Walkman, press play, close my eyes, and imagine I was entering another world. These fantasies were always intricately drawn. It might be an elaboration on a movie I’d seen them in, or maybe I met my crush in real life and it was love at first sight… Whatever the premise, what I enjoyed most was getting a detail just right about someone, so it felt REAL. When I’m writing today, I get a thrill from the same.

My sister put together a ‘Love Compilation’, featuring Maria McKee ‘Show Me Heaven’ and ‘Move Closer’ by Phyllis Nelson. I think this was around the time of my Keanu obsession because I was fantasising nightly about being a surfer in Point Break (anyone who knows me knows this is a hilarious proposition). The edge got lost slightly when the Walkman batteries started running down and the whole affair was tinged by a groaning slo-mo carousel of whatever it was I was listening to and made it more horror movie than Princess Bride. Sometimes I’d have to fast forward the fantasy to make way for this, because GET TO THE HEA I MUST! It’s a finely honed art.

Nowadays I fantasise less about men I can’t have (er, I have to say that because I just got married, but in reality it totally still happens) than I do about book ideas. I fantasise A LOT about book ideas. Sometimes I’ll watch the whole book in my head like a film, a shortened version obviously, just like all the main bits and pieces, and then I’ll know I have something that works. All authors are master fantasisers – we have to be. I got to thinking about this recently because I just came back from a month in Argentina, where I fantasised basically the whole time. It was lovely. I looked out of aeroplanes and coaches, across the Pampas, over mountains, into the sky and the sea, and dreamed of new places and characters. I listened to albums and thought up stories and it was wonderful. Sometimes we need a break because when it’s rested our mind throws up all sorts of waking dreams, every one of which carries the seed of a story. Working a fantasy from this seed is the first step to writing a book.

But I won’t be putting Vanilla in my next novel, water tower or not.

Here is a present. You can thank me later.

Victoria x

 

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