Why Filly Fooling Deserves Its Criticism · 5:52pm Apr 12th, 2014
It seems to be fashionable to criticize Filly Fooling these days, as is evident by the most recent comments. Let me just say that I completely agree that the story took a turn for the worst after the first couple of chapters. The reasons for the decline of the story are actually a bit personal, and I am only willing to discuss them to an extent. Here is more or less why this story took a downturn.
When I first started writing this story, I was absolutely inspired. I was writing chapters a day and churning out this story at lightning speed. Unfortunately, I can’t show you the original upload dates of the chapters due to some hefty reformatting that reset the dates, but some of the comments from the beginning indicate this.
What happened afterwards is that I lost a lot of that inspiration in an attempt to make the story more “dramatic.” Well, I wasn't very good at writing like that. In fact, I don’t think I was good at writing anything that wasn't “inspired” like the earlier chapters. The result was that I slogged through the rest of the story with sub-par work.
I just ask that no one take this as an accurate representation of my current writing prowess simply because it’s the most viewed story in my repertoire. I have written much better stories since then, and I encourage you to read those and then decide whether or not I am a capable writer.
I am saddened that I may have disappointed people who initially enjoyed the story. It certainly wasn't my intent to take a good story and tarnish it the way I did. That being said, this was an experiment in MLP fanfiction, and I learned a lot about trying to continue a story in such a drastically different way than how it started. I outline all of my stories in advance now, and even if I don’t stick necessarily to this outline, I at least establish the tone and general direction of the piece so that I can remain focused. Hopefully this means I will no longer produce meandering works like this.
To the people that disliked the way the story progressed, hopefully you read this post and at least now have a bit of clarity as to what happened. I also hope I've made clear my personal opinion of the story, because it is not far off from yours. For me, criticism is hard to take when it validates my own negative outlook on my story, so that will be something to which I have to grow accustomed. Still, even if you didn't like it, hopefully you don’t feel as though you wasted your time reading it. I certainly don’t feel I've wasted my time writing it, because in your failures lie your greatest learning experiences.
For just a moment, I thought this blog was about the "everypony is gay" trope.
Don't beat yourself up over it, FF was trendsetting at the time, the fact that ponyfic has moved on reflects how the better authors (including you) have raised the bar of our expectations.
In my comment on the final chapter I agreed with all of that, but I personally think that the quality of the first few chapters more than makes up for the other chapters.
And the story is by no means bad, it is significantly better than anything I could ever do.
And to be able to take all the negative comments so well, really is impressive.
Keep up the good work.
-Swimmingly