Bubble Berry: Be a Man · 12:27am Mar 8th, 2012
So, the February Writing Contest is now over. The fics have been returned to their respective owners, including me. This is a massive relief for me, even though I didn't place (My story does show up third in the group though, at the top of the first page. Useful!) I can finally talk about what I wrote, instead of keeping it under wraps.
My entry was titled "Bubble Berry: Be a Man", and can now be found listed under my stories. It's a bit different from my usual fare, and was originally going to be even more different. The day before the contest began, I made a small list of different story ideas that had bouncing around in my head, in the hopes that one of them would be similar enough to one of the prompts that I could tweak it. I don't know if that defeated the intent of the contest, but I did it anyway.
Ideas on my list included:
"Giant monsters that only Twilight can see attack Ponyville. Is she the world's only hope, or has she just gone crazy?"
"Spike faces discrimination for being the only heterosexual in Ponyville."
"Fluttershy makes it big in the Gangsta' Rap scene."
When I saw the prompts, I was disappointed. Not because I couldn't apply them to the contest, but because I felt they were restrictive and unoriginal. How many stories could you right about a fire in the Everfree Forest, anyway? (Answer, around 241/3, apparently)
I decided I could write the first one in a pinch, but I didn't have a solid plan for it, and I didn't think I could fit it in under 10,000 words. So, brainstorming with the other Bronies at my school, I came up with some ideas that could work:
"Derpy gets a pet Fire Demon."
"The Mane 6, while experimenting with the Elements of Harmony, accidentally banish themselves to the moon for a thousand years."
"The mane six go on vacation, forcing the pets to save Ponyville."
-Buck to the Future: Derpy finds herself being erased from history."
While these new ideas were fun to think about, I didn't think I could actually write a story about any of them in a week. (Made worse by the fact that the week of the contest coincided with Finals Week at my school.) Going back through my original list, I spotted one I had initially discarded, because it didn't fit any of the prompts:
"Bubble Berry asks Rainbow Blitz for advice on how to be manlier after he endures gay-bashing."
Now, clearly this was the idea that ended up becoming "Bubble Berry: Be a Man," but I want to clarify that the story originally was very different. In my original idea for the story:
1. Presto (Trixie) wasn't in it at all. Neither was Angel Bunny.
2. Bubble Berry actually was gay, and had a crush on Rainbow Blitz to boot.
3. It would have ended with Rainbow Blitz standing up for Bubble Berry in front of Berry's parents.
So yeah, the story was going to be a lot darker originally.
I began to like the idea of a monster attacking Ponyville in the story, however, because I saw it as an opportunity to show how Berry trying to change his behavior just got him in trouble. I wanted Berry to take an idea on how to be manlier from each of the other four ponies (Elusive, Butterscotch, Dusk Shine, and Applejack), and during the fight against the monster, each of the cues would backfire. Eventually Berry would learn to incorporate what he had been told without changing his personality (for example, he would learn how to be meek from Butterscotch without feeling compelled.) However, I wasn't able to come up with advice from all the ponies, and it wouldn't have fit in the word limit, so I lumped Dusk Shine and Butterscotch together and cut Applejack's lesson entirely. (Applejack was going to take Berry apple bucking, but Berry was going to hurt his hoof, which would cause him to trip during the fight against Angel.)
When I began writing, I didn't know what the monster was yet. I later went back and added the scenes with Presto once I had that figured out. In the first scene, Presto uses a spell to listen in on a conversation between Dusk Shine and Butterscotch. Originally, this spell was going to make a comeback at the end of the story, when it was revealed that the spell was still active, causing Presto to endure just as much pain as Angel from the noise attacks. When the scene came, however, Presto was nowhere to be found.
Since the week of the contest was Finals Week at my school, the vast majority of the story was written on the last day of the contest. I didn't sleep the last night, and I was messed up for days. I am never doing that again.
I learned a couple of other lessons from this experience, the first and foremost being "Don't put off writing a 10k word assignment until the day before it's due." A close second would be "I cannot write comedy." These are both good things to learn, so I suppose I would call the contest a success.
BRO!!!!!!!!!!!! YOU NEED TO RIGHT IT THE ORIGONAL WAY YOU WERE GONNA WRITE IT!!! THAT WOULDA BEEN MUCH BETTER!!!! Not to say the actual story wasnt good, but Berry/Blitz shipping woulda been better. PLEASE WRITE THIS!!!
