bits and pieces · 2:41am Oct 30th, 2020
The best way to grow as a writer, I'm told, is to challenge yourself. Deliberately try to do something different. Unfamiliar genres, Oblique Strategies, artificial conditions, whatever.
I've been struggling to write of late, as you may or may not have noticed. With all the stuff going on in the world, and the fandom fracturing a few months back, and the show gone, it's been difficult to find the motivation to do anything here. But I do kind of miss writing. I forced myself to do something back in the summer, and while the general consensus seems to be that Seven of Cups didn't turn out particularly good, well, at least I wrote it, and finished it, and it is a thing that exists. Which puts it ahead of all the half-finished and half-started bits and pieces adorning my alarmingly thick folder of unfinished, unpublished stories.
(I also entered a Flashfic 150 contest back in June, maybe I'll post my entry somewhere on here at some point. Somepony remind me!)
Anyway. A friend of mine is running a Hallowe'en speedwrite contest, and I've never tried either of those things (at least not formally - I usually write pretty quickly anyway, so a lot of my stories are effectively unofficial speedwrites already), so I thought, hey, why not give that a go? Not in terms of actually entering the contest or anything, goodness, no, far too much pressure. But I wondered if it might be good to jolt myself out of what could laughably be called my "comfort zone" (more accurately, the Usual Sort of Thing I Write). See if it makes me come up with something other than talky and slow and contemplative slice of life stuff. See how it goes, no pressure. That kind of thing.
With crushing obviousness, what I've got is another half-started idea. Turns out even when I'm trying to write something unsettling and... well, if not horror as such, then faintly horror-adjacent, it ends up as an outline for a talky and slow and contemplative slice of life thing, just with blood instead of pocketwatches or rain or prosthetic limbs or chamomile tea.
I do think it's an interesting idea, though. On the surface, it's about Luna and Celestia in retirement, and the mystery and future of Luna's batpony guards. But the interesting (to me) part is that it's actually not one outline, it's two - I want to tell two stories covering the same events in the same period of time, but each following a different main character, crossing over in places but mostly showing what each Princess Emeritus was doing "off screen" during the events of the other story.
In my head, I'd publish it as two independent, standalone stories (working titles: In the Blood and Do Not Be Afraid), and mark them both as being the sequel of the other (which is apparently a thing you can do!), and you could read them in either order. Or, indeed, only read one and not the other, if you so chose, or if you thought the first one you picked was not interesting enough to merit investigating the second.
Anyhow, this struck me as a really fun challenge, although it's probably been done lots of times.
(When Red/Yellow was featured on Equestria Daily, one of the sarcastic comments read "Wow, finally, a story about Sunset's human counterpart! [rolleyes emoji]", or something along those lines. The perils of arriving late, especially when there are already, like, a million stories here. Still, up yours, I'm proud of that story.)
So, who knows? Maybe I'll get that project up and ready soon; I'm kind of excited to at least try.
Before all of that, though, I still need to finish and publish Âme Câline, my obtusely-titled, long-teased Starlight/Trixie cuddle romance which I keep stopping because I second-guess myself and decide I'm not happy with it. Again, soon. Soon.
tl;dr: Still here, not dead, new stories soon maybe, love you all, stay strong, keep on keeping on, &c.
YAY
Okay I’m now mega hype for all three!
Good luck with the writing!
And thanks. :)
The best way to grow, maybe, but I don't remember the bit where growing was compulsory. The best way to be a writer, as far as I'm aware, is merely to write something. Everything else is just details.
True, I'm intending to grow, but the trouble with challenges is that, if they end up being too hard, a lot of the fun goes down the drain. Making progress and having some structure is satisfying, but we're not doing life-or-death work or anything essential, so making it unpleasant and taxing is kinda defeating the point of doing it.
I generally try something like what you mention here: there's a rough "canon" to my fics and each one connects with others in various ways, but they can still be read as standalones. It's similar to references: it should be possible to enjoy the story without them, but anyone who gets the reference gets an extra bonus reward on top of that. I've never had a straight sequel to something, though I wouldn't mind trying someday.
If we weren't allowed to do what's been done before, time travel stories would have stopped with H. G. Wells. Originality is such a slippery concept at the best of times (it's not even a guarantee of quality, anyway) that I just say hang the sense of it and do whatever you want.
In any case, I rarely if ever read Equestria Daily comments. They're rarely that illuminating or intelligent (one fic I submitted got nothing but Captain Obvious comments about its cover image, which was frankly a waste of a read, and a waste of a write too on their part).
Not something to take for granted in this day and age.
Well, whatever you do - write chamomile-tea-drinking horror, finish a cuddle fic, and so on - I at least wish you every enjoyment.