That Princeton fan-fiction course that covered "The Magician and the Detective" finally posted my interview on their blog… 2 weeks after the course ended, so nobody read it. But you can! It was posted here, but no point going there. You can’t leave comments there, and the slightly-improved version is right here:
AN INTERVIEW WITH BAD HORSEby Evan Cole, Cara Hedlund, A. J. Ohiwerei, and Chet Reyen
Thank you very much for agreeing to interview us! We’re fans of your work – the “The Magician and the Detective” was assigned in our class as required reading, and we thoroughly enjoyed it – and we were looking to get your perspective on both the FiM [My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic] fandom and fanfiction writing in general.
Cara: What is your process for writing fanfiction?
Sometimes my starting idea is something one character and no one else would do (“It’s a Trap!”, “No Regrets”, “The Quiet One”, “Fluttershy’s Night Out”). Sometimes they’re character-independent propositions or “high concepts” (“Interior Design Alicorn”, the central analogy in “Keepers”). Sometimes they’re just moods (“All the Pretty Pony Princesses”) or plots (“The Mailmare,” stolen from David Brin). “Pony Play” began with the mood that Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body left me in. “Elpis” was a reaction against Harlan Ellison’s “The Deathbird.”
I think the best ideas are two or more of these things simultaneously, inextricably. “Experience” is a concept that applies to only one character (the one pony who loves sunrises the most can never really experience them herself). “Corpse Bride” is a plot that hinges on Twilight’s arrogance. “Bedtime Stories” is a subversion gimmick, but also a character. “Moments” began with a mood of desperate tenacity that’s half heroism and half Twilight’s obsessive-compulsive neuroticism.
For long stories I write an outline. For tricky stories I may start at the end and write backwards to the beginning. When I start, I know the plot, but usually not the themes. If I’m lucky, a theme emerges. “Moments” turned out to be about Twilight believing she couldn’t be a princess or a mother. “Magician and Detective” turned out to be about pride, racism, and self-loathing. “Mailmare” turned out to be partly about pragmatism versus morality. “Alicorn Cider” turned out to be about… feudalism, I think.
I do want my stories to be about something. Very old-fashioned of me. My opinions on what makes something a story, as opposed to just a narrative or something published in The Atlantic Monthly, are like those expressed by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren in their excellent (really, you should read them instead of this) books Understanding Fiction and An Approach to Literature: Fiction is an imaginative enactment of life which increases our knowledge of the possibilities of the self. A piece of fiction represents the writer’s ideas and feelings about life and its meaning. A short story should usually have a plot and a theme, where parts of the plot symbolize parts of the theme. We inhabit the characters, feel the plot as they push on and are pushed by it, and through the plot, we feel the theme that it symbolizes. (Some good stories don’t fit this pattern. Many bad ones don’t.)
Tony Earley said it more simply: “A story is about a thing, and another thing.” See “The story isn’t over when you wrap up the plot.”
When I finish the “first draft” (after rewriting most sentences several times), I send it to a few people and hope one of them can tell me what it’s about. Once I know, I rewrite it. I may set it aside for weeks until I figure out what it’s missing, or how to fix some structural problem. Sometimes I never do.
Between stories, the idea that I could type interesting words about fake people seems absurd. Samuel Johnson and Robert Heinlein said that anyone who writes for anything but money is a fool. But nowadays, the person who writes for money is also a fool. Ipso facto, writers are fools. I know writing is impossible; I try not to write; somehow, like a wino waking up in the gutter, I always find myself doing it again.
I never sit down to a blank page with no idea what to write. The story has to make me write it. I don’t get writer’s block. I get writer’s fork, when I have to choose one story path and set aside all the others. I'm always either knitting or unravelling. If you're lost in the woods and don't know how to go forward, you did something wrong; go backwards. (Unless you're actually and not metaphorically lost in the woods; then you should probably sit down and wait for someone to find you.)
I don’t “write for myself”. The last time I did that, I ended up with three pages of Celestia lecturing Twilight on the connections between deism, Buddhism, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Christianity, and BDSM. In fan-fiction, it’s just you and the readers, and you know how many read your work and what they think of it. It forced me to admit that I want a lot of people to like my stories. I want it enough to choose ideas they might like over ideas they won’t. I’m a popular writer now on fimfiction, but only because I once sat down and asked, “What can I write that people will read?”, and came up with “Twilight Sparkle and the Quest for Anatomical Accuracy” and “The Saga of Dark Demon King Ravenblood Nightblade, Interior Design Alicorn”. I prostituted myself for popularity, and it was a lot of fun, and afterwards some people hung around to read my other stories.
(I said that I don’t write for myself, and that the story has to make me write it. These sound contradictory, but it doesn’t feel that way. I’ve internalized my goal to write for others enough that stories compel me more when others might like them.)
Evan: Despite mostly being based in the FiM universe, your works display a diversity of writing styles. Do you edit your works to specifically fit certain modes of writing after completion, or do you find yourself able to channel your style of choice even while working on the initial draft?
I check afterwards that my style is consistent, just as I check each character’s voice, but I need to find the style early on. Sometimes the style guides the story more than its seed idea does (Moments, Pony Play, Old Friends, Bedtime Stories, Elpis).
Having a personal style is overrated. Nobody read Charles Dickens or Henry James for their style. Having a personal style only became a big deal in prose in the early 20th century, when modernists decided reality was unknowable, and so art should be about art, not about the world. Becoming famous became a matter of contributing not great art, but a new style. (This began earlier in painting, probably because of photography.)
Ironically, this focus on art itself made it hard for art to progress, because any style distinctive enough to make one famous is too idiosyncratic to learn from. If you borrowed Van Gogh’s or Hemingway’s style, people would say “Nice Van Gogh parody” or “Nice Hemingway pastiche” without being able to notice whether your painting or story was good or bad. If it was un-ironically good, that would make it bad.
As a result, the true importance of style is underrated. You do need the right style for the story. Different stories require different characters with different voices. Style is the voice of the story itself. The prose writer who has only one style can tell only one kind of story. Think Hemingway or Cormac McCarthy. They’re great stories, but there’s a sameness to them. The more distinctive the style, the less that can be done with it. I love Lovecraft’s mythos, but you only need to read one Lovecraft story. They’re all basically the same.
The fetishizing of style has conspired with the agendas of literary critics and publishers to focus our attention on writers with narrowly-constrained minds, like Hemingway, [1] Thomas Pynchon, Charles Bukowski, or Philip K. Dick, who wrote beautiful stories but circled obsessively around the same few themes over and over. They can be more easily summarized, shelved, and sold than Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, or Karen Joy Fowler.
Bruce Lee allegedly said of martial arts, “The man who is really serious, with the urge to find out what truth is, has no style at all,” meaning he knows and can use many styles at will. The architect Bjarke Ingels said that your style is the sum of your inhibitions.
Cara: Is there any writing you’ve produced that you’ve been disappointed with stylistically, or that you wish you could edit now that it’s up publicly?
Maybe “Friends, With Occasional Magic.” “Mailmare” has some flat, sparse sections. “Happy Ending” is dry. But those bother me only because the story and the style sag in the same place.
I often do edit my old stories. Sometimes I incorporate suggestions from readers.
Chet: When you decide to write a work of fanfiction, do you generally create a narrative scenario based on the world you want to write about, or do you instead pick a particular facet of the source material to focus on? For instance, in The Magician and the Detective, I found the discussion of ‘cutie marks’ as they related to Holmes, as well as his interaction with magic, to be particularly interesting consequences of the existence of the character within the world of FiM. Do concepts such as these motivate you to write specific stories, or are they simply natural functions of transposing characters into alternate universes?
More the latter for me. They’re the things that mold themselves around the story once I’ve cast it in the FiM universe. I’ve asked some authors to de-ponify their stories for a non-pony anthology, and it turns out that the better a story is, the more tightly everything in it holds together, and the harder it is to de-ponify.
Evan: Have you noticed any particular trends within the themes, style, or content of FiM fanfiction as the years have passed and the fandom has evolved? What about fanfiction in general? Do you tend to adapt your own writing to match these trends, or has your artistic vision remained largely constant?
I can’t think of any definite trends. I don’t read in other fandoms because I don’t know how to find the good stuff in the slush pile. I don’t think I have an artistic vision beyond wanting to make my readers cry the sweet, sweet brony tears that I feed on.
A.J: In your blog post about Fallout: Equestria, you mention that published books are required to endorse certain lies and omit certain truths while also abiding by a set of rules about plot structure that can never be broken. In your own fanfiction writing, do you find yourself defying these conventions in the way that Fallout: Equestria does? If so, in what ways and why? Do you think that fanfiction is a medium that generally abides by these conventions or subverts them?
I tried to in “Mortality Report”, in which Celestia’s immortality forces her to see how being nice to today’s ponies is cruel to their descendants, but most readers subverted my subversion. In “Mailmare”, the good (save the world) and the just (punish the guilty) turn out to be mutually exclusive. But usually, just writing a good conventional story is hard enough for me.
But if you choose to either observe or subvert a convention, you’ve already yielded to it. You’re still bound by its assumptions. Few people can escape these chains of thought intentionally; it almost has to be done out of ignorance.
For example, Tolkien said, “A fantasy world is one in which moral and magical law have the force of physical law.” (See my post “Fantasy as deontology”.) If you act virtuously, a fantasy world’s karmic forces will conspire to give you victory in the end. That’s the point of classic fantasy. They’re all about that one scene near the end where Frodo lets Gollum go, or Luke switches off his targeting computer, and the virtuous fool defeats the pragmatist.
Contemporary writers may subvert that trope, writing gritty fantasies where awful things happen to good guys, or everything is shades of grey. But to do so they must assume that the world should have karmic justice, and so their subversions are cynical, bitter, and post-modern.
Fallout: Equestria never invoked that logocentric expectation of the world, and so went beyond modernism in a way that post-modernism never could, just by honestly not caring about its concerns. Many fan-fiction writers would say, if they thought about it, that the two-thousand year old artistic tradition of seeking the logos, and the one-hundred year old tradition of angsting about its disappearance, are equally silly. They never expected there to be a logos in the first place.
Fan-fiction writers aren’t just writing outside the box. They may not know there is a box. They’re re-inventing literature almost from the ground up, not by theory, but often blindly, by Darwinian evolution. They birth hundreds of thousands of hopeful monsters, some few of which crawl, swim, or fly in strange new ways.
Evan: As a fanfiction writer who writes primarily in the FiM fandom, why do you think that the franchise has succeeded to such a great extent in an age group that was not meant as its target market? Typical reasons given for FiM’s success with older fans focus on its intelligent writing and mature themes, as well as Hasbro’s healthy relationship with and encouragement of the “brony” community. Do you agree that these aspects of FiM are what has made the series so popular among adults?
I wouldn’t call the show’s themes “mature” if that means “too complex for children to understand.” But I wouldn’t call shows made for adults mature, either. There’s a very limited market for mature stories, maybe not enough to support a TV show. We sacrificed the word “mature” years ago just to have a shorthand for sex and violence, and nobody complained. [2]
My post “Why the New My Little Pony is 20% Cooler” suggests some story-based reasons for its popularity. These include:
– not wasting (much) time fighting villains, who suck up screen time without developing anybody’s character
– characters who each have lives, goals, careers, and problems of their own
– rejecting the Aristotelian idea that characters have “strengths” and “flaws”, in favor of the idea that characters fit or fail to fit their qualities into a social context
Another reason is that adult shows today are edgy, ironic, and full of derisive humor. It’s hard to find something nice. Sometimes South Park just isn’t funny enough to make up for the pain of watching it. Sometimes a guy gets back from his third tour in Iraq and just wants to watch ponies for a while.
I think anime paved the way for MLP. Japanese culture lets men appreciate cuteness. It’s given us a weird blend of cuteness and violence for years, in anime like Pokemon, One Piece, or Madoka Magica (an anime about schoolgirls who giggle, wear frilly clothes, angst about their crushes, and die horribly in magical fights to the death).
Thanks for getting this far!
[1] I originally included Flannery O’Connor in this list because nearly all of her stories that I’ve read are about some person who acts very foolishly and then either dies or causes someone else’s death at the end, in a sudden final orgasm of despair. I took her off the list because her reputation is very high and she’s written a lot of things I haven’t read. Your thoughts?
[2] I didn’t want to get into the question of whether Hasbro’s relationship with bronies is “healthy”.
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Interesting.
There is no shame, I think, in writing simple stories meant only to amuse. There is craft and ingenuity there, too, and it would not be a better world if every book attempted to ascend to some imagined lofty peak of True Literature.
That being said, what I wonder is: was he happy? Did he just want to write and have his stories read, and was he happy to do so? Or did he want something indefinably more, something he couldn't quite reach?
...I took creative writing at the University of Oklahoma.
Not until 2003, though. Shame I missed out on that.
I've read the Character and Viewpoint entry in the Elements of Fiction Writing series (albeit about a decade ago) and I remember it being helpful, especially in deciding how to devote your story-telling time in a larger work with a defined hierarchy of character importance. That one suggested largely the opposite, as I remember – using archetypes to stand in for minor characters, but spending time developing major characters into figures with individualized personalities and problems.
All that said, I may have to look into picking this up. It sounds interesting, and although I'd like my own writing to develop into something that can better approach themes and ideas, at the end of the day I think that all the lofty goals in the world won't get you anywhere if you can't create a taut, well-structured narrative that keeps people reading to see those themes and ideas.
Not to nitpick (totally to nitpick) but your usage of the phrase 'those who can't do, teach' is completely inaccurate. The actual meaning is closer to 'those who can no longer do, teach': for example, a pitcher who coaches after he severely fractured his throwing wrist, or a smith that threw out his back.
>>830536 You speak as if it were a translation from another language. Not as far as I know. Google tells me the original quote is, "He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches." (G.B. Shaw, Man and Superman, 1903)
"Those who can't do, teach" has been around long enough to be it's own thing now, even if it was derived from something else long ago. But I would like to know if it's a variation on something older.
Google says:
"Those who can't do, teach": About 872,000 results
"those who can no longer do, teach": About 4,080 results
Hmm, you really didn't make much a case for the guy; he seems like a robot that spits out novels as opposed to someone to hold in regard. Care to elaborate on why you consider him a hero? In any case, he seems like a better teacher of how to get published than of how to write.
>>830536 I've only ever heard it used the way BH does here; it's always held that derogatory tone to it as far as I'm aware.
>>831027 It's the gifted people who spit out novels thoughtlessly. Hacks like me and Bickham have to work at it. It depresses me every time a fimfiction author who wrote a story that I really liked says they wrote it in a few hours. That happens a lot. Whereas the story I spent much of the past week working on is one I began 11 months ago. I've probably spent at least 50 hours on it, and it's only 9000 words. I don't feel very gifted, but I want to write. I write like Bickham, relying on brute-force analysis, not inspiration.
>>831170 Ah, that makes sense. I agree, that kind of dedication is something to look up to I'm the same way; I'm not an author, but the projects I do work on are definitely labours of weeks rather than hours. You gotta do the best you can with what you have, I suppose, and then make up the rest through sweat and blood.
Talent can make the gifted lazy.
Perseverance can accomplish miracles in the hands of the everyman.
>>831170
Yes. This.
I also like how the man's story dispels a popular image that all writers are just somehow magically able to sit down and vomit forth a proper story with characters and themes and everything. Knowing that it actually does take mountains of hard work is oddly reassuring. It's better than the alternative world that some people are simply magically writerly.
>>831406
THIS, for all the bits in Equestria.
Being somewhat talented in some endeavors, I'm very familiar with this. And let me say, from that side of things, perseverance is a helluva lot more important than talent for most things, or at least most things that are hard and/or important.
I would far rather read something that an author has poured his blood, sweat and tears into than an Athenian tale that springs from the proverbial brow of Zeus, fully-formed and ready to do battle. Why? Because what you get in that extra work may not be obvious, but it's critical. Theme, tone, and structure, notably, are things I associate with the hard days of working.
Having both talent and perseverance would, admittedly, be the best. But talent just gets you a few good ideas. Perseverance is what gets you to the point where your ideas are worth reading.
>>831170 There's a bit of 'Wellhead pressure' in writing too. Both "In Celestia We Trust" and "The Sacrifice of the Knight Bolo" were just one long spontaneous painful writing session where I did nothing but type until I hit the end (which was normally around 3am with work the next day). If I had tried that with "Tutor", I would have starved to death. (100k words) "Monster" had been scratching at the back of my head for several months until it broke out, but that scratching process let me mentally block out the whole sequence of events (I can't write outlines on paper) until I was ready to start. Now I'm putting out a chapter a week (although at my low quality level)
A lot of what might be called "wrote in a few hours" is actually "Thought about for months, mentally outlined, revised, and then typed out one night." although sometimes the Muse does really sit on our computer chair with spiked mace in hand, urging us onward. Or else.
>>830566 Y'know... I've always had a gut reaction against that truism. Maybe it's because I'm a martial arts nut. Believe me, all of my sensei could do very well. Same for most of my upper-level education. Come to think of it, all my art and animation teachers were very competent professionals as well.
I think Shaw was dead wrong and only provided fodder for bad students to use as an excuse to disrespect their teachers.
>>830457
"There is no shame, I think, in writing simple stories meant only to amuse." Absolutely none! In fact, I would assert that entertainment value should be the primary goal of literature. Sure, there are many other aspects that can raise a work into the realm of the sublime, but if the work isn't entertaining at its heart, it's like a castle built on sand.
I hear a lot of emphasis being put on theme, but it seems to me that most authors who put overmuch value in theme end up with bloodless cut-outs plodding around to illustrate a point instead of believable characters.*
Language use that approaches prose poetry can be awesome when it doesn't get so thick that it... ah... I seem to be headed toward a major rant. Nobody wants that.
TL:DR A story better be amusing or I won't read it, no matter how masterful it is otherwise.
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* See the latter works of Heinlein, for unfortunate examples.