Sixth-grader Fiona Plunkett is the published author of seven books. Really. But the Malibu, Calif., resident happily notes that they are all online – on figment.com, a free share-your-writing Web site geared toward teens. She has no idea how long her stories are (figment measures length in minutes, not pages) but says her biggest tale, a sci-fi “work-in-progress” called Dark, currently takes 24 minutes to read. She is in no rush to publish her work on paper – “because I’m so young,” she says. “I’ll sit back for a couple of years.”
She is likely to be spending her usual hour-plus a day on the online salon for years to come. After all, an anonymous angel investor just gave $1 million to Figment, co-founded and named by New Yorker writer Dana Goodyear and former Conde Nast editor Jacob Lewis. (The word “figment,” says Lewis, “captured the creative message of the site.”)
Goodyear, who got the idea from a New Yorker story she wrote about Japanese teens who wrote stories on their cell phones, is the volunteer “editor at large.” Lewis is its CEO. “The money allows us to keep going,” says Goodyear. As of June 1, Figment – based on Manhattan’s Upper East Side – will employ seven full-time workers.
Since Figment launched publicly on December 6, after a “closed” beta test, it has grown to 35,000 registered users who have posted 80,000 pieces of writing. “We believe it can be exponentially larger,” Lewis says.
Every week some 1,000 to 2,000 new members sign up, and every day users post 500 or so new stories and poems. They also read each other’s work and give constructive criticism. A typical user spends 15 minutes each visit and views 18 pages. Twenty percent of users return more than 200 times a month. “People don’t just come and dump and leave,” says Lewis. “Many people come and write serially.”
Figment users welcome feedback from each other – and click the “edit” button and tweak their stories if they agree with the suggestions they receive. “There are a lot of people with shrewd eyes,” says Goodyear. “There’s a lot of cheerleading that goes on, too.” It is, she says, “a place to have their work and show their work and get comments from like-minded people.”
Seventy percent of users are 13 to 18 (13 is the site's minimum age for users), and Goodyear identifies with them. Figment is based on “my own experience as someone who was once a 15-year-old with a notebook,” she says. How old is she today? “Now I’m a 35-year-old with a notebook!” (She is also the mother of a future Figment user – a nine-month-old.)
Users of all ages come to Figment to read free stories, exchange comments with other writers, and post their pieces in a friendly space. "I was looking for a safe environment to publish some stories to see what people thought of them," says Sophie Jones, an 18-year-old high school senior in Williamstown, Mass., who had tried sites such as fanfiction. “I wanted to actually meet and interact with other writers – swap ideas, discuss character names and traits – not just read their work.”
The site is a work in progress, with Figment developers constantly trying to make it easier to navigate. To find fiction, for example, figment.com users can now search the site’s library by category – such as cyberpunk, dystopian, historical, memoir, or poetry.
To inspire its young authors, Figment often uses contests. “Everybody likes a bit of healthy competition,” Goodyear says. “[But] it’s a creative community, not a competitive community. The contests essentially are writing prompts.” For this year's school library month theme of “create your own story,” Figment worked with the American Association of School Librarians on four writing contests (one per week). “It worked out perfectly,” says Jennifer Habley, who manages Web communications and social networking for the AASL.
And a current contest, which runs through May 23, asks Figment users to write an 800-words-or-less story involving at least one character who travels through time. Later this month a new competition – judged by Paolo Coehlo, author of The Alchemist – will ask writers to pen a fable.
Coehlo is not the only big name associated with the site. Bloggers include Scott Westerfeld, Meg Cabot, and Lauren Oliver. How did Figment get them? “We just asked,” Lewis says. “We do a lot of work with publishers… We believe Figment can become this home for readers and writers.”
This fall Figment plans to produce a paperback of Dream School, a YA novel by Girl and Exile author Blake Nelson that is an original title first published in serialized form on its Web site. For distribution, it will work with Publishers Group West. Lewis has not yet decided how many copies to produce. “We’ll look at the print run as a limited-edition print run,” he says. “It’s less about us becoming a publisher and more about us experimenting with different formats.”
Meanwhile, publishers are providing free excerpts from novels, including the Clique series. (Plunkett discovered – and then bought – that series this way.) Currently Figment users can read “Abstinence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder,” a short story by Jennifer Knight, excerpted from her Truth & Dare collection. “This is an audience they [publishers] are very interested in,” says Goodyear. “We can offer something valuable, and it’s giving our community what they want.”
It’s easy to figure out the site’s popular authors based on how many “hearts” they receive online. Plunkett talks about “people who are famous Figment” because they have the “most hearted books.” These authors are Emily Kane, the Drew sisters, and Coolio Dash, whose oeuvre is “like four minutes,” says Plunkett. (Actually, figment.com says Dash’s story “Coffee” – which boasts 789 hearts, and counting – is 1,846 words and takes approximately nine minutes to read.)
Over the next six months or so, figment.com plans to roll out “closed groups” – the equivalent of reading groups or book groups. “That will make the site more usable for creative writing teachers,” says Goodyear. Currently all 70 students taking a class at the University of California at Riverside are posting their assignments on figment.com.
Writers self-publish on the site and do not receive any payment. In the future, perhaps some of the young authors could sell their pieces as Kindle “singles.” But the site’s contents will remain free, Goodyear insists. “It’s philosophically important to us that it be free to read on Figment.”
