Featured Fic Author Interview with Amy Raine

[ljwrites]

Here follows the author interview with amyraine. See also her Featured Fic post. There's some swearing (bad Amy!), which I decided not to censor because I don't think it's a big deal.

You'll have to speak to my attorney.
- Amy Raine

How did you discover the Avatar: The Last Airbender fandom, and what do you like about it? What other fandoms are you interested in/active in?

I’m going to jump back and forth a little bit between the two questions, if you don’t mind.

My first ever fandom was Sailor Moon. This was in the days where Yahoo was a lot bigger and more influential, Google was still just a search engine, and I didn’t know the term “fandom”. I roleplayed with a small group of people in what used to be called Yahoo! Clubs, one of whom became my RL best friend and I still hang out with her today.

Then I got into LARPing White Wolf games (the most popular of which is Vampire the Masquerade, but I’ve done others too) and that satisfied my need to play pretend, so I didn’t do the online stuff anymore.

Fast forward to after the birth of my son. Having a young child means watching a LOT of cartoons. So I had seen some of the episodes of AtLA in reruns, but not all and not in order. Then I saw the movie when it came out, and that disappointment made me want to watch more of the show. Netflix to the rescue! But it wasn’t until some months later that I got bit by the fanfic bug, and that’s what drew me in.

This fandom experience is a lot different from my first one. I have not done any roleplaying for AtLA, and I’m not sure I want to. That’s so bizarre for me to admit because roleplaying one thing or another has been such a big part of my life for so long.

Right now the only other fandom I’ve participated in is New Thundercats, and I haven’t really done much there except leave a comment or two in the LJ comm. There was a very short period right after reading Order of the Phoenix that I wrote a couple Harry Potter fics, but my involvement in that fandom was so brief and barely there that I don’t really count it. I lurk in some Doctor Who comms but haven’t had anything to offer there (yet). I have a list of books and shows I like in the top entry of my journal, but my participation is minimal to nonexistent with those.

For anyone who’s curious, my favorite senshi and the ones I roleplayed the most were Saturn and Pluto.

Could you describe your writing process? How do you get ideas, and how does an idea become a finished story?

Often I’ll be doing something innocuous like brushing my teeth or driving to the store and a snippet of dialogue or a flash of a scene will just pop into my head. It’s usually the middle or the end of the story, but not always.

For example, in a recent fic I wrote called Worst Traitor of Them All, (spoilers for the Promise) I pictured a scene where Smellerbee spat on Kori Morishita and called her a traitor. The rest of the story was me filling in how she got into that situation and how she managed to escape.

You Don’t Stop Running, on the other hand, started with the beginning scene of Azula in Toph’s rock tent musing on how she got there with dark, detached amusement, and the rest just seemed to flow from that. That story wrote itself in something like five days. I was a woman obsessed. It could really have used a beta but I was on a deadline.

My current fic in progress, “The Only Truth That Sticks,” actually had two scenes that came into my head at once and sparked my desire to write. But I can’t say anymore than that. :)

In several stories (Touch the Sky, Aurora Australis, The Leaden Voice) you've used what I consider one of the more difficult points of view in this fandom, Toph's. Did you find her point of view limiting, or did it come easily to you? What was it like working from inside the head of a character who senses the world without visual input?

I don’t find Toph’s voice difficult, mainly because I’m also a blunt, tell-it-as-it-is kind of person. I just channel my inner half-loud, half-insecure twelve year old and use that. I do have one difficulty with her; I’ve been criticized in reviews for “Prisons of Choice” for my choice of nicknames. (I had her refer to Mai as “Blades”, which I thought was better than the “Knives” I’ve seen elsewhere but which was universally panned as ‘too weak’). I think my problem is that other ones I come up with aren’t appropriate for general audiences. Coming up with a quintessential Toph nickname for other characters is hard.

The lack of visual input, on the other hand, takes a concentrated effort to remember and write accurately. I’ve had to go back and rewrite passages that talked about her as if she were a seeing person. I try to remember to focus on touch and sound when writing from her point of view, and when writing from others’ POV to insert the occasional description of how she stands perfectly still and doesn’t move her head when addressing people, just like in the show. The quirk about Toph is that she can see…sort of. To properly describe how she senses the world I talk about vibrations and resonances giving her shapes and movement, but not color or details that exist only in 2 dimensions.

Yet another point I didn't really get to in the feature post was the descriptive aspects of your writing. There are some that I can remember off the top of my head--sunlight painting a bright line on a body, or the huge hard ball of a pregnant belly. How do you come up with these images?

I’m a very visual person. I used to draw a lot as a kid, and I took a couple of art classes. Honestly, I was average at best, though I do pride myself on a fairly good sense of proportion for figures. I kind of lost the drive to continue as the years went on. While I’d like to get back into it since I have lots of ideas, I had a long hard talk with myself where I said, you kinda have to pick something to be good at and to work on being even better at, and writing was the obvious choice.

But I took some of those art lessons about drawing just what I see and applied them to text. I get the image in my head of the scene I’m writing, and then I just describe what I see in my mind’s eye. That can get me into trouble though, if I get too bogged down in detail. The trick is to pick one or two things that pop and leave the rest to the reader’s imagination.

Most of the stories you've published are short stories, and I have it on good authority (yours) that writing Mirror the Sun was a stressful experience for you. Why was that, and how was it different from writing short stories or even a story like The Ground on Which I Stand, which was also longer than your other stories?

Oh boy. Where to begin.

It wasn’t just the length. I went far above and beyond the requirements for length when writing it. I have more trouble restricting myself to the 500 word count in the Avatar 500 community challenges than I do blathering on and on and on (your criticism about pages of description where nothing really happens is an apt one). But whether one is writing 500 words or 500,000 words, the requirement is the same: butt in chair, spend the time writing. I have a husband and two young children, real life worries and daily duties. I can’t spend more than a couple of hours writing a day— and those are usually broken up into ten to fifteen minute sections, the first two or three minutes of which is spent trying to get back into the groove I was in.

This was a small slice of the pie. I’d say the next biggest slice was the problem was taking someone else’s half-thought out idea based on a cockamamie webcomic and making it not suck. (That’s not a criticism of the original prompt givers, who are awesome, just an observation that there is a whole lot of difference between tossing around ideas and actually working out the kinks). So that took up a huge chunk of time and effort.

And then I went through what any writer who cares about their craft and has a good editor goes through—extensive rewrites. I had to wipe away the tears, set my jaw and sacrifice pages of previously done work, replacing them with all new material that was hopefully tighter and better. I had to do this with ‘Ground’, but not to the same extent, maybe because it was all mine?

But the biggest issue I faced was having to do all this on a deadline, because it was for a big bang. Were that not the case, the stress levels would have been much lower…on the other hand, I might not have gotten as much done as I did without a deadline looming over my head.

Fanfic is a funny thing. You can toss out half baked shit and the worst you might get is a few bad reviews. (Often, people toss out half-baked shit and get good reviews…seriously, what is that about? Hell, that happens for professional, original stuff and what is that even about??? But that is a rant for another time and place.) A person who really cares and tries can put out something that gets positive attention, but it can feel sometimes like the amount of work is far greater than the rewards, which are mostly intangible and definitely limited to the size of the audience—imagine what it’s like in tiny fandoms!

I swear I’m getting around to answering your question. LOL. Basically, when a short thing that’s not betaed can get a ton of attention, recs and reviews, but something long and hard to write falls between the cracks, it’s like, why bother with long fics at all when a short one can be churned out in an hour and still get some notice?

I actually have an answer to that question. :) The reason to write a long fic, even though it takes so much time and effort and runs the risk of being ignored, is that there is an immense amount of satisfaction that comes from finishing something that took you months to write. Short fiction doesn’t supply that same kind of satisfaction. Plus, knowing you did it once can give you the push to do it again. (Of course, I didn’t finish MtS, but let’s not quibble about the details.) I also feel that I’ve gotten a little taste of what writing an original novel must be like. A good original novel anyway. Though good doesn’t always mean popular…and I could rant about that forever but I’ve rambled on enough.

I think after all is said and done short fiction and long fiction, fan- or otherwise, are different styles that accomplish different goals and require different skills. It doesn’t hurt to practice both.

Do you ever have any difficulty writing the cultural aspects of the world, such as extra research or different cultural expectations?

Picking names for OCs frequently sends me to Google. I’ve also explored the right way to make tea, proper seating at banquets held by Chinese emperors, names and descriptions for clothing and fabrics, and a little bit of history. :)

But for the most part, I stick with what the show already provides, referring to screenshots, transcripts, and the Avatar Wiki. I don’t like to make assumptions beyond what’s already there in terms of politics, culture, expectations, titles, names for things, whatever. AtLA may be a world based on Asian cultures, but it’s still a fantasy realm with its own internal logic and sense. (You once referred to it as ‘Western people in Asian drag’.) So I try to be respectful of the influence, but when it comes to language and terminology that I have to invent because the show didn’t say, I’ll go with an appropriate English word or phrase.

One last note, the AtLA annotated tumblr is the best source ever for the meanings of Asian elements in the show that a Western audience wouldn’t be familiar with. I highly recommend it.

So you've been a naughty girl. Specifically you've written two stories, The Soldier in the Iceberg and The Merchandise, which have flipped around the moral axis of the ATLA universe. What's your defense, young lady? Speak quickly!

You’ll have to speak to my attorney. Hehe.

Seriously though, there’s nothing really special going on here. I was participating in the atlaland LJ challenge community which put forth a challenge to write a mirrorverse fic, so I wrote ‘Soldier’. At the same time I was also participating in the Avatar 500 comm, and I had an idea for one of their prompts set in that same universe.

I think it would all fall apart if I tried to make it into a long fic because I didn’t think the details through that well. But it was fun to think about: the Avatar as a force for conquest and domination, the Water Tribes as ruthless pirates, the Earth Kingdom as a sprawling empire ruled by a competent tyrant, and the Fire Nation as a small kingdom headed by a man trying to preserve his culture in the face of oppression. I never quite ironed out how Zuko got his scar, I think I handwaved it as a training accident. Weak, I know.

This was something I didn't really explore in the profile post because it was included in the larger point (about the inner lives of characters) and that post was already too damn long, but I find it intriguing how your stories explore women's lives so insightfully and poignantly. Mirror the Sun, for instance, reads as a very feminist story about a young woman struggling to find her place, and was a refreshing antidote to the inherent sexism of the plot that gave you the idea. Prisons of Choice caught my eye because the rich girl problems on the surface expanded into the larger question about women's roles. And Journey of a Thousand Miles, of course, deals with the most epic feat of women's lib from the original show. You do the same for male characters, particularly Tenzin in The Wind in the Sail, but it seems that more women deal with issues of alienation, identity, and meaning in your stories than men.

Does this reflect your belief about the challenges women face, whether in the ATLA world or ours? Do feminist issues affect you, interest you as a writer?

The short answer is yes, but I’m finding it difficult to explain why. I’m not about just having a lot of women in my stories, or just making them badass. Both of those are great but they’re not enough on their own.

I took a class on James Joyce in college, whose big thing was spinning complex and bizarre tales based on the place he lived in and the people he knew. “Write what you know.” But that doesn’t always mean “set everything in the town you grew up in”. It’s about finding the commonalities between your experiences and feelings and those of the characters, and using them in your writing. Since being female is what I know, I write about that. To elaborate upon the examples you offered: I sometimes feels trapped by my role, so I drew upon that to write a Mai that feels trapped in hers. I’ve run away from bad relationships into the scary unknown, so I used that in writing Kanna as she fled the North Pole. I’m still struggling to find my place in the world, so I used that to write Azula’s identity crisis.

Also, the women are more ripe with story potential since the show focused on the two male leads. I mean, what else is there to say about Zuko and Aang that hasn’t already been said?

I think one could easily write a feminist story about a woman who stayed within traditional gender roles. It isn’t always about having the girl kick a few butts. It’s about having a female character show agency, decisiveness, and heroic traits no matter what role she happens to play. That’s not just feminism, that’s good writing. Let’s take good ol’ Ursa. Based on what little we know, she’s not really much of a fighter, but she acts decisively, murdering her father in law to save the life of her son. I find her to have more agency and purpose than Ozai himself, who is supposed to be the big bad. Think about it: who got him the throne? Ursa. Who got him Ba Sing Se? Azula. Who came up with the plan to annihilate the EK? Azula. Other than his one horrific act of abuse toward Zuko, the man did dick squat. I find Ozai to be the most boring villian in the history of boring villians, ever. But now I’m going off on a tangent…

The flip side is true too; just because a female throws a punch doesn’t make the work feminist, not if said female ends up being nothing but either a foil or a prize for the male characters.

In the end I just want to write interesting stories about interesting people. So far I’ve found the women more interesting, but that could change.

You've made the move from the venerable FanFiction.Net to Archive of Our Own, a more recent archive. How do you find the experiences on these two sites different or similar, and do you have a preference?

A note for your readers: I have reposted some stories on Fanfiction.net again, but only the ones I find most palatable to an audience with a significant population of people under 18.

This is not to say that everyone who uses FFN is a teenager and/or juvenile and/or immature because that’s certainly not true, nor is it to say that Archive of Our Own (hereby referred to as AO3) is adults only because it isn’t - the age limit to join is the same, I think. But it seems that I find more younger people at FFN than at AO3. I could speculate all day long as to why this is: FFN is easier to find in an internet search so people end up their first; FFN’s been around longer; they don’t allow explicit fics so their content would be on average skewed away from an adult audience (though people slip under the radar all the time); and it’s open to anyone with an email address. AO3, on the other hand, is invitation only (though it’s not hard to get an invitation; one still has to sign up and then wait for it to come); and at least in my experience one doesn’t hear about the Archive until one has floated around in fandom circles for a while—during which time one gets older. Also, AO3 permits explicit content. A teenager can read and post such content, but a good number don’t want to. Not all of them are in it for the porn.

Again, I’m speculating and I lack good stats to back me up. But the age thing matters because I’m writing about characters in a children’s show, which means children might read and comment on my fic. The Archive makes me feel a little better about this because at least I can throw warnings all over the more violent/explicit stuff. This might not cover my butt legally, but I can at least say I warned for content. So that’s why I made AO3 my main headquarters and I prefer reading and posting fic there.

Other reasons I prefer AO3: I can just copy paste into their Rich Text editor and hit Post, whereas FFN makes you go through several steps to publish a story. Heaven forbid I have to make an edit after publishing! The importing from another URL feature is a bonus. Another reason I like it is that on FFN I have to click to my profile and then to a separate reviews page in order to see feedback from folks on a story, but on AO3 the comments are right there under the story. I also love the Kudos feature - in some ways I like it even better than comments!

Now for the flip side: I don’t know if AO3 has a reputation for having better fic overall, but if it does, I wouldn’t agree with it. Since FFN is so well known and archives so much fic, it tends to have the worst of the worst…but it also has the best of the best and everything in between. Because AO3 is just so much smaller it tends more toward the middle of the bell curve, in my humble opinion. Also, some might be put off by the academic (read: snooty and elitist - not my opinion but I’ve seen this criticism elsewhere) aims of the Organization for Transformative Works, which owns the AO3. As someone who was once a wannabe academic and is still a solid nerd, I like that part, but it’s not for everyone.