Where did you grow up/live now?

I was a shy, nerdy girl who was too smart — and, as the daughter of immigrants from Chile and the Philippines, a complete oddity in the Indiana town where I grew up. So I left early and headed for college in California. Then I spent 20 years in the California Bay Area, and today I live in Seattle, where I’m a professor at the University of Washington.

When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer? Or what first inspired you to write?

I wrote and illustrated my first picture book when I was four years old, with the immortal title Wasting Kleenex. By the time I was ten I was writing lots of stories, including a lengthy fanfiction based on Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. I wrote an original novel when I was nineteen that I have sworn no one will ever see. But I didn’t seriously start working on writing as a career until ten years ago. Since then I’ve written over a million words. Maybe about 1/3 of that is fanfiction, 1/3 original fiction, and 1/3 nonfiction.

What do you think makes a good book?

Something that immediately makes me curious about what happens next, or how something happened. When I read the first chapter of a book and it gives me chills of delight, I know I’m in for a wonderful experience.

What inspired your book?

Katie Davis and I met by chance over lunch at an event at the University of Washington. She’s a professor at UW's Information School who specializes in digital youth, child development, and education; her interests dovetailed well with my expertise in human-centered data science and the study of very large text data sets. Over lunch, we happened to discuss recent news stories in which “experts” claimed that young people couldn’t write – and agreed that we didn’t believe it. My teenage children and Katie’s young sister all defied this stereotype, writing lengthy stories, sophisticated essays, and actively participating in fan communities. This contradiction struck us as fertile ground for research, and so our collaboration began.

How does a new story idea come to you? Is it an event that sparks the plot or a character speaking to you?

I have so many ideas; the problem is finding time to write them all out. When I’m walking, or riding the bus, or reading an interesting news article, I’ll often come up with a new story or research idea. I usually get several of them every day. My files contain so many story ideas that I won’t have enough years in my life to write them all.

With fanfiction, what often sparks an idea is a plot hole in canon, or a missing explanation as to why the characters behave the way they do, or simply a desire to put two interesting characters together and see what happens. The most fun part about writing fanfiction is I can get a story idea, post the first chapter online, and get immediate feedback on whether I should continue or not.

I have tons of first chapters of original fiction languishing in my file cabinets or on my hard drive that I’ve never shown to anyone, and so I have no idea whether they might appeal to readers. But with fanfiction, I can post a chapter and if it gets an enthusiastic response with dozens of reviews in the first day or two, I know it’s worth continuing.

That kind of instant and voluminous feedback is characteristic of distributed mentoring online, and is extremely valuable for a writer. As a matter of fact, many published authors who’ve written both fanfiction and original fiction have commented on the sheer abundance of fanfiction feedback, and how much they love it.

Is there a message/theme in your book that you want readers to grasp?

We should trust young people more. They are teaching each other how to write on their own. Maybe we should support them and provide them guidance with learning rather than creating artificial structures and standardized tests.

Also, fanfiction doesn’t deserve its bad rap! We talk in Writers in the Secret Garden about the important role fanfiction can play in society.

What was one of the most surprising things you learned when writing?

First, the breadth and depth of the fanfiction community. We had no idea that millions of young people were writing and reading fanfiction, and what’s more, that they were finding their identities and teaching each other how to write.

It also surprised us to find a new type of mentoring among young people in online communities, what we ended up calling distributed mentoring. Rather than traditional one-on-one mentoring, young people are mentoring each other in small pieces that all together make up much more than the sum of the whole. We describe distributed mentoring, how it arises, and why it works in detail in the book.

What was your greatest challenge in writing this book?

I have a demanding full-time job, a family, and take care of special-needs family members. My husband is sick and unable to work, so my job provides our only income. My father has Alzheimer’s, and I’m his primary caregiver. It’s always difficult to carve out enough time to write.

What’s the best writing advice you have ever received?

Believe in yourself.

What are you working on now?

My memoir: Flying Free: How I Used Math to Overcome Fear and Achieve my Wildest Dreams, about my journey from fearful, bullied child to champion pilot and beyond. It’ll be out from Blackstone Publishing in fall 2020.

You can read more at http://CeciliaAragonAuthor.com/ and sign up for my newsletter about my writing life, or follow me on
Twitter https://twitter.com/CeciliaRAragon,
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/CeciliaRAragon/,
Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/18981003.Cecilia_Aragon,
or Bookbub https://www.bookbub.com/authors/cecilia-aragon

to stay in touch.

Also, our research group at UW maintains a tumblr blog about our fanfiction research:
https://ffanalytics.tumblr.com/post/181788901675/hi-im-ruby-and-im-part-of-a-group-of