The Wolverine & Rogue Fanfiction Archive Interview with Macha

Interviews by Fans
Title:	The Wolverine & Rogue Fanfiction Archive Interview with Macha
Interviewer:	The Wolverine & Rogue Fanfiction Archive
Interviewee:	Macha
Date(s):	August 21, 2004
Medium:	online
Fandom(s):	X-Men
External Links:	interview is here, Archived version
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The Wolverine & Rogue Fanfiction Archive Interview with Macha was conducted in 2004.

Other Interviews in the Series

See The Wolverine & Rogue Fanfiction Archive Interview Series.

Some Excerpts

I can't bear to look up actual dates for my first story, but I'd say close to ten years. I cut my teeth on X-Files fandom, back when there weren't pairing - or character-specific lists or archives. There was the Gossamer archive and there was alt.tv.x-files.creative. :) It was rough, in some ways, but I learned a *lot* from posting my Mulder/Scully stories to an audience that included people overtly hostile to the idea of them in a romantic pairing. Nobody over there ever pulled a punch, and I'm a better writer and better at taking criticism -- sort of ::g:: -- for it. As for why I wrote my first fanfic... Tough question. I'd written various stories growing up, and fanfic seemed like a fun new way of exercising that skill. (Not that I was particularly skilled back then -- I wrote a SONGFIC, for the love of all that is holy!) A lot of my XF fic was filling in the blanks, the missing pieces that we didn't see onscreen. (And, no, I'm not archived as Macha over there. Thank GOD.) That's still why I write a lot of my fic.

Fandom in general has brought me so many dear friends, and X-Men in particular has exposed me to *more* great writers and a group of incredibly witty and welcoming fannish types. Wit and good humor are prerequisites to any positive fannish experience, so the WRFA and wrbeta, under Devil Doll's leadership, are simply a joy. As a writer, learning how to write inherently... uh, *comic* characters with reality and humanity -- that's been a challenge. And I spent the three years prior to falling into XM fandom writing West Wing fanfic, which is *very* different, generically speaking. While that was a lovely outlet for my political wonkishness, it's nice to come at societal problems from another point of view -- writing the people on the ground affected by the bad policy as opposed to the people trying to fix the policy from above. Heroes of a different color, I guess. I'm fascinated by Xavier's and Magneto's differing approaches to mutant-human conflict.

I know this is, like, the eternal argument in the XM fandom, but since I'm firmly and unabashedly a movieverse girl, I base my characterizations on *that* version of Logan and Rogue. I know a lot of the fanon that I disagree with is probably comic canon, but I still write Logan as tall and muscular, and Rogue with brown eyes. Oddly, the thing I remember most about learning how to extrapolate character traits from canon is a betacomment I got back in my horrible XF writing days. I had Scully listening to Tori Amos, a favorite of mine, and my beta reader said, "Um… Scully's in her early thirties and an FBI agent in Washington. I'm not sure she would have ever even *heard* of Tori Amos." Wow, no kidding. But I was writing what *I* knew and what *I* would listen to, and I had to learn how to *not* do that. In short, I think you have to watch the movies enough to have an instinctive sense of how each character would act and then try not to let your own personality (or your own preferred characteristics in a hero or heroine) bleed into your writing. Which sounds easier than it sometimes is.