Reviews? Interviews! · 4:51am Feb 21st, 2016
If you have read any of the RCL site-wide blog posts, you should know that they include an interview with the author of the featured story at the bottom. I find these far more interesting that the stories or the reviews, usually.
I have concluded that the outcome of my interest in reviewing stories has lead here. Loosely based on pony fiction, I am hoping to interview a wide range of the writers on this site. While this could be a way for authors to reach more eyes, I plan to go for a potentially more humiliating take on these interviews.
If all goes well, nobody will be hurt in the process of interviewing or posting. A significant goal of these interviews will be to recall the fact that we're all people (... right?), and should be reasonably relatable to each other. One thing that I do not want to do is establish or support any notion of cliques/upper-circles, or foster any feelings of helplessness or incompetence through comparison as a result of these posts.
How might I achieve this? First and foremost, I am not going to be highly selective. Your story need not be one of the best or, really, even all that good. Another measure is that these interviews probably won't end up focusing on your story(s). They will be about the people who write them a bit more than the stories themselves.
While Twilight's checklist-inclusive way of doing things objectively might make for a slightly more 'fair' execution of this, I happen to not be a purple pony princess, and will definitely suffer from a tendency for subjectivity. Selecting interviewees and what questions I ask them wouldn't be nearly as entertaining for me (or, I suspect, many readers) if I stuck to strict rules and a common set of questions. Instead, why I select will be up to me, and may be influenced by just about anything, including feedback and discussions. No two interviews will be made to be the same, but hay if I know if some will be really close.
In the end, the interviewee gets to call what I do or do not post publicly, because it is their information/thoughts. I doubt this will be much of a problem, due to the fact that I do not plan on conducting any interviews through instant messengers or any real-time means of communication. Similarly, an interviewee's wishes will be the highest priority of what I take into account while conducting the interview.
Lastly, these aren't going to be a place to advertise your new story/tumblr/tweet/other or otherwise freely gain an audience for your own purposes (though if they're relevant, links will probably be allowed). I doubt they'd appreciate it. Likewise, advocating hate, deceit, and anything that you'd lump together with those and/or label as "bad" isn't going to fly. I won't exclude anything without first checking with the interviewee, but I will not post at all if an agreement is not reached.
Edited to include more details:
As I'm doing more than one at once, you can just answer at your own pace without worry. I'll probably wrap it up as it nears 3000 words. Also, I have a life, so I can't promise immediate turnaround on questions and answers. This could take days, or it could take weeks.
In the end, I'll be compiling the questions and answers into a Google document. Notably, I do one question at a time for relevance, so this is going to resemble a drawn out conversation rather than my handing out a list of words and empty boxes. The interview can be conducted within the document itself, but I can also communicate through PM, Skype, Google, or Email. Whichever works best.
Could be fun. I'll be watching.
Turns out that Google Docs is an unterrible thing to use for these, at least in some cases.
Is there any particular criteria for choosing an interviewee, or are you just going for people who interest you?
3861608 Well, that's a good question.
Currently, I don't know what criteria I may land on, but while I'm still getting my feet wet, starting with people that I am familiar with seemed like a good idea, even if the first few give the impression of pickyness.
The general idea behind these is "why the hell not?", which may give you a better idea of what I'm doing. Or it might not. As I noted in the post, I don't plan to be highly selective, and I'm not going to tie these interviews to specific stories. As I continue these, I'll update this post as necessary to reflect what I've learned.
I didn't actually expect to interview someone as "well known" as Kwakerjak so soon, but he volunteered shortly after I had confirmation from Caliaponia. This did lead to the idea that interviewing multiple people at once would be a good thing, given how the process has turned out. In this light, volunteers would probably be highly considered, so long as I don't have a larger-than-I-can-handle queue at that moment (which as of now is at least two people, with potentially three more). More than three at a time gets difficult, but at least these things aren't intensive.
And even though she hasn't officially published anything, not even Ferret is safe.