Interview: Sean Collins on The Outbreak

For writer Sean T. Collins, the zombie outbreak ended around last Christmas. That’s when he posted the final entry in his zombie-fiction-as-blog experiment The Outbreak.

The story, which was introduced gradually after the blog started as if it was an extension of his regular writing, stretched for nearly a year and was the “real” blog of a writer named Sean Collins who chronicled life during a zombie plague.

In his non-zombie life, Collins is a freelance writer from Long Island whose work has appeared in Giant, The Comics Journal, and most recently Wizard. (He’s also written for DBS. You may remember his piece on the video for Michael Jackson’s Thriller from last All Hallow’s Month.)

After nearly nine months to digest and reflect on the Outbreak, I interviewed Sean about the project, his goals, and how he straddled the line between fiction and sometimes-disturbing reality.

DBS: How did you get thinking about this project? What was the genesis of the idea?

STC: I guess I started the blog to fulfill a handful of different needs for me. When I started it in the winter of 2005, I’d discontinued my once and current blog Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat because it had mostly been a comics blog and my new-ish job in the industry precluded me from blogging about comics anymore. Meanwhile I wasn’t doing a whole lot of actual writing at my day job, and I was feeling frustrated about the comics scriptwriting I was doing in my free time. So that introductory post on The Outbreak, which explained the blog’s creation as an attempt to remedy my “writer’s funk,” was actually telling the truth, if not the whole truth.

Meanwhile I’d started thinking a lot more about horror. I’d been a buff for a long while, but after I graduated college and got married I’d watch horror movies and think about horror in general a lot less than I used to. I’d go through these periods where I’d want to re-engage with the genre, which in the past had led to things like a big month-long horror-blogging marathon I did in October of 2003. This was before the horror blogosphere sorta realized it existed and started making connections with each other, you know? So I had horror on the brain.

And like most horror fans these days, I love zombies. The remake of Dawn of the Dead in particular became one of those movies that I’d watch over and over again, like if my wife went out to run errands I’d throw it on and eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and watch those first twenty minutes or so. I’m guessing that the mockumentary-style opening credits sequence first put the idea in my head of doing a faux “real life” take on zombies.

At some point I also realized that one of the big sticking points for a lot of horror fiction is that it’s saddled relatively underdeveloped characters. Creating a first-person autobiographical narrative with myself and my friends and family as the main characters, sticking as close to our actual real lives and personalities as is possible in a story about undead cannibals, would help overcome that–obviously I know myself and the people I care about pretty well and would never run out of details that would make our “characters” pretty convincing. Plus, I really admired autobio writers who went completely balls-out, like my wife did and does on her own blog. So if I managed to be really open and honest and unflinching on the autobio side of things like she was, it’d give the horror an extra uncomfortable edge, I figured. On the flipside, anyone who’s read as many alternative comics as I have toys with autobio on occasion, and the one autobio comic I’d written had a sort of horrific tinge to it that was what made it worth doing in the first place to me. I realized that injecting a full-fledged horror-fiction element into an autobio story would make it a lot more fun and attractive to me. Which is not to say that I’m not as in love with myself as all autobio creators are–the length of this answer is a pretty good piece of evidence that I am–just that this would set it apart from more straightforward navel-gazing, which I dug.

At a certain point all these factors coalesced in my head and boom, all of a sudden, “zombie blog” popped in there. When it did, it seemed to me to be such a great idea that a) I couldn’t believe *I’d* come up with it, and b) I couldn’t POSSIBLY believe no one else had come up with it. So I did some Googling, and to my complete surprise and delight I couldn’t find anything like it. I guess I wasn’t quite thorough enough because eventually I did find similar efforts, but they were much more focused on a sort of militaristic gun-toting guy/last man on Earth/waging war against zombies kinda thing, and if I was gonna keep it autobiographical that’d never be me anyway, so it worked out. Anyway, when I established to my satisfaction that this would be sort of a first, I sent an email to my best friend and alltooflat.com webmaster Ken Bromberg saying, “I have an idea: a blog written in first person, chronicling my life during a zombie apocalypse.” He thought it was a great idea, so that was really that. After a few days of hashing out in my head exactly how to do it–the idea of maintaining the blog completely normally for a month or so before introducing the zombies, for example–I created the blogspot blog and got to work.

Clearly doing this as a blog invites a certain amount of participation from the audience in creating the fiction. How did that affect your thinking about the work? What were your hopes for the reader participation?

Beyond a vague hope that maybe someone would create another blog and set it in my “world,” I’m not sure it did affect my thinking about the work, really. But obviously I made a conscious choice to keep the comments open in all the entries. The stuff that other people pitched in would give me something to talk about, which was definitely a plus if I was stuck for a development that particular day. And it also added an extra layer of verisimilitude to the proceedings. That was a big concern of mine, actually, in large part because I had to construct a scenario that was widespread and devastating but not SO devastating that, y’know, I wouldn’t have Internet access and Blogger would be down. And Blogger went down enough when there weren’t thousands of flesh-eating zombies running around killing people, so I really gave them the benefit of the doubt here. But yeah, I liked having other people contribute. Like a big crowd scene in Times Square in a Troma film, it added a sense of production values, if that makes sense. Plus, I thought seeing how people would interact under these circumstances would be a worthwhile aspect of the scenario to investigate.

When you’re writing, you’re pretty much god of your world. By opening it up the way you did, you lose that control. Was giving that much input to others, even to people you’d never met or talked to about the project, a scary step to take?

I wouldn’t say it was scary, no, because it really was limited to the comment threads. It’s not like people could post in the main body of the blog. If I liked what they were adding to the story I could incorporate it into my entries, but I didn’t have to. And if I really DIDN’T like what they were adding, I could always delete it, or close comments, or something like that. So I was still god, you know? Just a slightly more democratic one than we’re accustomed to, I guess.

It seemed like in some cases people were taking the ideas you’d put forward even farther than you wanted to take them. Is that true? How did you deal with that?

Yeah, definitely. Like I said, I really felt I had a very narrow window of feasibility in which to work because of the nature of what I was doing. The zombie outbreak–I chose that word pretty fortuitously because “apocalypse” would have connoted something a lot more total–or plague or whatever could never be SO bad that it would shut down the Internet. Electricity, Blogger, cable or dial-up or however you wanted to get on to the Internet to post–all those things had to remain intact or it wouldn’t make any sense for me to be blogging, obviously. So when people would comment about entire regions being destroyed or really huge-scale destruction of civilization, I’d have to clamp it down. Not always, of course. A good friend of mine from high school developed a really compelling narrative in the comments about holing up with a group of his anarchist friends in Seattle, which he said had been pretty much completely overrun along with much of the Pacific Northwest. But that actually made sense with the epidemiology I’d constructed in my head for the zombie outbreak. The idea, which I never revealed on the blog because there’s no way some random guy from Long Island would ever know this, was that the Indonesian earthquake and tsunami from December of 2004 had unearthed some sort of virus that laid dormant for some time and then sprang into action at a certain point when people who’d been exposed to it died. So the Pacific Northwest and the West Coast generally, which has more people traveling to and from Asia, would be harder hit, I thought. That worked. Anything that didn’t, I dismissed as rumor or hearsay or even deliberate lies. And that worked too, because a big part of what I wanted to address in The Outbreak was the notion that tragedy and catastrophe and death are not inherently ennobling, and that instead of being Jake Weber’s character from Dawn of the Dead (or, on the flipside, some total nutjob psychopath a la some of the bad guys from The Stand) we’re just as likely to be the asshole guy who ditches them when the bus flips over, or Barbara from Night of the Living Dead, or (this might have been the biggest touchstone of all for me) Bill Paxton’s Marine character from Aliens. We might react in a really venal way, we might be mean or cowardly, we might just fall apart. So it made sense in that framework for people to post their Mad Max fantasies, which is what I labeled them at one point.

The other thing I had to watch out for was people posting information they wouldn’t realistically have. But more accurately I was concerned about people, including me, posting about information in ways they wouldn’t realistically have done. Like, in regular run-of-the-mill blogs, if Madonna was assassinated or something, people wouldn’t all run to their blogs and post “Madonna was assassinated today.” All their readers would already know that. With that in mind I really worked hard not to spell out the big events going down in my fictional world, especially in those really key first few days when I tried as hard as I could to reconstruct what it might be like to blog with such events going down. I actually went through some other blogs’ archives to 9/11 and the days and weeks thereafter to get a sense of how people talked about such an enormous catastrophe, and obviously very few people said anything like “the World Trade Center has been attacked.” But you could learn that, you could see the outline of that in the negative space created by their other entries. That’s what I tried to do, to the extent that I carried that style over into talking about events that other people WOULDN’T know about, which you’ll see if you read over the last few entries in which my family is literally destroyed–I don’t think I ever said exactly what happened and who did what to whom.

If I felt like someone’s post really flew in the face of that, or of anything else I was trying to do, I’d delete it. I think there were a couple of times where I’d delete a comment because of an infraction of some sort, but thought it was so good aside from that that I’d copy it and email the commenter and ask them to repost an edited version. And I think they did!

Given that you’d chosen to make this a participatory exercise, did you ever feel that you didn’t have the right to move the story back onto your plan, or that you should let the experiment run?

Oh no, not at all. In my mind it was always mine to run, in terms of developing the story and moving it along. My only fear was that those commenters whose stuff I would call lies or whatever would see this as an insult to them, which wasn’t my intention at all! I just wanted to make it work, and this gave me a way to do it.

You included a lot of real events in your fiction - Hurricane Katrina, links to other real blogs, maybe real events from your life, etc. Why did you do that?

The autobiographical elements were integral to the whole project, like I said. It got me around the biggest hurdle for genre writing, which is coming up with a character who’s an actual character and not just a puppet you move around and put in the way of your cloned dinosaurs or whatever. And even aside from that, I really liked the notion of “autobiographical horror.” I’d say both halves of that phrase were equally important to me. As for Hurricane Katrina and things like that, I really couldn’t ignore them even if I wanted to. Hurricane Katrina would have happened even if New Orleans had already been under zombie attack for several months, you know? And it just so happened that several real-life events–Katrina, but also Iraq, and being in New York during the aftermath of 9/11 a few years ago–provided a pretty good window into the different ways people really do deal with catastrophe and violence and death on a scale that really disrupts life as we know it. The real-life Katrina narrative in particular was really constructed like a horror movie in those early days and weeks, especially before they cleared out the Superdome and you had people talking about cannibalism and what not. A lot of that turned out to be urban mythmaking and news media self-aggrandizement, unfortunately, but even more unfortunately a good deal of it was true, and at the time you didn’t know for sure either way. And my best friend from college really was made homeless by that hurricane and was impossible to reach for several days, so that certainly added to the sense of urgency about it. So basically I had to incorporate the Hurricane itself into the fiction to make it realistic, which was always a big concern of mine, but even if I could have ignored it, I probably wouldn’t have. It just spoke way too directly to the fears about human behavior in the face of death that I was trying to address for me to possibly ignore.

How did you manage the line between fiction and reality? What was too much truth or not enough?

There wasn’t much I left out. In addition to large-scale national situations like Katrina and the war, by sheer, awful coincidence, my real-life family actually did fall apart that year. Maybe I sensed it from afar and that inspired some of the more unpleasant stuff I talked about even before the shit really hit the fan with my folks, I don’t know. But my grandfather really did die, and that set off a chain of events that culminated with my parents splitting up in a fashion that, to put it judiciously, has been acrimonious and painful for everyone involved. Also, my wife really is anorexic, as she’s chronicled with pretty stunning candor on her own blog, so her issues with that, and our issues in general, were natural touchstones too. As for my own problems, my biggest fear, my sort of existential fear, is that there are some things you can do or mistakes you can make that can never, ever be fixed. You can’t make up for them, you can’t make amends for them, you can’t undo them, you can’t fix them. You’re left with the consequences for the rest of your life. The guilt of that haunts me and frightens me more than any zombie. So that’s really what the blog became about–finding and focusing on anything I’d done in my life that had me frightened that it might be irrevocable and unsolvable and disastrous. Sexual issues and issues of loyalty and trust and fidelity and a fear that I might never be successful as a writer were a big part of that, so I tried to address them pretty frankly.

Actually, I cranked all of these things to 11 in some respects. The clearest example is that I am not, in fact, an alcoholic. And no, that’s not denial–I’m really not. But I’ve seen alcoholism and its effects up close, and I also saw aspects of myself, negative and hurtful aspects, that would be highlighted by alcoholism and pill-popping and such. So I gave myself a monkey. I had at least one friend write to me congratulating me for starting to take the steps, so I guess the autobiographical stuff that WAS true was really convincing.

One of the things that’s always said about zombie stories - to the point of cliche, to my ears - is that they reveal everyday people to be the real monsters, that what we’re all capable of is actually the most frightening. You mention that one of your friends wrote to congratulate on dealing with issues related to drinking. Did your writing The Outbreak revealed some things in you, your family, your friends that you didn’t know where there? Not, of course, that any of you were monsters, but instead revealing things that were previously hidden or held back in these relationships?

You know what? Maybe it did. As it turns out a lot of the worst-case-scenario reactions to tragedy that I ascribed to our fictional counterparts ended up being more or less accurate when real-life emotional turmoil struck. But I’m not sure if that’s a case of revealing things I didn’t know were there. All along, I was writing about what I feared, in my heart of hearts, was already present in myself and in everyone, really.

Were you ever concerned about being _too_ revealing or honest about your life and your family’s? Were there lines you didn’t feel comfortable crossing?

Yeah, definitely. I was actually a lot more gingerly about people outside my family, though–I was much more thorough about changing their names, for example, though a big reason why I did that less for the family members (my wife, for example) was because I figured I’d naturally lapse into calling them by their real names and it’d be a pain in the neck to remember their noms d’Outbreak all the time. But if I recall correctly, I avoided a lot of specifics about my family members’ jobs and things like that, and I didn’t really go into great detail about what emotional problems each of them faces. It seemed like it worked better from a storytelling perspective to be a little oblique about it anyway, in the sense that it gave the readers a little more work to do in trying to comprehend what was happening with and to the characters. And now that I think of it, maybe not giving everyone in my family the equivalent of a G.I. Joe filecard with their bio and abilities on it it made it easier for the readers to draw comparisons with people in their own lives.

Did you plan the whole story out from the beginning? Did you know how it would end?

I’m pretty sure that no, I didn’t, not from the very beginning. I didn’t know how long I’d make it last, that’s for sure. But around the half-way mark I decided there were a couple of options for ending it, one of which would be me dying and my wife writing the last entry, and one of which would be us driving across country to find the rest of her family out in Colorado. I ended up going with that, because it fit best with another idea I had about how the story should end, namely that the zombie outbreak itself should end. Aside from, like, the final five minutes of 28 Days Later, I’d never seen or heard of a zombie story that raised the issue of a world after a zombie plague. I’m sure there must be some–I just haven’t seen it. So I wanted to leave things open to address that at some unspecified future point, which I may still do. (I also might adapt the whole story into a podcast or a comic or both, while we’re on that subject.) But even aside from that, I thought the notion that this whole awful situation which either ended or fundamentally ruined the lives of everyone on Earth was basically over in the space of nine months made it extra horrifying. What the hell was the point of all that, then? It’s just now occurring to me that I thought that exact thought when reading a couple of dystopian novels lately and wondering aloud whether dystopias that fall are in some way even worse than dystopias that are eternal. There’s something about impermanence that, to me, is kind of pathetic and awful. So naturally that’s the ending I gravitated towards! The final straw was when I realized that since the actual zombie outbreak itself began on Good Friday or so, completely coincidentally I might add, I could have it end on Christmas. I don’t normally like to play little hidden-easter-egg parlor games like that, but it was too good to pass up.

I loved the way you laid the groundwork for the fiction - starting the blog out like a regular blog, writing about CDs and movies and things, lulling readers into a certain expectation and security. Because of that, when I read that first post about the zombies, the one about the man banging on the door of the house, I was really freaked out. Since I knew a bit about you, but not the blog, I thought it was a true story! Did you get much email about that in the early days - people thinking it was real?

Oh yeah, lots! And I can’t even begin to tell you how rewarding that was as a writer. When people think there really is a half-eaten dead body on your front lawn and that earless people are trying to break through your front door, you know you’ve done a pretty good job! And it wasn’t just Internet friends, y’know, fellow bloggers or people we knew on message boards whatever. My wife’s best friend got in touch to make sure everything was okay. And she lived in Manhattan at the time! So we had people who knew us in real life and lived where these events were taking place convinced. I am beaming just thinking about it.

Do you think these kinds of projects point a direction for new kinds of fiction, or the future of fiction, as pretentious as that may sound?

Hmm. I think they point A direction, A future, I guess, but certainly not THE direction of THE future. I’m no Scott McCloud. I do a lot of reading online, but very little of it is fiction of any kind, prose or comics or even more Web-centric stuff like The Outbreak. I don’t think anything will ever take the place of the thrill and satisfaction of holding the actual object, the actual container of the fiction, in your two hands and flipping the pages as you read. But that being said, shit yeah, there’s probably endless potential for doing stories of this nature, taking advantage of the architecture of the Internet. If I had been more ambitious–especially after I discovered Eric Heisserer’s wonderful, multi-tiered Web-horror creation The Dionaea House, I’d have had friends construct parallel blogs, I’d have photoshopped pictures and created a Flickr account, I’d have used IMs and LJs and emails, I’d have spread the fiction into every nook and cranny that the Internet makes available to us and told the story in all sorts of ways.

One of the big thrills of creating The Outbreak, in fact, was that it sort of helped link up many of the sites that we now collectively think of as the horror blogosphere. I remember writing about how you linked to both The Outbreak and Dracula Blogged on your blog at the time, and thereby discovering a bunch of other sites through comment threads and referrer logs and blogrolls, and seeing other horror bloggers do the same, until it expanded into the monstrosity we know and love today. And one thing it quickly taught me is that horror will ooze into any available space, from scary eBay item descriptions to haunted livejournals like Laylasweetie to God knows what else. It’s all just begging to be taken advantage of, and people should, and people will.

Any plans to do something like this again?

Nothing concrete, I guess. But like I said I may return to The Outbreak itself, whether to adapt it to some other medium or to continue the story in the post-zombie world. And I really came to enjoy the style I used here of focusing on the lives of the people affected by the horror elements rather than on the horror elements themselves; I don’t think the story was any less horrific for that, you know? So even if I don’t ever do another first-person mockumentary-style “autobiographical horror” project, I could end up applying a lot of what I learned while writing The Outbreak to a lot of other stories. I certainly hope to.