Pony Fanfiction Thread

@Clever: Have what?

@ Kuroi: I like that second idea.

Doing something different has worked for me in the past, but I don't think it's a good idea right now. Every time I switch tasks is another chance to give up and go do something easier, like reading somebody else's story.

I used to use the "work on something else" strategy, but it's usually a very bad idea; it makes it harder to get into the mindset of the first story when one does return to it.

Lately I tend to use the "barf out the rest when the end is near" approach, but it's hardly ideal either.

If the story is really that hard to write, then you might consider if it needs restructuring. For me, the hardest parts to write tend to be the parts that are the most forced plotting-wise.

An Adorkable page

edited 30th Mar '15 5:37:12 PM by CleverPun

This one?

Woohoo! I've managed to crap out a whole two paragraphs of text that I'm sorta happy with, and it only took two days of concentrated effort! I wanna be a writer when I grow up, Mamma!

A very cute story, in honor of April 1st: http://www.fimfiction.net/story/179499/the-life-and-death-of-april-fool

This is why Celestia is best princess. Beeyotch.

Also, I finally started Alarm Clock. The original version, and just the first couple of chapters so far, but still pretty great. ("I dunno".) On to AoH!

edited 31st Mar '15 5:58:01 PM by YamiVizziniX

Yeah, "The Life and Death of April Fool" is basically the story that "Sunny Skies All Day Long" should have been.

Rough draft of Geomancy 01 is finished, just hoping for people to comb through it with comments and editing suggestions.

Starting 02. What is the most popular depictions of Trixie's dad?

edited 31st Mar '15 10:22:52 PM by God_of_Awesome

I got three in mind. The first is a rich snob who cut ties with Trixie when she started her traveling magician show because he thought it too low class for her.

Another is the same rich fellow but who hasn't cut ties, and is secretly supportive of her while appearing harsh to her, making her do her best.

The third is basically her grown up and eccentric but whom Trixie considers the greatest magician in the world. A loving relationship between father and daughter.

@santos: I see. Guess I must read the first post wrong.

There isn't a fanon consensus on that, to my knowledge

edited 31st Mar '15 11:58:31 PM by CleverPun

So I'm concocting an adaptation of Death in Venice, featuring Photo Finish. It's less than three hundred words long, so far, just a test of concept. Let me know if you see potential for a short story there.

well this is an odd take on a HIE story

'Sup, guys. I'm still alive. I haven't done any pony writing in over a month, haven't even read anything in a week or three, but I'm still alive!

Clever, that adventure-ish thing about ponies and gryphons of which you posted a snippet a bunch of pages back looked very interesting. Are you planning to write it?

As for Flash Fog, I remember I liked that story initially but disliked the later chapters. I'd have to reread bits and pieces of it to remember what caused my change of heart, though.

I've been thinking of writing a short one-shot to get around the wall of writer's block I've run into with AoH. One idea I'm considering right now is a story about Luna having a secret meeting with the gryphon president on board of an Equestrian warship at sea (working title: Gunboat Diplomacy). My problem, though, is that I tend to come up with a setting and an atmosphere first, rather than a plot – a process that rarely leads to a solid basis for a story.

(I swear I came up with the idea first and the title later.)

edited 1st Apr '15 12:29:08 PM by MidnightRambler

So I finally finished the first draft of chapter 3. Needs some work obviously, so if anybody has any suggestions they would be welcome.

@Midnight: I did make some progress on chapter two, actually (~300 words). Nearly at the action/fight scene. I've been in the middle of a thicket of homework, however, so I haven't been working on it too much.

It'll get done eventually. I don't see the first draft being too long, since the outline is pretty brief. Though I suppose writing about OCs it could be denser, if I really laid on the Narrative Filigree/integrated a lot of extra detail into the story.

As for your idea, I'd agree that there's not really enough there to build a story off of. I don't always agree with Chris, but he wrote a good post on just that problem over here.

My creative writing teacher in high school had a similar subject in one of his lectures; he was talking about how involving an element in a story should be organic, that it can't stem from just author appeal. The example he used was someone who likes golf writing a story about a golfer. He went on to point out that writing a story that takes place at a golf course doesn't need to be about golf.

edited 1st Apr '15 9:23:26 PM by CleverPun

No interest for Photo Finish Dies In Venice?

I havent read the story it's based on, so I doubt I would be able to add much

I've only started reading the book myself today. It's the ballet adaptation that I watched last week in Madrid.

Did you know that, over there, the Opera and Theater are subsidized, so that, if you're aged below 30, you get a 90% discount? We got some of the best seats, that would normally cost 100 EUR, for the price of a film ticket. it was awesome.

Anyway, it was awesome. And later I thought to myself, "Choreographer!Aschenbach is, like, totally in the vein of Photo Finish or Hoity Toity! That neurosis, that rigidity, that stuffiness!" While reading a paper that was placed as a preface to the book, I felt especially compelled by this bit:

Isn't it a struggle that all authors face? That we have faced here as well? Frankly, there are points where I feel like it's impossible to write pony fics because everything is a cliche, everything has been done to death, everything is naive and lacking self-awareness. That applies to artistic creation at large. There comes a time where you ask yourself, "what's even the point anymore? Why even try?"

Another conflict that comes up a lot is the one between passion and order. When does beauty become pornography? When does authenticity become vulgarity? When do rules and order cease to be structure and support, and become a stifling straitjacket instead? Or is it instead an armor, a protection against emotion and impulse so powerful in their raw state that they are utterly unsafe, untenable, impassible to keep up with? Which is the triumph, and which is the surrender? We build a wall, but who's the prisoner? Which "side" is in-"side"?

Finally, there's the matter of recognition versus achievement. If people acknewledge you, look up to you, consume your creations assiduously, does that mean you're actually good by your own standards? Are you satisfied? You've made it, and Now What?

I think all of these tensions and more could be fun to explore in the head of an aging champion of the fashion industry. They're just like any other artist, but I feel like they're even more exposed to these themes than, say, a painter or a wordsmith.

edited 2nd Apr '15 4:30:35 AM by TheHandle

Interesting quote. I'd disagree with the artistic part, though. Been stuck on a creative project for over twenty years now, in addition to what I've done more recently-ish with the pony fandom and I can feel emotion just fine.

The second applies to me as a general rule, though. The more I see and find out, especially about all those who supposedly champion fairness and all those other cliche concepts, the more disillusioned and pessimistic I get.

When I read the quote in Steve Jobs:

Is it wrong that I wanted to punch the guy and call him a deliberately misleading exploitative credit-stealing rotten liar? Yet I would feel a little bit reluctant to tell his student audience about that. I mean, I'd be afraid of discouraging them from achieving their maximum potential because they wouldn't believe in the ulterior rewards.

One thing I found, though, was that if one actively pursued cynicism, there came a point where poeple mostly stopped disappointing you, where your faith in humanity hit rock bottom, and could only grow and be reborn from there. You move from "Humans are SCUM" to "Humans are complicated and interesting and have so much potential and so much room for improvement!". If you want to fllow that path, here is somewhere to start:

edited 2nd Apr '15 8:24:40 AM by TheHandle

To be fair, if that's the philosophy Jobbs followed, then it worked. I mean, all his heart did was tell him to be a thief and an asshole and he was totally successful for it.

As for actively seeking cynicism, I'll pass. Enough of it finds me without even trying.

As far as artistic stuff goes, I do it because I enjoy it. If other people can get more enjoyment out of it, great. That's a bonus. I doesn't need to be any more complicated than that.

edited 2nd Apr '15 9:12:20 AM by JapaneseTeeth

It reminds me of an Ayn Rand quote my mother told me when I graduated. Something to the effect of "The world is yours for the taking, if you have the desire to take it". A nice sentiment, albeit somewhat diminished in that it comes from a sociopath.

Still, philosophies are no stranger to being warped into something worse than they were. Rather famously Neitzche absolutely hated Nazism, but that didn't keep his sister from framing it in a pro-Nazi context. And by those same philosophies of 'take what you want', why shouldn't we co-opt them into a more altruistic light? Many philosophies are less what they are, and more who has them. For example in Our Eminence, as I often do, the Villain's philosophies are a counterpoint to the protagonists in many ways. Both Jewel and Erin set their eyes on a goal and go after it with a psychotic, fervent passion, but where Erin's idea of value lies in understanding and growth, Jewel's lies in his own self-worth and comfort. Likewise, Jewel and the Batponies are both, in their way, predatory. Nightingale refuses to accept that anything he's done - the killing of animals both to eat, in self-defense, and in one case simply because he wanted to live in the cave it was living in - can be considered immoral, because he did it to survive. Jewel doesn't accept that the roads he takes to get what he wants - filing reports he knows are false on the off chance of getting Erin's license revoked, dancing with Erin purely to gauge of goad her about the Bat Ponies - are immoral because he's pursuing what he deems as justice.

In regards to intellectual, artistic endeavor and slowly losing one's emotional connection to it...I've found the ideal solution, as with many things, is to rebel against it. About three or four chapter in to writing Our Eminence I was incredibly frustrated with the story because I didn't know how to make it what I wanted it to be. After a particularly bad admonishment by my then-prereader, I stepped back from writing for a moment... then jumped back at it, and wrote a short story in a single go. I gave it a small editing pass then threw it up on Fimfiction, and it was in the feature box the next day. The entire thing was about the sheer frustration of being an artist, of how difficult it is to make something you have such strong tastes in and be so critical of yourself. As you say - everything is cliched, everything's been done, what makes us think we're good enough?

Art can draw from emotion, or technique, or experience, And for the most part I think it must draw on these things in equal measure, but in the same way that a purely technical piece of art can be impressive(See: Mona Lisa), something a pure, unadulterated explosion of feeling can be just as good. It doesn't matter of it's cliched, or flawed, or even if it's noise, because if you can get the emotions through you can still grab people(See: Jackson Pollock).

Oddly enough, guilt was a motivation for me when I didn't otherwise feel like writing. There were people following my story, and I didn't want to let them down by not finishing.

But in my experience, typical audience-placating measures (like posting new chapters as soon as they're finished, or posting blogs to assure everyone that you haven't abandoned the story) tend to reduce guilt and therefore reduce motivation. So I just maintained radio silence, and channeled that guilt into working until the whole story was ready.