Let's get this (cyberpunk) wagon train a-rollin' · 4:29pm May 1st, 2012
Well, if you'd told me, two years ago, that I'd be putting together a pony fanfic I would have called you mad. And yet, here I am. Weird how life works sometimes.
I figured I'd use this blog section for something practical as it seemed a shame to let it just sit there. As such, I figured that I'd put some stuff about the chapters I wrote, maybe address things I wasn't entirely happy with. Stuff like that. Pretty dull, honestly. If nothing else I'm interested to see how I change as I write as I have never written a proper story before.
I'm not going to make the blog posts flag up in people's notifications. If people, such as your fine self, dear reader, want to read my blog then they'll read it. No point waving it in people's faces, especially when I'm probably not going to be saying anythingawfully interesting.
There will be precisely ZERO SPOILERS. This is going to be more of a writer's diary thing on my failed experiments with style and what I'm learning from my fumbling attempts to convey ideas.
So, without further ado:
Why did I go with cyberpunk?
I'm a bit of a tech-y person and I enjoy wondering about the future. Anyone who took a look at my collection of Alistair Reynolds and Iain M. Banks would probably reach the same conclusion. In particular, I find it interesting how technology changes the social problems a civilisation faces and, when faced with a society that is pretty non-industrial, my first instinct was to to wonder what would happen if you changed that. Especially given that I'd recently re-read Neuromancer, the book that started the whole cyberpunk thing.
Then I pretty much just went to bed and, over the course of the next three hours, ended up with a notepad full of neat little ideas that I wanted to work with. Incidentally, I seem to have all my good (your mileage may, of course, vary) ideas just before falling asleep. A notebook by the bed was, and is, the best idea I've ever had. Ever.
I wanted (a liiiiitle optimistically) to do a proper job of building an altered Equestria. While I tried to steer clear from the tropes that just didnt fit (usually because magic is insanely useful) I did rather disappoint myself by reinventing a bunch of other sci-fi tropes. But then, tropes exist for a reason, I guess. Many are pretty useful and I just reeeaally hope I can pull them off well.
Why didn't you just start from a more interesting bit?
Hmm. This was a real difficult one for me. I toyed for ages with starting the story in media res but kept coming back to the same problem. As soon as I say the word 'Canterlot' the reader has an image in their head. And it's not an image of my Canterlot. I didn't want to be fighting against the fact I hadn't set things up well enough but equally I didn't want to just have five thousand words of me waxing lyrical about the images in my head. That's boring.
Arguably, that's exactly what I did anyway...
I'm very much a fan of the school of writing that doesn't just drop information on a reader but lets information about the society and the environment just kind of...be implied. The character's won't stand around talking loudly about what e-mail is, but they will mention using it and after a while the reader should be able to intuitively understand what 'e-mail' is. That's the plan anyways. Here, though, I felt that, with the amount of assumptions that the reader would naturally make about Equestria, I just had to get a few things clear from the get-go before the character for the chapter could take over as the eyes of the reader.
Another reason that I 'let myself get away with it, this one time' was that the story is going to be quite long and involved. I felt it was, basically, an investment. A rather slow initial chapter that would pay dividends by the end by having set up a little atmosphere.
Did it work? I think so. At any rate I couldn't come up with a better way to start.
But your prologue doesn't really go anywhere.
Yeeeaaaaah...it kinda doesn't. The downside is that the chapter lacks a clear hook; a clear narrative...point. Nothing, being blunt, happens in that chapter. It's pretty much Slice of Life and that risks the 'Adventure' tag seeming like a lie. Bad first impressions and all that.
So, I tried to make it...tantalising. I tried to make it as obvious as I could that there was going to be more to this than meets the eye and that it wasn't just going to be a flat retelling of the pilot episodes...just with robots or something. I tried to drop hints that the changes to the setting were more than just cosmetic, particularly in how the social order seems a little less stable, from how the character's interact with the world. I hoped, and still, hope, that the amount of little nigglging questions that the chapter raises are enough to bring people back for the start of the story proper.
That tied in rather nicely with the choice of lead character for the chapter. This choice, seemingly unrelated to the pilot episodes, was aimed at not just setting up the character and getting a few nice character points in but also to make the reader ask why she would be taking center stage here. Honestly, that was a happy coincidence that I could kill those birds with one stone.
How I put together my scenes
Finally, this is more of a question to other writers. It's probably really dumb, but I'm just interested as I'm kinda making the whole 'how to write a story' thing up as I go along.
I find the way that I write is very...cinematically driven i.e. I tend to see the scenes play out as little movies in my head and then I just play around with the 'camera' and with what I want to draw the reader's attention to. I have no idea if that's a good way of doing things and I'm kinda interested in whether other people write the same way; driven by images.
Anyway, that's all I can think that I wanted to say for the moment. I could talk about how the last line of the prologue was revised a bunch of times when I realised I couldnt alter the font sizes, but you probably don't care about that and can probably, now, figure out what I had to change.
Thanks for reading!
-Sanctae
i.imgur.com/fmha2.jpg
94146 Right click --> Save Image As
94149
Yeah, I tend to get splotches of images and scenes in my head to start and then try to write a story around those. To varying degrees of success.
It's not always easy, or feasible, to write prose from a movie standpoint. Sometimes there's something lost in translation from a cinematic perspective. Some things work better when viewed while the same is true when reading. The trick is not to get married to an idea and try to force it in come Hell or high water. There are times when you just have to leave certain things on the cutting room floor.
I thought the start of your story was good and the atmosphere presented sucked me in. I'm pretty good at comprising a scene from others' descriptions, though others might prefer more (or less) depending on their tastes. It's a matter of striking that balance.
You're off to a good start. I'd like to see you continue! If you ever need help with proofreading or story critique, I've been offering my services to those that want them. There's always the proofreading groups as well if you want someone that's more professional. Finding an editor that you can trust and isn't afraid to tell you what needs changing, fixing or removing is the best thing you can ever have as a fanfiction writer.
110133 Thanks for your thoughts, it's encouraging that someone else has a fairly similar way of working; good to know I'm not way off the mark in how to frame things.
It's interesting that you mention being able to cut ideas out and abandon them for the good of the piece as a whole because they don't work when read. That's what's giving me trouble with the first real chapter
. I find it hard to know when I've established the background to a scene enough. When I run through it in my head I reflexively 'see' the background, so then write the background; then 'see' the people, so then write them etc. I have to force myself not to go overboard on the description and just properly trust the reader to fill in the blanks.
Thank you, that means a lot; getting an atmosphere set up to begin with was the goal of that chapter so it's nice to know that I managed to write one! The main thing now is to try not to drop the ball and keep the atmosphere up without bothering the reader with it. We'll see how that goes, I guess.
It's kind of you to offer your services! I'm currently being pre-read by a friend and he has so far been very good at telling me what I need to hear, regardless of what I want to hear. For the moment, for consistency if nothing else, I'll probably be sticking with him. If he gets too busy, though, it's very nice to have some good alternatives
The next chapter is just being pre-read at the moment. It gave me a little trouble and is longer than the prologue as I'm aiming for ~8000 word chapters, so its a little behind schedule, but it should be done certainly by the end of the week. Things should start to speed up a bit after that as I get into the swing of things, but then again I've said that many times about many things and it's frequently a lie, so...
So yeah, thanks for the input.
I'm always looking to improve so feedback on future chapters, good or bad, is always much appreciated!