Writing of: Built From What Is Shattered · 6:23am Jan 29th, 2021
Hey guys, SunlightRays here, and I'm back with another "Writing of" blog entry!
This time, I'll be talking about the first story I had the pleasure of writing for someone else. Yup, that's right! Today's fic will be my Jinglemas story, Built From What Is Shattered.
The process of writing this story was quite the stressful yet delightful one, so let's get right into it!
Receiving the Request
So, Jinglemas 2020. A way to give a delightful present to people who spent the miserable year fighting against the plague in their own ways. So I signed up for the event, and this is the PM I got from Petrichord:
Hello! I'm Petrichord, co-administrator of the Jinglemas group. Flutterpriest and I would like to thank you for joining us for Jinglemas 2020!
This year, your assigned Fimfic User is: BronyWriter
They've requested a story that has: Tempest Shadow and Starlight Glimmer
Their special notes are: No romance, nothing sexual, no EQG
Thank you!!! Let me know if you have any questions.
So. Turns out I had gotten BronyWriter. No pressure at all right there. Nope.
Okay, I lied. Truth be told, I panicked. Hard. BronyWriter was one of the most famous writers on Fimfiction, and I, a person who had barely 85 followers at the time, was supposed to write a story for him. But hey, I had to do something, right? I couldn't just sit there and not write anything.
So I came up with an idea and began writing... only to shoot it down a few days later.
Perception of the Idea
Now, Starlight and Tempest are quite interesting characters. They're different at first glance, yet they have a lot more in common than what one might think.
Originally I tried to go with a dialogue-heavy story where Tempest Shadow was still being shunned by the Ponyville citizens before meeting Starlight. But then I realized that it wasn't an idea that was going to go anywhere, nor was I satisfied with how the 1k-word long test draft turned out to be. So I promptly erased the entire thing and went back to brainstorming.
Then I came up with the idea of having a village-wide event of sorts. At first the idea was to have the event be a snowpony-building contest (Do you wanna build a snowmare~?) but then I decided that a snowball fight would work better.
After that, it was chaos. At that point in time, I had less than a week left to finish writing the story. Normally I would try to recount the exact process I went through while writing the draft, but for this story, my memory has become so mixed up on how I even got to that point. Hell, I was writing and editing the draft until 15 minutes before my deadline arrived.
But I managed it. Somehow. Please don't ask me how because I don't remember and I'm not sure if I would want to remember.
Anyways, that was it for the "Writing of: Built From What Is Shattered", and I'll see you next time.
SunlightRays out.
