FFS Media’s Guiding Values
Connection
Honesty
Joy
“WHAT DOES FFS MEDIA STAND FOR?”
When people ask me this, they’re usually curious about the “FFS” part. More precisely, they’re curious if “FFS” stands for what it usually does on the internet: “for fuck’s sake.”
Yes, it does.
It goes back to the guiding values.
Connection is hard. It may be the hardest thing humans can do, but it’s also the most important. It takes vulnerability and courage and compassion. Unfortunately, you inevitably get the snot kicked out of you when you practice those necessary qualities to forge real connection, and when that happens, I find it helpful to shout “For fuck’s sake!” and then keep on striving for genuine connection.
Honesty is messy. And if I’m being honest, which is sort of the point, speaking your truth usually results in people coming after you with pitchforks. Writers must do it anyway. Bring on the pitchforks. But when the villagers show up at your doorstep with torches in hand, might I suggest allowing yourself the indulgence of muttering, “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” before facing them down?
Joy is terrifying. But I can’t think of a more worthy reason to be terrified. And here’s the hard truth (I wasn’t kidding about the honesty): if you don’t find joy in your storytelling, you’re not going to last. There will be plenty of things that cross your path and try to steal your joy—reviewers, bills, even other authors. All of them will try to take up residence in your brain. And when you hear their poisonous voices trying to steal your joy, it’s quite all right, even advisable, to mutter, “For fuck’s sake, take a hike.”
Real threats to a writer’s sense of connection, honest expression, and ability to feel joy more than warrant the strong language.
FFS Media stands for story. Not just any story. Great, fleshed out stories that capture the reader's attention, create that spark of recognition, and leave people with a sense of having learned something important about the world. That's what I strive for in the fiction I write, and that's what I help other authors achieve through my Supercharge Your Series course and Story Alignment and Author Alignment consulting calls.
There's an internal drive in all of us to tell stories, but I believe writers especially have an added drive, a philanthropic one. We want to tell the stories that we wish someone had told us. We want to give our readers something that didn't exist before, something that we believe ought to exist.
It's that same drive that compels me to help other authors dig deeper into their well of brilliance to create stories that last, stories that not only stand out but deserve to be read for years to come. I'm not here to help people cash in on the latest sub-sub-subgenre craze, though if that's a byproduct of our time together, great. What I want to do is help authors create classics, books that stand the test of time because they mean something to those who read them.
That's what FFS stands for.
-Claire Taylor
Owner, Fiction Strategist & Author, FFS Media