Working Stiffs Interview with Dawson Rambo

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Interviews by Fans
Title: Working Stiffs Interview with Dawson Rambo
Interviewer: Megan Reilly (with Nicola Simpson)
Interviewee: Dawson Rambo
Date(s): 2001
Medium: online
Fandom(s): X-Files
External Links: interview is here; reference link
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Working Stiffs Interview with Dawson Rambo was conducted in 2001.

It was posted to the website Working Stiffs.

Other Interviews in the Series

Some Excerpts

I'd actually written fanfiction before the X-Files. When I was 17, way back in 1984, I was a huge "Magnum, PI" fan. Thomas Sullivan Magnum was my alter ego; I wanted to BE him when I grew up. I wrote a rather longish short story based around the Magnum character, complete with ninjas, car chases, gunfights, and what I thought was a "sex" scene. I showed it to my girlfriend at the time, Trish, and she told me I should be writing something original. So, the first time I wrote fanfic, my first "fan" didn't "get" it. In the 16 years since, not much has changed. Only true fanfic fans "get" fanfic. My family still doesn't understand.

Fanfic was unknown to me as a genre at that time, when I was writing the Magnum stuff. Like *many* fanfic writers, I thought I was the only one nutty enough to write fiction based on characters created by someone else. A few years later, in my early 20s, I became aware of BBSes, and found Star Trek and Star Wars fanfic, but attributed that to the general "weenieness" of SciFi fans. I've never been a huge SciFi fan. I didn't become a Trekker until I was 24! So, no, the fact that my girlfriend didn't "get" my Magnum story had little impact on my writing. I watched XF from the first episode. Towards the end of the first season, I wrote a story called "The XXX Files" for alt.sex.stories. Later, when I was deep into my fanfic stage, I rewrote "The XXX Files" as "The Seducer," and cleaned it up a bit. Also, like some of my more promising stories, "The XXX Files" was never finished. LOL

Feedback is always nice to get, and honestly, I've gotten more than my fair share of it. I remember clearly several newsgroup "wars" over feedback; Authors witholding later chapters in exchange for feedback, arguments whether or not feedback is warrented or required, and what is "good" versus "bad" feedback. In the end, I've gotten over 25,000 feedback emails. I've kept every single one, and I've tried to answer every single one. I've got a backlog of about 200 now that I've been meaning to answer for months. That may sound like a lot, 25K letters, but I hasten to point out that a large majority of them are from repeat writers, people I've established online friendships with. As a matter of fact, I met my wife through fanfic. She wrote me a letter for "ELS," and we started corresponding. Almost 3 years later we're happily married and so in love it's disgusting. In all the feedback I've gotten, maybe 10 actual letters were negative. I've been incredibly lucky in that regard, and I know it.

[regarding his "concept covers"]: The story behind the graphics is complicated. :) When the Novel Annex came up, and the idea of "dustjackets" was first raised, I was incredibly intrigued. I fully believe the movie posters should have their own Oscar categories, and I've loved them for years. I was really jazzed about doing my own, but discouraged at first because I don't consider myself very visually artistic.

I discovered in the process of creating my first dustjackets that it helped me visualize the story line; to find the ultimate theme of the piece I was writing. I love it when a movie poster totally captures the theme and tone of a movie; better still when it even captures the pace of a movie.

While teaching myself various techniques, and just playing around with my graphics software, I came up with some "posters" for stuff that I was considering writing, and stuff that I'd already written. The X-Files show itself (at least in the first seasons,) was such a visually stunning show that it seemed natural to blend that sort of thing in with fanfic.

And was there a difference between being popular and being good? How much work did you put into keeping the identities separate?

That's a hard question to answer, because it brings into the discussion my writer's ego. Every writer has an ego; some are healthier than others. The writer's ego is a fragile thing, because let's face it, we're putting a lot of ourselves out there. I desparately wanted to be considered "good" and not just popular. If I learned anything from the Bandit experience it was that the things I write make people happy when they read them. They challenge people and make them think. A writer can expect no higher praise than when someone says, "I don't agree with what you said, but it DID make me think." There is a huge difference between being good and being popular. From the feedback I got, I think I'm good. If that sounds egotistical, I'm sorry, but it's the truth.

At the beginning, I put a LOT of work into keeping Bandit and Dawson separate. But even at the beginning there were people that guessed. One of the giveaways was the formatting. I tended to format my ASCII text a very specific way back then, and people noticed the "*******" that I used for sectional breaks, and the eight-space indent, single-spaced, no-paragraph-break format that I like to use. I started geting emails at my StarNet email address about 2 hours after the first Bandit story hit the newsgroup. But I denied it. At first, I enjoyed it, the duplicity, the secrecy. But then it got to be a hassle, and I decided to out myself about seven months later. The response was a lot better than I thought it would be, and I've written things as "Bandit" since.

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