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Featured Fic Author Interview with amanda91
This is the author interview with Amanda, conducted via e-mail. Thanks for the interview, Amanda!
Zuko is, quite frankly, a stubborn little bitch. -amanda91
So I notice that almost everything you've uploaded so far is Avatar-related. What is it about the show that grabbed you so hard?
I think it's because it had been so long since I had read or watched anything that had been just so awesome. There were plenty of things I had read/watched that were good, but that didn't really make me want more in the sense of going on the internet and looking for meta and fanfic and other people. I participate in a few other fandoms, but not to this extent—I never really wanted a continuation of the canon until Avatar. It was engaging, funny, heartwarming, sad, scary, and made me think, and I was kind of obsessed as soon as I watched it. Plus I wanted something fun to do—it was my first year of college, I was feeling kind of overwhelmed and Avatar fanfic turned into the perfect outlet for my frustration.
Who are your favorite Avatar characters, and what draws you to them?
Zuko is probably my favorite, though everyone else is clamoring for second place for all different reasons. Zuko's character arc is incredible and it was also fun to see how the other characters grew and developed over the course of the show. Aang's development gets sadly overlooked a lot of the time, I think, just because he doesn't do something drastic like turning from a villain into a hero. In my opinion his journey is just as profound as Zuko's; it's awesome to see how he turned from a flightly, goofy kid into a responsible hero, all without damaging his sense of humor or his devotion to his beliefs. It's a coming-of-age story for all of the characters, and I really like that.
The characters that I prefer watching/writing, in order, are probably Zuko, Sokka, Aang, Toph, Katara. Even though I don't really prefer Katara-centric stories, I still appreciate her character development as well.
I also like wondering about characters who got like five minutes of screen time. What are they thinking about? How can I turn it into a story?
Your old Dragonriders of Pern story was written when you were sixteen. It seems you've been writing since then, and it shows in how far your writing has come. So how long have you been writing overall?
I've been making up stories since before I could write. The earliest I remember writing just for fun (as opposed to making up characters and drawing pictures of them, and making up their stories in my head) was probably when I was eight. Back then, and for most of my growing-up years, I was incredibly secretive about my writing and it's only in the past few years that I've been able to loosen up and let other people read what I've written. Fanfic in particular has been really awesome in that area.
What interested you about Zuko's three years at sea, the subject of your (dare I say) flagship story so far?
I'm a big fan of sea-stories. My fascination with them probably started with Redwall back when I was in middle school—the books set at sea seemed exponentially better than the land-stories, at least from my perspective, haha. The first Pirates of the Caribbean movie came out when I was 13-14-ish (I was a massive Orlando Bloom fangirl at the time, so that's why I went and saw it) and that definitely helped. What really made me interested in the genre, though, was the movie Master and Commander. (I haven't read any of the books yet, but I'm planning on it once I have a little more time and a library that stocks them.) Once I saw Avatar and got interested in fanfic, the idea just came to me: an Avatar sea-story about my favorite character. Where can you go wrong with that?
One of the things I love about your works, including Three Years at Sea (and even Dragon Girl!) is the attention to detail. What draws you to those seemingly mundane details? What do you find interesting about things like, for instance, the budgetary constraints of running a ship or keeping food vermin-free at sea?
Again, it's my interest in old naval stuff that makes it interesting for me. Since starting the fic, I've done a little light reading on ships and navies and everything from the 19th century to about WWI since that seems to be about the era the Fire Nation is set in judging by their industrialization. That, plus some of the tropes and conventions common to Napoleonic-era (and earlier) sea stories makes for an interesting combination, at least for me. I've always been interested in the ways people live their lives throughout history and I'm always a bit worried that no one's going to care about whatever intricate details I include because I just couldn't help myself, haha. Plus, I kind of wondered what Zuko was doing all that time he was at sea before he found Aang. Maybe the whole story was just an excuse to be a total dork about the minutiae about naval life.
Another aspect I like about your stories is the relationships. not only between Mai and Zuko but also between Iroh and Zuko and, for different reasons, Ozai and Zuko. Is this something you've put a lot of thought into? How would you say relationships help people change and grow?
Avatar would be nothing without the relationships. People go from mortal enemies to friends, and from friends to mortal enemies. They know that family is what you make it, so you see family relationships that are successful because the characters work at it. You see Azula building relationships on fear while the heroes build relationships on trust. I feel like I've learned a lot from watching these two-dimensional drawings, no joke. Because that was so fundamental to Avatar, I feel like writing fanfic without interesting relationships is kind of pointless. All of the characters' growth happened in part because of their relationships, no matter what they were or how healthy they were.
An interesting development in Three Years At Sea is Zuko's reading Monk Gyatso's journal and realizing he had been lied to about the Air Nomads ("The Journal of Monk Gyatso"). How do you reconcile this development with his determined hunt of the Avatar? And what implications do you envision later on?
I'm able to reconcile the revelation about the Air Nomads with his hunt because Zuko is, quite frankly, a stubborn little bitch. He's able to totally ignore the truth and replace it with something he finds more familiar/comforting until he's ready to deal with the reality of what happened. Additionally, he doesn't see the Avatar as one of the easygoing, friendly monks that he read about, somehow he's able to separate them entirely, the same way he's able to separate “The Avatar” from Aang as a person. I don't know. He probably thinks that because the Avatar bends all four elements, he couldn't have stayed at one of the Air Temples and remained one of them. Once his character development kicks in and he joins Aang, I suspect it might give them something to talk about, to break the ice, as it were. By that time Zuko would be more open to learning about the Air Nomads, and Aang would be happy to share stories with him.
No writing is totally useless. -amanda91
So why fan fiction? You're quite obviously an aspiring writer. Why are you spending time and energy on derivative works?
Brain candy and practice. I do write quite a bit of my own stuff, but since starting college it's been really nice to have fanfic as something relatively easy to do for fun, to wind down. (Although since starting the Maiko Big Bang it's kind of not been very relaxing... sigh.) And I really do feel like it's made me a better writer. By exploring what I can do with preexisting characters and settings, it's made me more aware of what I can do with my own creations. No writing is totally useless. I mean, even Twilight gets better with each installment (though that might not be saying much). I may not be able to do anything with fanfiction in the long run, but all of the thousands of words I put into it are just more practice for whatever else I might do.
Like the first author I interviewed, FairLadyZ2005, you're primarily a short-story author so far. But I also know you're writing a Maiko Big Bang entry, and having a grand time of it too. How is writing a longer entry different from writing a short one? Do you have a preference?
I think I like short stories better. It's easier to stay within the goals you've set for yourself, whereas with my Maiko Big Bang I'm always worried that I'm going off on a tangent and that I won't finish the main story in time. The MBB story is different from 3YS in that the former has a well-defined plot with a beginning, middle, and end that takes place over about 8-10 months, but the latter is more just “random things that happened in three years.”
Another of your main series is the Avatar 500 entries, stories in 500 words or less that you've submitted to the Avatar 500 competitions. I think it's pretty amazing that you've made such regular entries. What benefit do you see in the entries, and in the 500-word limit?
I absolutely love writing those. To me they're just little nuggets of story—like any successful longer story, they have to have a direction, but you only have 500 words to make a whole story happen. Such a tight word limit really forces you to finish what you're saying without a lot of extra, unnecessary stuff. It makes it harder to describe things, sometimes, but it helps to crack down on purple prose and just get you to write what you're thinking. Plus having the Avatar 500 contest gives me an outlet for all of the tiny little ideas that I have that aren't big enough to justify a regular-sized oneshot. A few of the entries I think would be fun to expand sometime, maybe, but the contest has really helped me to pare down my writing.
I'm kind of glad you uploaded the Dragon Girl story because it shows the earlier developments in your writing, and helps me track your growth as a writer. How would you say your writing has changed since you were sixteen? What have you gained, and what have you lost?
I've definitely gotten better at writing dialogue and character interactions in general. I think I've also gotten better at giving the viewpoint character a personality, since Namira was just kind of there... she had motivation (sort of), but that was about it. Her personality was kind of blank and she spent a lot of time being acted upon by others. I think the strongest emotions she displayed were mild irritation and mild fear. I've also gotten better at finishing things that I start, or at least getting further than fifteen pages in. I would also say that I've only lost negative things since then. I've lost my fear of letting other people read my writing, and I've lost a lot of the verbosity I had.
I've also lost interest in Dragonriders of Pern fanworks, because the fanbase is super critical and nitpicky. It's no fun bending canon in that fandom, because there's always some vigilante who comes along and points out the (usually deliberate) error you made just because you wanted to make something more plausible/interesting.
What is the writing process like for you? How do you get ideas, and how do you work on them until they become finished stories?
My ideas usually come to me when I'm walking to the grocery store, or taking a shower, or sitting in church, or something equally mundane when my mind starts to wander and I start thinking about stories. Sometimes just a little fragment of an idea will come to me, and then I'll ask myself, “okay, what can I do with this? I like this fragment, how can I expand it into something that will take up a whole story/chapter?” From there, I start building a whole story/chapter based on what I come up with. I usually just write everything down straight, but if something's giving me trouble, I'll work it out on paper and write during class because it seems like my ideas flow best when I'm supposed to be paying attention to something else. It also helps to carry paper in my purse and just start writing whenever I have a few free minutes. If I sit down at my computer with intent to write, I usually end up on the internet.
I also try to think of the best way to tell the story I'm thinking of. Should it be in the past tense or present? For some of the Avatar 500 stories, should I tell it in a series of drabbles, or just one straight “chapter”? I think my Avatar 500 story about June and Combustion Man is an example of where the structure didn't work as well as it could have. It probably would have worked better to just write in shorter/longer segments depending on what I was trying to say, and not five strict drabbles. I think the five-drabble structure worked better in the Pakku/Kanna story and the Toph and Zuko friendship story.
How much planning goes into your stories? When Zuko's firing of the doctor in "Rumors and Doubts" led to his having to incognito into Earth Kingdom territory in "The Drunken Adventure," for instance, was that a planned thing?
It depends. My as yet unnamed Maiko Big Bang story is incredibly structured and planned-out, but 3YS is less so. I keep a list of ideas for future chapters and how they might affect each other, but I make up a lot of stuff as I go. That particular development was definitely a planned thing, as was everything that went into the “Shuang the Traitor” chapters. Those were the most structured parts of 3YS so far. The Avatar 500 stories also vary depending on what I'm trying to do. Most of them were thought up and written in one sitting, but I went through a few drafts of the Jee/Zuko story, just because I kept thinking about the consequences their relationship would have and revising based on what I came up with. “Much Better Now” is a good example of something I came up with on the fly that ended up being stupidly sappy, but fun to write.
And now the vital question: Coffee or tea?
Green or herbal tea, but neither if I can help it. I prefer chocolate milk (drunk through a crazy straw) or cranberry juice.
Zuko is, quite frankly, a stubborn little bitch. -amanda91
So I notice that almost everything you've uploaded so far is Avatar-related. What is it about the show that grabbed you so hard?
I think it's because it had been so long since I had read or watched anything that had been just so awesome. There were plenty of things I had read/watched that were good, but that didn't really make me want more in the sense of going on the internet and looking for meta and fanfic and other people. I participate in a few other fandoms, but not to this extent—I never really wanted a continuation of the canon until Avatar. It was engaging, funny, heartwarming, sad, scary, and made me think, and I was kind of obsessed as soon as I watched it. Plus I wanted something fun to do—it was my first year of college, I was feeling kind of overwhelmed and Avatar fanfic turned into the perfect outlet for my frustration.
Who are your favorite Avatar characters, and what draws you to them?
Zuko is probably my favorite, though everyone else is clamoring for second place for all different reasons. Zuko's character arc is incredible and it was also fun to see how the other characters grew and developed over the course of the show. Aang's development gets sadly overlooked a lot of the time, I think, just because he doesn't do something drastic like turning from a villain into a hero. In my opinion his journey is just as profound as Zuko's; it's awesome to see how he turned from a flightly, goofy kid into a responsible hero, all without damaging his sense of humor or his devotion to his beliefs. It's a coming-of-age story for all of the characters, and I really like that.
The characters that I prefer watching/writing, in order, are probably Zuko, Sokka, Aang, Toph, Katara. Even though I don't really prefer Katara-centric stories, I still appreciate her character development as well.
I also like wondering about characters who got like five minutes of screen time. What are they thinking about? How can I turn it into a story?
Your old Dragonriders of Pern story was written when you were sixteen. It seems you've been writing since then, and it shows in how far your writing has come. So how long have you been writing overall?
I've been making up stories since before I could write. The earliest I remember writing just for fun (as opposed to making up characters and drawing pictures of them, and making up their stories in my head) was probably when I was eight. Back then, and for most of my growing-up years, I was incredibly secretive about my writing and it's only in the past few years that I've been able to loosen up and let other people read what I've written. Fanfic in particular has been really awesome in that area.
What interested you about Zuko's three years at sea, the subject of your (dare I say) flagship story so far?
I'm a big fan of sea-stories. My fascination with them probably started with Redwall back when I was in middle school—the books set at sea seemed exponentially better than the land-stories, at least from my perspective, haha. The first Pirates of the Caribbean movie came out when I was 13-14-ish (I was a massive Orlando Bloom fangirl at the time, so that's why I went and saw it) and that definitely helped. What really made me interested in the genre, though, was the movie Master and Commander. (I haven't read any of the books yet, but I'm planning on it once I have a little more time and a library that stocks them.) Once I saw Avatar and got interested in fanfic, the idea just came to me: an Avatar sea-story about my favorite character. Where can you go wrong with that?
One of the things I love about your works, including Three Years at Sea (and even Dragon Girl!) is the attention to detail. What draws you to those seemingly mundane details? What do you find interesting about things like, for instance, the budgetary constraints of running a ship or keeping food vermin-free at sea?
Again, it's my interest in old naval stuff that makes it interesting for me. Since starting the fic, I've done a little light reading on ships and navies and everything from the 19th century to about WWI since that seems to be about the era the Fire Nation is set in judging by their industrialization. That, plus some of the tropes and conventions common to Napoleonic-era (and earlier) sea stories makes for an interesting combination, at least for me. I've always been interested in the ways people live their lives throughout history and I'm always a bit worried that no one's going to care about whatever intricate details I include because I just couldn't help myself, haha. Plus, I kind of wondered what Zuko was doing all that time he was at sea before he found Aang. Maybe the whole story was just an excuse to be a total dork about the minutiae about naval life.
Another aspect I like about your stories is the relationships. not only between Mai and Zuko but also between Iroh and Zuko and, for different reasons, Ozai and Zuko. Is this something you've put a lot of thought into? How would you say relationships help people change and grow?
Avatar would be nothing without the relationships. People go from mortal enemies to friends, and from friends to mortal enemies. They know that family is what you make it, so you see family relationships that are successful because the characters work at it. You see Azula building relationships on fear while the heroes build relationships on trust. I feel like I've learned a lot from watching these two-dimensional drawings, no joke. Because that was so fundamental to Avatar, I feel like writing fanfic without interesting relationships is kind of pointless. All of the characters' growth happened in part because of their relationships, no matter what they were or how healthy they were.
An interesting development in Three Years At Sea is Zuko's reading Monk Gyatso's journal and realizing he had been lied to about the Air Nomads ("The Journal of Monk Gyatso"). How do you reconcile this development with his determined hunt of the Avatar? And what implications do you envision later on?
I'm able to reconcile the revelation about the Air Nomads with his hunt because Zuko is, quite frankly, a stubborn little bitch. He's able to totally ignore the truth and replace it with something he finds more familiar/comforting until he's ready to deal with the reality of what happened. Additionally, he doesn't see the Avatar as one of the easygoing, friendly monks that he read about, somehow he's able to separate them entirely, the same way he's able to separate “The Avatar” from Aang as a person. I don't know. He probably thinks that because the Avatar bends all four elements, he couldn't have stayed at one of the Air Temples and remained one of them. Once his character development kicks in and he joins Aang, I suspect it might give them something to talk about, to break the ice, as it were. By that time Zuko would be more open to learning about the Air Nomads, and Aang would be happy to share stories with him.
No writing is totally useless. -amanda91
So why fan fiction? You're quite obviously an aspiring writer. Why are you spending time and energy on derivative works?
Brain candy and practice. I do write quite a bit of my own stuff, but since starting college it's been really nice to have fanfic as something relatively easy to do for fun, to wind down. (Although since starting the Maiko Big Bang it's kind of not been very relaxing... sigh.) And I really do feel like it's made me a better writer. By exploring what I can do with preexisting characters and settings, it's made me more aware of what I can do with my own creations. No writing is totally useless. I mean, even Twilight gets better with each installment (though that might not be saying much). I may not be able to do anything with fanfiction in the long run, but all of the thousands of words I put into it are just more practice for whatever else I might do.
Like the first author I interviewed, FairLadyZ2005, you're primarily a short-story author so far. But I also know you're writing a Maiko Big Bang entry, and having a grand time of it too. How is writing a longer entry different from writing a short one? Do you have a preference?
I think I like short stories better. It's easier to stay within the goals you've set for yourself, whereas with my Maiko Big Bang I'm always worried that I'm going off on a tangent and that I won't finish the main story in time. The MBB story is different from 3YS in that the former has a well-defined plot with a beginning, middle, and end that takes place over about 8-10 months, but the latter is more just “random things that happened in three years.”
Another of your main series is the Avatar 500 entries, stories in 500 words or less that you've submitted to the Avatar 500 competitions. I think it's pretty amazing that you've made such regular entries. What benefit do you see in the entries, and in the 500-word limit?
I absolutely love writing those. To me they're just little nuggets of story—like any successful longer story, they have to have a direction, but you only have 500 words to make a whole story happen. Such a tight word limit really forces you to finish what you're saying without a lot of extra, unnecessary stuff. It makes it harder to describe things, sometimes, but it helps to crack down on purple prose and just get you to write what you're thinking. Plus having the Avatar 500 contest gives me an outlet for all of the tiny little ideas that I have that aren't big enough to justify a regular-sized oneshot. A few of the entries I think would be fun to expand sometime, maybe, but the contest has really helped me to pare down my writing.
I'm kind of glad you uploaded the Dragon Girl story because it shows the earlier developments in your writing, and helps me track your growth as a writer. How would you say your writing has changed since you were sixteen? What have you gained, and what have you lost?
I've definitely gotten better at writing dialogue and character interactions in general. I think I've also gotten better at giving the viewpoint character a personality, since Namira was just kind of there... she had motivation (sort of), but that was about it. Her personality was kind of blank and she spent a lot of time being acted upon by others. I think the strongest emotions she displayed were mild irritation and mild fear. I've also gotten better at finishing things that I start, or at least getting further than fifteen pages in. I would also say that I've only lost negative things since then. I've lost my fear of letting other people read my writing, and I've lost a lot of the verbosity I had.
I've also lost interest in Dragonriders of Pern fanworks, because the fanbase is super critical and nitpicky. It's no fun bending canon in that fandom, because there's always some vigilante who comes along and points out the (usually deliberate) error you made just because you wanted to make something more plausible/interesting.
What is the writing process like for you? How do you get ideas, and how do you work on them until they become finished stories?
My ideas usually come to me when I'm walking to the grocery store, or taking a shower, or sitting in church, or something equally mundane when my mind starts to wander and I start thinking about stories. Sometimes just a little fragment of an idea will come to me, and then I'll ask myself, “okay, what can I do with this? I like this fragment, how can I expand it into something that will take up a whole story/chapter?” From there, I start building a whole story/chapter based on what I come up with. I usually just write everything down straight, but if something's giving me trouble, I'll work it out on paper and write during class because it seems like my ideas flow best when I'm supposed to be paying attention to something else. It also helps to carry paper in my purse and just start writing whenever I have a few free minutes. If I sit down at my computer with intent to write, I usually end up on the internet.
I also try to think of the best way to tell the story I'm thinking of. Should it be in the past tense or present? For some of the Avatar 500 stories, should I tell it in a series of drabbles, or just one straight “chapter”? I think my Avatar 500 story about June and Combustion Man is an example of where the structure didn't work as well as it could have. It probably would have worked better to just write in shorter/longer segments depending on what I was trying to say, and not five strict drabbles. I think the five-drabble structure worked better in the Pakku/Kanna story and the Toph and Zuko friendship story.
How much planning goes into your stories? When Zuko's firing of the doctor in "Rumors and Doubts" led to his having to incognito into Earth Kingdom territory in "The Drunken Adventure," for instance, was that a planned thing?
It depends. My as yet unnamed Maiko Big Bang story is incredibly structured and planned-out, but 3YS is less so. I keep a list of ideas for future chapters and how they might affect each other, but I make up a lot of stuff as I go. That particular development was definitely a planned thing, as was everything that went into the “Shuang the Traitor” chapters. Those were the most structured parts of 3YS so far. The Avatar 500 stories also vary depending on what I'm trying to do. Most of them were thought up and written in one sitting, but I went through a few drafts of the Jee/Zuko story, just because I kept thinking about the consequences their relationship would have and revising based on what I came up with. “Much Better Now” is a good example of something I came up with on the fly that ended up being stupidly sappy, but fun to write.
And now the vital question: Coffee or tea?
Green or herbal tea, but neither if I can help it. I prefer chocolate milk (drunk through a crazy straw) or cranberry juice.