fandom q+a Three Winning Writers Q&A

[Trinary 18]

Write the story you want to write, and let people judge it how they will.

 

But on the other end of the spectrum, doesn't that attitude also play into a lot of first-time fanfic writers who are convinced that they've written the equivalent of Shakespeare and anyone who disagrees just doesn't "get it"? I understand not wanting to re-write your story to appease your readers, but if you write a scene or a story to get across an idea and most of your readers are not getting that idea, doesn't that mean you should take that into account? Where's the line between following your own vision and just having ones head up their BEEP?

[Ponibius 57]

Do you often find yourselves living within the minds of your characters as you work with them?

 

Living with them, eating with them, working with them, and holding full conversations with them. It's a very crammed place in my head. I can think of numerous instances where I've put down logical arguments by straight up villains, and make it sound reasonable from a certain perspective.

[Comma-Kazie 58]

This question is directed at you Comma.  One of your more unusual stories compared to your usual fare is "The Incredibly Valuable Contract of a Sellsword Changeling."  What motivated you to write that story?  You're certainly no stranger to tragedy in your stories (most apparent given the name of the fic-verse you originated  ), but this fic was most unusual given whose POV it was from.  Writing from a villain's POV is nothing new, but was it difficult getting in this particular changeling's head and trying to present how they would perceive such a grim and horrible task?

 

As I recall, Sellsword came about as part of a Winningverse writing event where the challenge was to write from a PoV that was in the Winningverse but not one of the main characters of Life and Times. The changeling who abducted Nimbus Gust (lovingly referred to as 'Momling' by us) was something of a blank slate--we saw its disguise as Nimbus, but once that arc has reached its climax, that was the end of it.

 

I wanted to do some more with that, and get some world-building in as well to differentiate the canon led-by-Chrysalis changelings and the Free Mind changelings we'd created for Life and Times. It honestly was a lot of fun to create Momling--the use of 'this one' (borrowed from Mass Effect's hanar) helped form a character for whom a sense of self was detached and private, even from its own thoughts while on the job. From there, all that was needed was a dose of cold professionalism and a few self-imposed rules to keep Momling in the Lawful Evil side of things.

[Chengar Qordath 67]

But on the other end of the spectrum, doesn't that attitude also play into a lot of first-time fanfic writers who are convinced that they've written the equivalent of Shakespeare and anyone who disagrees just doesn't "get it"? I understand not wanting to re-write your story to appease your readers, but if you write a scene or a story to get across an idea and most of your readers are not getting that idea, doesn't that mean you should take that into account? Where's the line between following your own vision and just having ones head up their BEEP?

 

I'd say the key is to always keep your own fallibility in mind and stay open to constructive criticism.

 

I will always write the story I believe in, but that doesn't mean I can't be persuaded to believe in something else. If I see a comment pointing out a legitimate problem/weakness in the story, I'll work to fix it.

[Ponibius 57]

Oh, thought of another one: assuming you fall prey to it at some point, how do you get over the "I don't feel like writing today" slump? Because I get that more often than not and simply can't convince myself to put down even one hundred words of a random scene.

 

How often do you write/edit/etc. per day? Do you set aside time for it, or do you just work on stories when the mood strikes you?

 

I tell myself to sit down and write. I'll turn off the TV, close Youtube, turn off my music, and so on until I'm in a dark room with nothing but the GoogleDoc in front of me so that I can concentrate and write if that's what it takes. For me, writing is all about momentum. The first word is always tougher than the next five hundred.

 

I try and write at least a little bit each day, with my daily goal being 500 words a day, but I prefer to see 1,000 words a day. Noramlly I try and set aside a period of time to write, though it can depend how the mood strikes me. Some days I just don't feel like writing, and so don't. I also spend my breaks at work writing, considering there are few distractions then, and I can normally get out 300 words during my lunch break, which slowly adds up.

[Chengar Qordath 67]

As I recall, Sellsword came about as part of a Winningverse writing event where the challenge was to write from a PoV that was in the Winningverse but not one of the main characters of Life and Times. The changeling who abducted Nimbus Gust (lovingly referred to as 'Momling' by us) was something of a blank slate--we saw its disguise as Nimbus, but once that arc has reached its climax, that was the end of it.

 

I wanted to do some more with that, and get some world-building in as well to differentiate the canon led-by-Chrysalis changelings and the Free Mind changelings we'd created for Life and Times. It honestly was a lot of fun to create Momling--the use of 'this one' (borrowed from Mass Effect's hanar) helped form a character for whom a sense of self was detached and private, even from its own thoughts while on the job. From there, all that was needed was a dose of cold professionalism and a few self-imposed rules to keep Momling in the Lawful Evil side of things.

 

I am looking forward making use of that character in the Venture stories. One advantage of having a series set a good decade+ before the show's canon is that I can play with a character we killed off canonically.

[Comma-Kazie 58]

Do you think there's any sort of bias towards longer or shorter stories? Short stories (especially comedies or tragedies) tend to get a lot of promotion on, say, Equestria Daily and get a huge number of readers. At the same time, sometimes it feels like longer stories can't attract readers outside of a hardened fanbase who were on board when you started writing. There are exceptions like Past Sins or Fall Out Equestria, but those were some of the earliest major, well-written works in the fandom. Do you agree/disagree?

 

I can't speak for Equestria Daily, but I will say that there is some hesitation on a lot of readers' parts to jump into a long story if it's unfinished, simply because no one wants to get invested in a story that an author could lose interest in or not come back to for a very long time. (I admit, I am guilty of this particular sin.) Thus, I think shorter stories will get more immediate attention and longer stories will go into the 'Wait and see' pile unless they're from an author readers trust to see things through.

[Chengar Qordath 67]

I tell myself to sit down and write. I'll turn off the TV, close Youtube, turn off my music, and so on until I'm in a dark room with nothing but the GoogleDoc in front of me so that I can concentrate and write if that's what it takes. For me, writing is all about momentum. The first word is always tougher than the next five hundred.

 

I try and write at least a little bit each day, with my daily goal being 500 words a day, but I prefer to see 1,000 words a day. Noramlly I try and set aside a period of time to write, though it can depend how the mood strikes me. Some days I just don't feel like writing, and so don't. I also spend my breaks at work writing, considering there are few distractions then, and I can normally get out 300 words during my lunch break, which slowly adds up.

 

I'll often do the same thing of "I will add at least one page to my story today." Sometimes I'll just barely get that done, and sometimes I'll get some momentum going and crank out several thousand words.

[Ponibius 57]

This story I have in mind involves first-person POV of our main character, but I feel that I might need to switch occanionally to another's POV to fully show and tell the story. When and/or how the best way to switch POV?

 

When the narrative demands it. Find the best places in your story to break and switch to different characters. On cliffhangers or when a miniplot point have been reached are good places to switch perspectives. Look at some of the stories you have liked that had multiple perspectives and see how they handled it. See what type of events happen that percipitated shifts in perspective.

[Comma-Kazie 58]

I am looking forward making use of that character in the Venture stories. One advantage of having a series set a good decade+ before the show's canon is that I can play with a character we killed off canonically.

 

True enough. That is going to be fun to flesh out.

 

One thing I've always wanted to try is make readers sympathize with a villian.

[Trinary 18]

One thing I've always wanted to try is make readers sympathize with a villian.

 

In other words, make them sympathize with you?

[Chengar Qordath 67]

I can't speak for Equestria Daily, but I will say that there is some hesitation on a lot of readers' parts to jump into a long story if it's unfinished, simply because no one wants to get invested in a story that an author could lose interest in or not come back to for a very long time. (I admit, I am guilty of this particular sin.) Thus, I think shorter stories will get more immediate attention and longer stories will go into the 'Wait and see' pile unless they're from an author readers trust to see things through.

 

I've definitely gotten a good number of reviews on my longer stories where people mentioned that they didn't want to read them until I'd finished.

[Ponibius 57]

I have another question, and I apologize in advance if this is confusing, but I just thought I'd take a shot and ask.

 

How do you deal with lofty expectations for your stories? What I mean is that recently one of my stories kind of exploded in popularity far more than I could have imagined, and I've had people commenting saying things like "Oh, this is one of the best stories I've ever read!" or "I hope [this] happens!" followed by "I hope [this] doesn't happen." or things like "Why didn't you do [that]?"

 

I know I can't please everyone, but the fear that I could royally screw this up though no fault of my own is making it harder to put word to paper.  

 

Write the story you want to write. At the end of the day, it's your story, and you own it. If you're not happy with how the story is then you have a problem. It's okay to take suggestions from readers if you really like them and can work them into your story smoothly, but don't feel compelled to do so by any means. If you wrote the story you wanted, then you can hold your head up high for that. At least for myself, I would feel a lot worse caving to reader demands and it messing up my story as a result. You know the story your writing, where it is going, and how it will end. Stay the course as you desire.

Ah, yes, momentum and my total lack thereof. Oh well. 

 

 

One more before I have to leave for a while.    How lenient should writers be with taking creative liberties in the way they present the story? I've seen authors use colored text for different characters, gratuitous bold and italicized words, and even cutting up paragraphs partway through to show characterization (somehow). Where is the line, or does it all come down to how well good the story is in the end?

 

 

I would say whatever works, works. Though be very careful when you break with conventions. You better know what you are doing or you will fall on your face in a very messy way. The English language is a messy, disfigured hybrid of an abomination, so you can get away with quite a bit.... technically. So stick with conventions unless you really know what you want.

[Will Guide 21,376]

Most punctuation marks, I know how to use. But, the semicolon always confuses me. When are appropriate times to use them?

Edited September 20, 2015 by WiiGuy2014

[Ponibius 57]

Do you think there's any sort of bias towards longer or shorter stories? Short stories (especially comedies or tragedies) tend to get a lot of promotion on, say, Equestria Daily and get a huge number of readers. At the same time, sometimes it feels like longer stories can't attract readers outside of a hardened fanbase who were on board when you started writing. There are exceptions like Past Sins or Fall Out Equestria, but those were some of the earliest major, well-written works in the fandom. Do you agree/disagree?

 

Shorter stories are easier to read and carry a smaller investment. Especially when you see a story that is over 100k and still unfinished. So naturally people are going to gravitate towards those. I know I'm more reluctant to dive into something like Game of Thrones, a very large series that is yet unfinished, versus something like Heart of Darkness, a relatively short book. I think it just comes down to the investment on the part of readers and reviewers.

[Comma-Kazie 58]

Most punctuation marks, I know how to use. But, the semicolon ( always confuses me. When are appropriate times to use them?

 

Semicolons help connect closely related ideas when you need something stronger than a comma, but not as strong as a new sentence (a period). That said, you should use them sparingly--one or two per page of text is generally a good limit. 

 

http://www.fimfiction.net/writing-guide#Commas-semicolons-colons-dashes-and-ellipses

Edited September 20, 2015 by Comma-Kazie

[Ponibius 57]

But on the other end of the spectrum, doesn't that attitude also play into a lot of first-time fanfic writers who are convinced that they've written the equivalent of Shakespeare and anyone who disagrees just doesn't "get it"? I understand not wanting to re-write your story to appease your readers, but if you write a scene or a story to get across an idea and most of your readers are not getting that idea, doesn't that mean you should take that into account? Where's the line between following your own vision and just having ones head up their BEEP?

 

That comes down whether that person is a good writer or not, and a person in general. I do think you should write what you want to write and stick to your guns. But also be aware that once you put something into the public sphere it will get criticism, and that people are allowed to have their opinions. For myself, I do listen to what my readers say about my story. Now how I take what they say depends on what they say, and I judge it by a case by case basis. 

 

Ultimately, it's what you're happy with when you're writing fanfiction, just be ready to reap the whirlwind of what you write.

[Trinary 18]

Its said the two most important elements of writing are characters and story/plot. Have you read stories that had great characters but an uninspired or even bad story, or had bad characters in a good storyline?

[Denim&Venöm 21,284]

Another @Chengar Qordath All. 

 

Have you ever considered including the world of Equestria Girls into the Winningverse? Such as seeing human Cloud Kicker's promiscuous life and how it's reflected in our western culture,  having one Kicker cross over into the others world, or just having two Cloud Kickers bang each other (I'm pretty sure that's somewhere on Cloud's to-do list.) 

Edited September 20, 2015 by Denim&Venom

[Comma-Kazie 58]

Its said the two most important elements of writing are characters and story/plot. Have you read stories that had great characters but an uninspired or even bad story, or had bad characters in a good storyline?

 

Nothing comes to mind, though I may have simply forgotten them after I stopped reading. That said, I do remember being underwhelmed by book one of Tales of Earthsea. There was a lot of interesting world-building, but nothing to make me feel invested in the main character.

[Batbrony 16,088]

As I recall, Sellsword came about as part of a Winningverse writing event where the challenge was to write from a PoV that was in the Winningverse but not one of the main characters of Life and Times. The changeling who abducted Nimbus Gust (lovingly referred to as 'Momling' by us) was something of a blank slate--we saw its disguise as Nimbus, but once that arc has reached its climax, that was the end of it.

 

I wanted to do some more with that, and get some world-building in as well to differentiate the canon led-by-Chrysalis changelings and the Free Mind changelings we'd created for Life and Times. It honestly was a lot of fun to create Momling--the use of 'this one' (borrowed from Mass Effect's hanar) helped form a character for whom a sense of self was detached and private, even from its own thoughts while on the job. From there, all that was needed was a dose of cold professionalism and a few self-imposed rules to keep Momling in the Lawful Evil side of things.

 

Very good, and yeah, I think you're right about it being for a Winningverse event.  On a related note, you wrote as a sequel to Chengars "Winning Pony: Road Not Taken" the one-shot "Road Not Taken: Going Home."  What was it like getting to write a Nimbus who's softer and didn't have nearly as many regrets as canon-Winningverse Nimbus did?  I mostly ask because (and Chengar could attest to this from the exchanges we've had when I've thrown questions and ideas his way for my fic) Nimbus is probably my oddly enough favorite original character in Winningverse, even though we got to see so little of her in the canon, and I'm doing something similar to what you did there in that, in my fic "Batmare Begins" continuity, the Kicker family is essentially the Winningverse one, but in addition Nimbus is still around following the events of the Changeling invasion.  So I just wanna know what it was like for you getting to expand on her character, but also write her in this alternate universe Winningverse where things, essentially, went the way they were supposed to originally for the Kickers.

[Ponibius 57]

Its said the two most important elements of writing are characters and story/plot. Have you read stories that had great characters but an uninspired or even bad story, or had bad characters in a good storyline?

 

Oh certainly. It can be especially glaring when one aspect of a writer can be very good, but others are not good. For example. I think David Weber is great at making stories, but his characters tend to be relatively flat and same-y. While R.A. Salvatore can make some really interesting characters, but some of his plots can really fall flat, especially some of his later works where he clearly didn't want to write a specific character anymore, but was told to by his editor.

[Chengar Qordath 67]

Another @Chengar Qordath All. 

 

Have you ever considered including the world of Equestria Girls into the Winningverse? Such as seeing human Cloud Kicker's promiscuous life and how it's reflected in our western culture,  having one Kicker cross over into the others world, or just having two Cloud Kickers bang each other (I'm pretty sure that's somewhere on Cloud's to-do list.) 

 

Well, technically the second chapter of New Life of a Winning Pony mentioned Twilight discovering the portal to something implied to be the Equestria Girls dimension. Of course, then she smashed said portal and both she and Storm agreed to never speak of it again.

 

I'm not too inclined to work the world of Equestria Girls into the Winningverse, mostly because connecting the two has generally been a clumsy and messy process even for canon. Plus it would mean Sunset would need to stop having her Venture stories in order to go be generic high school bully. Which just seems like a waste of way too many fun story possibilities.

[Ponibius 57]

Another @Chengar Qordath All. 

 

Have you ever considered including the world of Equestria Girls into the Winningverse? Such as seeing human Cloud Kicker's promiscuous life and how it's reflected in our western culture,  having one Kicker cross over into the others world, or just having two Cloud Kickers bang each other (I'm pretty sure that's somewhere on Cloud's to-do list.) 

 

Oh we've batted a few ideas around. The issue is that none of us are overly wild about Equestria Girls (or at least I'm not). The problem is that the high school genre is a plot wasteland of overused cliches and zero inventiveness. Once you've seen one high school movie, you've seen 95% of them. For the first movie, you had the interesting bit, the magic, the mystery, the ponies, and they cut all that stuff away to have a very generic, by the numbers high school film about beating the local school bully to win prom. So we aren't rushing to get into the EQG universe. There are things we can certainly do with it, but it would take going off in directions EQG wasn't originally intended to go.

[Comma-Kazie 58]

Very good, and yeah, I think you're right about it being for a Winningverse event.  On a related note, you wrote as a sequel to Chengars "Winning Pony: Road Not Taken" the one-shot "Road Not Taken: Going Home."  What was it like getting to write a Nimbus who's softer and didn't have nearly as many regrets as canon-Winningverse Nimbus did?  I mostly ask because (and Chengar could attest to this from the exchanges we've had when I've thrown questions and ideas his way for my fic) Nimbus is probably my oddly enough favorite original character in Winningverse, even though we got to see so little of her in the canon, and I'm doing something similar to what you did there in that, in my fic "Batmare Begins" continuity, the Kicker family is essentially the Winningverse one, but in addition Nimbus is still around following the events of the Changeling invasion.  So I just wanna know what it was like for you getting to expand on her character, but also write her in this alternate universe Winningverse where things, essentially, went the way they were supposed to originally for the Kickers.

 

I really enjoyed expanding on her, even if it was just for one story. Seeing a happier and more fulfilled Nimbus is something I'd like to expand on more in that continuity, and it's fun to contrast her quietly loving and supportive style of parenting to what I'm used to with Derpy's 'Hugs and muffins for all mah bebehs!' method of motherhood.