Reflections on Fifteen Dinners · 12:48pm Dec 1st, 2014
I've never won National Novel Writing Month before. The furthest I've ever got was 27,000 words, back in 2011 when I first gave NaNo a shot. I guess in a way I'm still reeling from that moment on the 15th, when I broke 50,000 for the first time.
It seems so crazy that I tried to write and edit something as long as Fifteen Dinners in just 720 hours, when so many of those were spent sleeping or doing Uni work. And I know I didn't do as well as I'd hoped—the last three days did not see as much done as I'd wanted, and as a result Chapter 15 is rushed, almost unedited and a little bit out of place—but the very fact that I succeeded at all is, really, more than I could ever have hoped for. That, so far, the fic has been received quite so positively is just the icing on the cake.
There are some things I don't want to discuss: the purpose of Fifteen Dinners was to try to get people thinking, to challenge views and perceptions about how stories should be told and give me an opportunity to start pushing some boundaries, and so a lot of the key structural things in the fic are almost spoilers for the experience, if not the plot. That does leave a few things I wanted to talk about, so I guess this is the place to do it.
Fifteen Dinners was, when I started writing it, going to be a perfectly ordinary fic that was little more than a slice-of-life romance. There was going to be no tragedy, and I wouldn't be trying to push any boundaries, simply telling the story naturally and normally. Within a day, this degenerated into a discrete story that explored the lowest moments in Rainbow's life, and some surprisingly dark elements worked their way in there. (I genuinely never thought I'd have to write ponies throwing up, for instance.) And, as sad as I am to have given up the opportunity to tell a nice, simple story, I'm really glad I've had the chance to do something as crazy as this.
Lately my writing has been loosely inspired by writers like James Joyce, and Fifteen Dinners is no exception. To compare my writing to Joyce's is, of course, a foregone conclusion—I write like an amateur fanfiction author, and he writes like one of the greatest creative minds of the 20th Century. Still, things like Chapter 7's inclusion of letters to break up the flow of writing and the way the narration of the story lapses in and out of a stream of consciousness style (I'd like to say "with ease" but I'm pretty sure that it's quite clunky in places!) can all be traced back to Ulysses. Sometimes I feel the need to apologise for this.
I've also been a little inspired by 20th Century Twelve-Tone Serialist composers, and the wonderful vihart. I used to hate this kind of music with a passion, but I've found it to be much more enjoyable lately and I think some of the ideas of serialism have been leaking through into my writing, mostly through a desire to defy conventions one at a time.
So that's where Fifteen Dinners came from. Where it ended up, of course, was an entirely different matter, and I'm pleased to say that for the most part I'm pretty proud of the result, despite all my complaining and whining about Chapter 15 and the hurriedly-thrown-together Applejack arc (which I wish had had time to reference, even momentarily, in earlier chapters.) It's not a work of beauty, but it is a labour of love (and exhaustion.)
I think the end result works, at least a little bit. And I think it's given me a chance to make a bit of a statement about the place of hindsight in tragedies. I hope that people enjoy it for what it is, because I know I've enjoyed the last month immensely.
This wouldn't be a blog post of mine, of course, if I didn't say I'd learned anything about writing. It might not be a letter to a Princess, but I still think there's a place for lessons, even in a reflective post like this. So, without further ado:
This month, I've learned that I don't have to treat my readers like children who need to be spoon-fed each little bit of important information. I've learned that Rainbow Dash is a fun challenge to present in a believable romantic relationship (and one day I hope to actually succeed in that challenge!) But most importantly, I've learned that I should never, ever attempt to write and edit more than 50,000 words in a month.
Camp NaNoWriMo opens in April, and I can't wait to do this again.
Quill Scratch
This has been more than just positively received. I just saw this sitting comfortably in the Popular Stories box; the real feature box. Congrats!