8 Questions for... Claudia Befu

Story Voyager

Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

Tea-fulled, climate fiction, prize-winning writer

Claudia Befu

was born at 340 ppm. She welcomes you to Story Voyager, an ‘intelligent, almost spiritual’ fiction newsletter for all sci-fi and climate-interested readers where you’ll find gripping dystopian stories with strong female protagonists, a diverse cast and stellar world building.

1. Why Substack?

Let’s call this a pandemic love affair! It was August 2020 and I had just finished my master’s degree in screenwriting. My remote job was very slow and the illusion of freedom offered by the sunny summer days ended abruptly at the beginning of fall with a new wave of covid cases and quarantine. I spent my free time watching Netflix, writing whenever the muse struck and following tea nerds on Instagram. One of them happened to write fiction and she opened a Substack. The platform looked a bit sketchy back then and I didn’t quite get its use but the newsletters started trickling in my inbox and eventually I opened them. She was a good writer! And I guess this was when Substack piqued my interest for the first time.

At some point, recommendations were introduced and I realized that, hey, there are more writers here! I found and subscribed to Elle Griffin. Her enthusiasm for serializing fiction on Substack was contagious and I couldn’t help it, I had to give it a try. At the end of September 2022, I quit my toxic relationship with Netflix and started my own Substack. I don’t regret it. After almost two years, it’s still going strong!

2. How long did it take you to find your groove?

It took me a while to understand that writing fiction is not the same as writing a weekly newsletter. Once I stopped trying to do both, I found my groove on Substack.

3. How has it changed you?

I successfully wrote and published poetry for many years. I wrote a theater play that was produced in 2019. During my screenwriting study I wrote screenplays and developed several story ideas. Nothing has prepared me for writing and publishing serialized fiction directly to an audience. This is not for the faint of heart. But Substack’s fiction community is very supportive, there are many talented writers here and I feel like we inspire and challenge each other to write our best work.

Perhaps the biggest change for me is that I don’t wait any longer for inspiration to strike. I’ve learned that if I’m unwilling to sweat at my keyboard every single day, there’s little else I can do to become a fiction writer. Or, to paraphrase Edison, ‘Writing fiction is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration’.

4. What mistakes have you made?

When I joined Substack, there was this idea in the fiction community that ‘fiction doesn’t work on Substack’. I poured hundreds of hours into creating a non-fiction side to my newsletter before I finally took the time to reflect on what I wanted to get out of my fiction newsletter. It’s so easy to get distracted by all the shiny bright ideas we get when we look at other people’s work. But their work is not our work. And perhaps this is one of the biggest downsides of social media and online platforms. This irresistible pull to imitate others and to reduce everything to a common denominator. We are more creative than that! We must allow ourselves to soar higher.

5. To pay or not to pay?

I found a soft spot in between where everything a subscriber gets in their inbox is free but on the blog I put things behind a paywall after a while mainly because I want to publish them in other formats at some point. I’m at the beginning of my career as a writer and my focus now is on writing and finishing a couple of books before I can start thinking about money. Growing a fiction Substack is difficult and I’m still figuring things out.

6. What artistic and technical choices have you made?

I’m happy that I started by writing short stories. It was not by choice, my first book is a collection of interlinked short stories with recurring characters and an overarching plot. But I soon realized that Substack as a medium is more suitable for short stories. The attention span and retention are lower when we read online on our devices. And Substack doesn’t have a good reading experience for longform fiction. I read a book on Substack and it was the most frustrating experience. But I do see fiction podcasts as a good alternative.

I also like getting feedback from my readers in real time, especially for my worldbuilding, and I try to involve readers as much as possible. Their reactions inform me about which aspects of my secondary world are the most interesting and this leads to creative ideas. For example, I’ve added some episodes to my cli-fi series that I call letters from the future and which are written from the perspective of secondary characters from the short stories. Readers can vote which character will write the letter. I will also use another aspect of my worldbuilding, a Museum of Life, to create a virtual exhibition exploring ‘Memories of Life and Death on the Dust Road’ which will manifest as a companion book for my series. I love the exponential effect of Substack on my creativity.

7. What’s been the effect on your writing?

Simply put, I started writing fiction because I joined Substack. I’ve been developing my story ideas and secondary world for the past decade but joining this platform has given me the push to finally write them. These are very personal stories, deeply rooted in my view of the world and how I feel about our current struggles with climate change and biodiversity loss. I think that we need a new blueprint for living on this planet and I mean this in the most philosophical and spiritual way even though I write science fiction. We need to change the way we view ourselves, our relationship with nature and our place in the world. These are the themes I explore in my writing and the feedback I received from readers so far has been fantastic.

8. In it for the long haul?

Substack will always be my fiction newsletter but I don’t know if I’ll publish all my fiction on Substack in the future.

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