The Story Behind Stampede of Conformity
People who know me know I don’t use social media. There are many reasons behind that, but one of the big ones I discovered on Reddit.
While I was writing Girl in Red, I had little feedback from anyone apart from my beta reader. The best way I had to get a sense of what the broader fanfiction community wanted was to check Reddit. That was a mistake.
The problem was that when I saw enough people confirming my worst fears – original characters shouldn’t be main characters, Harry should be the only main character, magic should be handled in a certain way and I was doing it wrong – it was hard to stick with my current ideas. I became afraid that if I didn’t do it a certain way, no one would read or enjoy it.
That wasn’t the only time Reddit did that. After realizing how much time I was spending on Reddit, and the negative effect it was having on me, I left it. I’d left Facebook long before that, for different reasons, but I then had a new reason: I wasn’t strong enough to ignore so many dissenting voices.
I recently saw the movie Dead Poets Society, in which Robin Williams plays an English teacher at an elite prep school. For a sense of his teaching style, his first lesson involves the class tearing out pages from their textbook. This, and many of his lessons thereafter stuck with me. One in particular had him marching some of the students around the courtyard. After a time, they fell into step with one another. He tells them, “we all have a great need for acceptance, but you must trust that your beliefs are unique”.
This reminded me of my time on Reddit, my time getting swept up with the herd. Thinking of this, I wrote Stampede of Conformity, hoping that others could learn from my experience.
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