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| READ OTHER PEOPLE'S DARKEST SECRETS AND LET LOOSE WITH Y0UR OWN By Joe Shepter "I used to be afraid of swallowing orange seeds because I was worried I'd start to grow an orange tree. Does that make me weird?"
Everyone's got a confession to make, and Derek Powazek's interactive story site, the Fray is just the place to do it. "The Web is really just about getting people to talk to each other," he says. Believe it. For three years, more than five thousand people have been using the Fray as a clean, well-lighted place to share their deepest, darkest secrets. Content, which rotates monthly, consists of a single story based around one of four topics: crime, hope, drugs, and work. The stories feature frank talk about dead people, confessions of minor crimes, and details about, um, first experiences of various sorts.
Literary ability may not be crucial to getting a story published on The Fray, but honesty is. "The stories must be written in the first person, and they must be true," says Powazek, who gets more than two hundred submissions every month, only one of which ends up online.
The stories should also provoke a few thoughts, because the chat that comes afterward forms the real focal point of the site. To get things going, Powazek takes a theme from each piece and turns it into a question. One popular chat list asked what people found interesting about themselves. In reply, someone wrote, "I used to be interesting...then I moved to Arizona." "I'm a Web designer," another said, "some people think that's interesting." "Well," declared a third, "two thirds of my left leg is made out of titanium." Ok, for the non-communicative or the uninitiated, the success of the Fray is an inevitable question. Maybe the answer has a little more to do with Powazek than he's willing to admit.
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