(Welcome, BoingBoing readers! Thank you for coming.)
Our main mission here at TeleRead is cover the ways that electronic media have changed reading. But occasionally we also talk about how it changes writing, because after all, writing is just the flip side of reading. And there are a number of sites where writing is only half the equation, because after someone has written something electronically, then naturally other people are going to need to read it electronically.
One such site, which I have discussed here before, was Ficlets.com, begun in early 2007 as a subsidiary of AOL. Ficlets was based on a simple idea: let people write stories 1024 bytes at a time, with other people free to spin their own stories out of those others have created. The stories, called “ficlets”, were released under a Creative Commons Attribution/Sharealike license, meaning that other people could reuse them however they wanted as long as the reusers did not impose further restrictions.
Requiem for Ficlets
I first learned about Ficlets when two well-known Internet personalities became involved with it and endorsed it—child-actor-turned-geek Wil Wheaton and geek-turned-SF-writer John Scalzi. (In fact, I think that’s also how I first heard of John Scalzi, too—his involvement in Ficlets. I heard about it from Wheaton; he heard about it from Scalzi. Or maybe I just saw Scalzi’s post on BoingBoing.) I went there and had fun.
Both Scalzi and Wheaton eventually burned out on it—not surprising, I guess, as busy as they are with other projects—but I and a number of other writers continued participating. Even after Kevin Lawver, the site’s creator, left AOL, and AOL never replaced him, the site continued chugging along, rolling up a remarkable 49,000 story segment contributions before AOL finally pulled the plug. (My blog post here ended up being reblogged by Wil Wheaton himself, I was astonished to notice.)
But fortunately, the Creative Commons license came to the rescue. Since all the content of the site was licensed under Attribution/Sharealike, Lawver was able to rescue and archive all of the stories. (Lawver said on his blog that though he’d always thought Creative Commons was a good idea, he hadn’t ever imagined that he would be one of the beneficiaries.) Though he couldn’t get the login information, which could have been used to let people “claim” their ficlets on the new site, he could at least make all 49,000 of those ficlets available for people to read.
Enter Ficly
And he was also able to create a revised, improved version of the site, called Ficly.com, to continue the idea of Ficlets from where it had left off, even making a couple of improvements along the way. It took a while to get the site up and running (during which time someone else tried to float his own successor site called “litlets.com”; not sure what happened to it but the domain name no longer resolves and the last post to its Twitter account was in February 2009). Once it was, a number of the old writers returned, and continued or created new stories from where they left off. Including me, for a while. The first story was posted on May 16, 2009, and in the intervening 19 months just over 22,600 ficlets have been created at the new site.
I gradually found other things to do with my time (such as writing more frequently for TeleRead) and hadn’t been back to the site for several months when my fancy took me to visit and write some more there a few days ago. And looking it over, I was a little saddened to see that activity had fallen off considerably. In fact, it looks like only a couple of dozen people at most are still writing with any regularity—there are only about a dozen or so posts per day, and the average story segment only gets read by about 5 to 15 people.
I suppose that without big-name Internet bloggers bringing it attention, it just became too obscure for people to discover easily. It has gotten the occasional mention in writing blogs (such as this one collecting five micro-fiction sites for fast writing inspiration, or this one from a writer reposting one of his works), but it doesn’t seem to be widely known anymore. And that’s a pity.
The Writing Experience
Writing for Ficlets or Ficly was always a bit challenging. For the most part, it’s a fun challenge: how much can you say in 1024 bytes? Do you keep descriptions sparse so you can show more events, or do you build a 1024-byte word picture in which nothing much actually happens? What if you alternate between the two? What if you tell a story entirely in dialogue so that only the words come across, like in an old-time radio show? And should you try to come out to 1024 bytes exactly, or intentionally go a little long and then go back to try to tighten things up?
One problem I ran into is that it can be hard to get people to write sequels. Most ficlets just don’t get a sequel—and often, if you write a sequel to someone else’s, they won’t follow you up in return. That’s how it was at the height of Ficly’s popularity, and it’s how it is even more now that there are relatively few active participants. People simply have different tastes, and stories that excite other people enough to provoke a follow-up can be rare.
Often, I ended up writing long chains of ficlets by myself, without any accompaniment. I always felt a little like I was “cheating”, doing that—or else kind of missing the point of the site. But I suppose that, in a way, it’s the same thing that Charles Dickens and other magazine serial writers of the 19th century always did—just on a much smaller scale. And certainly it’s more satisfying to write 1K of story at a time and get whatever feedback you get, than to work on writing the whole thing at once, never complete it, and so never hear from anybody.
Not a Tragedy of the Creative Commons
But even if people aren’t using the site that much anymore, it still stands as a great example of Creative Commons fulfilling its mission to promote creativity. The relatively non-restrictive license meant that the material from the old site was not lost when AOL shut it down, even though AOL didn’t provide its own methods of exporting content (they actually seriously suggested people should just copy and paste their stories into a Word document)—Lawver was able to scoop the site and reuse the content because it was CC-licensed.
I was also able to make use of some Ficlets content in my “Biblio File” podcast, reading aloud some of the segments that particularly amused me (overriding TalkShoe’s default non-commercial CC license due to Ficlets’s sharealike). I think those shows came out rather well. Maybe I should do more sometime.
And about five months ago, Ficleteers got together and selected a number of their favorite ficlets to publish in a 60-page book for $7.50 to serve as a fundraiser for the site. (Alas that I wasn’t reading the site at the time; it would have been nice to participate, and maybe get some of my own stories in there.)
And who knows what other uses we will find for this sort of bite-sized content in the future of the net? The 1-kilobyte size would actually be perfect for display on a tablet screen—it’s just about the right size for reading in a single screen at a legible font size. (Sadly, the individual-stories Twitter feed has been down since August 2009, so there isn’t really an easy way to get a Flipboard channel with just Ficly story content at the moment—just the Ficly blog’s feed.)
It really is a lot of fun writing a round-robin story, with neither writer exactly sure where the next one is going to take it. I’d really like to see more writers return to Ficlets and provide a broader pool of interest—the more writers there are, the more writers might want to sequel other writers’ stories.
My own Ficlets story archive can be found here, and my Ficly user page is here. I would like to invite any readers who think it looks like fun to go ahead and give it a shot. There’s no lengthy account creation process—you can use Google, Yahoo, Facebook, or other OpenID providers to sign in.
