Café Wednesday: Eddy Webb
How an author can make the most of his audience.
It is sometimes said that every person has a book in them. But how many of those books come with audio, weekly polls, author notes, and secret agent missions?
Last issue’s guest was Isa, who spoke about the importance of fan fearlessness, and of author-reader interaction, in the context of her webfiction hosting site fluffy-seme.
This week, as a prelude to Friday’s post on interactive stories, we’ve called in Eddy Webb, the author of Whitechapel, and an all-round brave and commendable soul for relying on reader polls to help shape his story. That’s him there. →
Did you know I used to live right by Whitechapel? What? You don’t care? You want to get to the interview because Eddy looks far more interesting than me? Fine! Be that way.
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AMH: You write a serialized horror novella called Whitechapel. Can you tell our readers what the story’s about?
EW: Essentially, it’s about a man who wakes up in a padded cell with amnesia and the ability to kill with his mind. Over the past eleven episodes it’s evolved a bit into a mystery into the main character’s origins, but there’s more personal horror to come in later episodes (especially after a big reveal in episode ten — no spoilers!).
AMH: What makes Whitechapel stand out is that it is reader-directed. Where did you get the idea from, and can you tell us how it works?
EW: The mechanic is pretty simple — I write and record each episode, and post it on my blog and to a podcast feed. At the end of the episode, there’s a poll for readers to vote on during the course of a week. After a week, I use the most popular option to inform the writing of the next episode.
The idea’s actually been kicking around in my head for some time. I’ve always been fascinated with interactive fiction since I was a kid, everything from role-playing games to Choose Your Own Adventure books to text adventures. One day I realized that not only is the technology available to do a new kind of interactive story on the Internet, but it was relatively cheap to put together. I decided to give it a try just to see if anyone would follow along, and suddenly it’s six months later and I’m nearly halfway through the story.
AMH: How much influence does reader voting have? Do you have a loose plot already outlined, or do the polls really shape the direction of the story?
EW: I do have a very, very loose plot, because the story needs some cohesion — it’s too easy for a purely reader-directed story to go off the rails, and I wanted to make sure I had a roadmap to assure that things were continuing to move forward. But a lot of plot developments, down to the core premise for the main character’s antagonists, came directly from reader polls (and, to a less extent, from the reader commentary on each episode). Really, my plot consists of a few words each episode, like “The hero escapes” or “The hero gets help,” but how that plot is getting realized is very much a collaboration between me and my readers.
AMH: So you see webfiction as a collaborative medium, rather than a solitary affair? Do you ever worry about losing your own voice and vision?
EW: I see that it CAN be a collaborative medium, more so than traditional publishing models. The Internet, and the Internet culture of commenting and voting, is uniquely positioned to help me tell a story with a wider audience, but that doesn’t mean that every story SHOULD be told collaboratively, or through the same methods of collaboration as polls and comments. Sometimes the artist has to hold firm and say “No, this is the direction I want to take my art in.”
I admit at first I was a little worried that I wouldn’t be able to tell me story the way I wanted to when I started, but I still have a lot of power over the story. I get to interpret the choices in whatever way makes the most sense, and ultimately I decide what choices I put before the audience. I do try to make them meaningful choices, but if there’s a direction I don’t want the story to go in, I simply don’t offer that option up for consideration. And sometimes, the audience votes for the character to do something, but he fails at it, or the choice they voted for has unforeseen consequences.
AMH: You’ve also been harnessing your audience in other ways. Can you tell us about your Agents of Whitechapel, and the types of missions you set for them?
EW: Early on, I had a lot of people offering to promote the story, but their efforts were all over the map — one person would post a review on iTunes, another would post a link in their blog, and so on. I decided to come up with a way that I could help direct people’s efforts toward common promotional goals, if they so desire. Stealing an idea from J.C. Hutchins, I decided to theme the challenges around something related to the story, so I came up with the Agents of Whitechapel. I’ve only done it a couple of times so far, but each time I’ve been floored with the response.
AMH: Fan response really can make an author’s day. On that note, what is the nicest thing a fan has ever done for you?
EW: That’s tough to say — there’s been a lot of cool things happening — but I think the nicest thing so far is one fan who has offered to translate my fiction into French, and another fan offering to translate it into Spanish. I simply never thought this would be interesting enough to enough people that translation would be even an option, and I’m just floored that it’s even being considered twice!
AMH: If it does get translated, you’ll be quite the multimediac (is that a word?) since you also podcast Whitechapel. Speaking of, how do podcasts compare to writing? Any strengths or weaknesses of the format?
EW: It’s been very challenging, but in a good way. I started off just writing whatever and then trying to podcast it, but over time I’m finding that I’m slanting my writing a little bit to suit the podcast format. For example, I originally had a specific vision for my character of Mister Rich, but when David Bounds (the actor who voiced him on the podcast) started playing the role on the podcast, I found I was writing the character more to the pattern and cadence of David’s voice instead of what was originally in my head — his performance was far superior to what I had in mind. On the other hand, I’ve found that sometimes I write something that looks good, but it forces me to learn something new about the podcast technology to make it work. I’ve been using musical strings to reflect things like dreams and section breaks, but it took me a bit at first to think of ways to reflect what was on the page in the audio.
AMH: Someone as productive as you must have thousands of ideas. Any other projects in the pipeline?
EW: Well, my work at White Wolf/CCP keeps me plenty busy, but on the side I do submit to a few fiction anthologies. One that’s been officially announced is “Close Encounters of the Urban Kind,” in which I contributed a short story about a private detective on the trail of a song that kills people. It’s scheduled for release in late spring 2010, so I hope people will check it out!
AMH: Let’s finish off with a teaser. What’s your favorite sentence from Whitechapel?
EW: There are a lot, but the one I like right now comes from the latest episode (11 as of this writing):
“Just a mute mystery woman and a psychic serial killer doped up on pain meds out for a casual drive in the Cincinnati snow.”
AMH: How mysterious. Well, that’s all from me. Any last words?
EW: There’s still plenty of room left in this story, so I hope people who read this interview go and check out Whitechapel at whitechapelproject.com!
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Well, what are you waiting for? Go check it out!
Any questions for Eddy? Leave them in a comment below.
Twitter-ers may be interested in following the official associated account, @whitechapelproj, or Eddy’s personal one: @eddyfate.
And if you found this post intriguing, don’t forget to check back on Friday, for Jan’s post on interactive fiction!