Café Wednesday: Isa
Interviewing the dictator behind fluffy-seme
Wednesdays here on Ergofiction have been rechristened to Café Wednesdays, a place to get the inside scoop straight from the horse’s mouth, interviewing webfictioneers of all shapes and sizes!
Yes, that’s right: the Caf has returned, and in a spangly new home no less. (For the uninitiated, it used to be on my blog, and you can see a round up of previous interviews here.)
Starting off the new year is Isa, a webfiction author as well as the creater of fluffy-seme, a community-oriented site. Isa is a staunch supporter of building fan communities, and has special insight into the matter.
Tea? Check. Time for the interview.
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AMH: The internet has made author-reader interaction far easier than it ever was before. What do you think is one strength and one weakness of this?
Isa: In my experience, good storytelling requires an intimate understanding of your readers’ thinking. Not just what they like, but what they expect from the story and how they interpret certain things. Then as an author you choose between pandering to those expectations or flipping them on their heads for twists and turns. The interaction the internet makes possible helps writers do that more efficiently and as a result creates better stories.
As for weaknesses, culturally we’ve been conditioned to think—both as fans and creatives—that we should be protective of our work. My work belongs to ME and I should have the ultimate say. Good author-reader interaction requires the author give up that sense of entitlement and cultivate an environment where the reader understands that the author will not come after her with a pick-ax for writing smutty incest fanfic (…for example ^O^). It’s a delicate balance.
When I talk as a publisher about recruiting writers, a lot of people assume I’m looking for the best writers with the best stories. That’s not true at all, what I’m looking for first are people with the right attitude. You can be the best writer in the world, but if you’re a total jackass to your fans the kind of interaction the internet makes possible will only be a detriment to your work.
AMH: You say authors need the right attitude, but what about fans? In your opinion, what makes an awesome fan?
Isa: Fearlessness. Any author that can’t respect reinterpretation of her work isn’t worth being a fan of, but still it’s a very scary thing to know that the creator is watching you as you scribble out your homoerotic fantasies (again, just an example) … yet I know very few creators who aren’t thrilled and fascinated by the stuff their fans produce when they get creative.
As a writer I want people to tell me when they hate things. It helps me plot out how the story should continue, whether what I’m trying to say is being communicated clearly or not. But this too takes fearlessness.
AMH: And how does fluffy-seme encourage this fearlessness?
Isa: Well one of the things we’ve learned and are working hard to better implement is that if you want fans to cross over and start actively playing with the material, you need to give them as many different options to approach the story as possible. I’m not talking about different ebook formats or adding RSS feeds. I’m talking about presenting the characters in multiple versions of the same story with different tones and different interaction options. So for f-s stories you have the main story, you have a kind of bonus-story universe, you have the character blog universe (same characters, mini crack filled adventures off canon), then you have potentially other comic based or game based verses as well. When each of these has a slightly different tone it creates natural holes for fans to fill in.
Also, it’s worth mentioning that just as you can’t control how a reader interprets what you write, you can’t control how a reader wants to interact with the content. Some loyal readers will reply to story chapters every week with feedback, some will never say a word about the official material but will religiously comment on the character blogs (mostly to heckle the characters), and some won’t do either but will jump at the chance to throw your characters into their 3rd party video games (no joke, Martin Ostrowski apparently owned the ice playing in the playoffs for the Boston Bruins in EA’s NHL 09)
But the real trick, I think, is integrating all of these options into one online experience. I’m not the only webfic author whose characters have blogs (or Twitter accounts for that matter) this isn’t a revolutionary idea, but too many webfic sites are designed to display the story alone, any additional content is sort of lost in the side bar. When you have that additional content to show, I feel like the side bar treatment does your whole project a disservice and cuts potential fan interaction off at the knees. It clearly suggests that there is only ONE acceptable version of the story and everything else is just secondary, and with that kind of presentation how do you then convince people to take the risk and write a derivative version that might piss you off right under your nose?
With this f-s is better than most, but I think we can be even better than that: more options and a tighter integration with the main site so that when fans come into a story they come into a full dynamic world, not just a novel released in parts.
AMH: Can you give us two examples of authors who have cultivated this type of dynamic, creative community around their works?
Isa: No :) The creative communities are born all the time, but typically not under the author’s cultivation. In this sense what we’re trying to accomplish at fluffy-seme is completely against the grain. We want to break down a wall between the fans and the writer that has simply always been in publishing. Who could forget the hilarity that exploded over Twitter when Inglourious Basterds fans were HORRIFIED to find out that Tarantino was reading their fanfiction and seriously discussing it with various cast members? But why should creators and fans hide from each other all the time?
Even authors who are pro-fan creativity find their efforts to nurture their communities hampered by various forces inside and out. Marion Zimmer Bradley allegedly got sued by one of her fanfic writing fans. Both J.K Rowling and Stephenie Meyers (very pro-fan community) have had ubiquitous cease-and-desist letters in their name handed out by corporate lawyers for movie studios.
These problems bleed into the webfiction side because those webfic writers who become really successful are bound to get picked up by traditional publishing. Cassandra Clare is a good example I think. She built up an extremely dynamic community of followers through her online releases, then bolted for traditional publishing with traditional publishing rules. Now her fan community looks exactly the same as any other writer’s. The fact that she was originally publishing in installments online is lost.
AMH: What do you think of our initial attempts at creating an interactive, creative webfiction community (e.g. with our Scavenger Hunt)? Any advice?
Isa: I think Ergofiction is definitely on the right track. For blogs community interaction means comments because blogs express opinions and the natural response to opinions are more opinions. But fiction is not about opinions. As long as we try to cultivate our interaction primarily through comments we will fail, because the natural response to stories are more stories. I believe making the webfic a vibrant medium is all about encouraging creative play.
What seems like eons ago, Penny Arcade (before they were massively famous) started this project called The Bench where you got a character, a bench and a squirrel and were encouraged to draw a three panel strip of just about whatever your twisted mind could come up and post it to the site. What happened is that very quickly people started working in characters from their own webcomics and inside jokes from video games, memes from the internet, etc, etc. The Bench became an odd little promotional tool for artists to introduce themselves to an audience and for the audience it was easy to explore the community and find new stuff because no matter how strange or hideously photoshopped the strip was you knew 1) it was self-contained at three panels 2) there were going to be those familiar images of Gabe, the bench and the squirrel. Any comics you didn’t get and didn’t arouse your interest you could just click right by.
I’d like to see Ergofiction grow into more of that. First because I am so awestruck by the amount of work you and Jan are willing to do that I’m a little scared for the day when we finally burn you out. But the second reason is that readers are not going to be attracted to essays about webfiction, they are going to be attracted to actual fiction. So I think it would serve the community well to promote ourselves through creative play. Some examples:
1) Building on The Bench model: establish two webfic characters and challenge webfic writers to write a short piece of flash fiction (word limits are your friends) using these characters in their own story world somehow.
2) Allow people to submit their characters to a massive webfic character database… except skip the boring stats like date of birth, background, personality… make the characters answer questions from the Proust questionnaire instead. What is Silver from Above Ground’s favorite qualities in a man? Who are his favorite painters and composers? I’m a firm believer in the power of ridiculousness :)
Then take that database and produce community challenges. Randomly select two characters and a situation. Incentivize it by having a banner advertisement space up for grabs to whoever finishes the drabble first. Want to promote your website? Fine … the community demands 400 words on Nick Klien from Legion of Nothing and Shahin from Addergoole trying to pick a television program!
The advantage here is that it gives readers what they want– something to read– and also gives them a quick taste of different authors’ styles. When I write that 400 word drabble I’m not only promoting Legion of Nothing and Addergoole, I’m also promoting myself and my work because the people who like it are going to go, “Hey… where can I read more stuff from this Isa person?”
It also better primes the webfic community itself to accept what everyone is claiming they want. The dirty reality of creative communities is that the first thing people do is completely butcher characters you poured your heart into shaping and developing (it should be obvious now, but if it isn’t: the second thing they do is write porn). There are lots of authors who say they want community interaction when what they really want is lots of praise and attention, there’s a big difference between the two.
AMH: You’ve spoken a lot about fan creativity, but what about other forms of support? Does patronage factor into your business plans at all?
Isa: Not in ours no. I think patronage is an interesting idea, but ultimately I’m skeptical of its sustainability. That’s not to say that I think webfic should be 100% free, I just don’t really get the point of saying ‘this story is free … but hey if you want to pay for it, you can do that too’. Classic patrons the likes of the Medicis became patrons so they could show off what they were sponsoring to their social circles. They supported artists not so much because they liked their work but because by doing so they could one-up their rivals in the social hierarchy. Does webfiction have such leverage? No. Will it ever… I don’t know.
AMH: Now that we know what you think about it all, tell us: what’s the nicest thing a fan has ever done for you?
Isa: I’ve been writing and publishing stories online for about 12 years now. I’ve had people do some pretty wild stuff. Somebody once drew a three-four page comic based on one of my early pre fluffy-seme series, I get fanfiction and fanart from time to time (which I love), but the coolest is when people make stuff. I had someone make me basically a piggy bank decorated with characters I was writing and adorable cartoons. That was awesome. :D
AMH: Awesome indeed! Thanks for speaking with us. Any last words of wisdom?
Isa: When trying to build up your creative community, remember to be patient. At first it will feel like no one is even the slightest bit interested in what you’re doing. You will feel as if you look completely ridiculous and surrounded by better authors laughing at your silly attempts, but stay strong and keep going. It takes time to first build an audience, then to build up a relationship between the audience and the work intense enough for people to want to steal your characters and run off with them.
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There you have it: be fearless, and make your favorite author happy.
To learn a little more about fluffy-seme, check out this video, which describes their business model.
Don’t forget to head on over to fluffy-seme, where you’ll find several great webfiction serials to read.
Any questions for Isa? Leave them in a comment below.