Wherefore Art Thou, Chapter Five? · 10:10pm Sep 7th, 2015
Hello again. It's been a while, and I'm sorry to say that progress has been pretty marginal at best. It turns out that writing a bunch of scenes, each with its own timeframe and context to be explained, is really tiring after the first few. On top of that, Five was supposed to be in two full-length parts, which has been looking like an increasingly poor idea as time has gone on and progress has slowed to a snail's pace.
I have about five-thousand words of a probable ten-thousand, none of which I'm all that happy with. The nature of the scenes requires each to have its own scene be set before any of the important stuff can happen, and it feels like all I'm doing is writing a short exposition dump and a just-as-short scene which wasn't really worth all the effort of setting it up, ad nauseam. It's not bad, don't get me wrong, but it certainly isn't strong stuff, and when there's going to be twenty-thousand words of it across two chapters, you don't want it to feel weakly realised.
I think I'm going to have to scrap Chapter Five as it currently exists: it just isn't working, and I might not finish it before the end of the year at the current rate. To be honest, I'd like to move on to Chapter Six's planned plot, but there are important parts of the backstory which need to be told sooner rather than later, and this period of unconsciousness is the best chance I'm likely to have for a place where telling the backstory will feel natural rather than an awkward exposition dump.
I'm thinking that it's best if I extract the most important scenes - the ones that need to be told, not just the ones that would make a nice aside to the main plot - and write them as individual uploads as chapter parts. The current list is as follows:
1 - A section detailing Chrysalis's negative relationship with her mother (expanding on the incident I made brief mention of earlier in the story, where she hung Chrysalis from the mansion flagpole by her mane) and a little more background on how changeling society used to be.
2 - Explaining why Chrysalis, the youngest of her siblings and therefore last in line to the throne out of them all, ended up being made Queen at seventeen years old, and showing some of her early troubles in leadership.
3 - A brief glimpse of the run up to, and a decent bit of detail on the actual event of the Griffon invasion, along with the evacuation into the deserts and the beginnings of the trek to Equestria.
4 - The events that led to Cadance's attack on the changelings, and the resulting battle between she and Chrysalis, ending on the formation of their plan to replace Cadance and use the wedding as a platform for invasion.
I'm not sure as yet whether these can be put in pairs and uploaded together as chapters, or if it would be better to have each one as its own self-contained chapter. Even if they aren't too long for pairing, it might be best to have them as separate units anyway since most of them don't have that strong a chronological link to the following chapter.
Anyhow, that's my plan as it stands now, and I would greatly appreciate any input you have on this. I am deeply sorry for the long delay, and the continuing setbacks on this chapter, but I am working to get something worth your time ready for upload. Thank you for your continued support and patience, and I hope to have something with you before too long.
Making them their own separate unit sounds better to me.
While it sounds like you are on the right track in cutting out unimportant junk, I think you need to be more ruthless than this. 1 and 2 are really not that big a deal so you can probably cut them way back or drop them completely. 2 in particular is something that Chrysalis could easily tell someone later if it becomes important at whatever length is appropriate or be dropped entirely because it is crystal clear that she did wind up in charge. I would say that these two should be no more than 3000 words when taken together and 1000 to 2000 is a better target range.
3 is a bit more directly relevant so it needs more attention, especially to explain how it happened under Celestia's nose, but I got the impression that Chrysalis was a bit isolated from the events so you can probably keep this fairly compact as well.
4 on the other hand is a huge deal and needs to be thoroughly explained because what we know so far seems very out of character for Cadence so this may need a chapter on its own.
Also, it sounds to me like you may need to rethink your chapter lengths. With how long it is taking you to get updates out, you may want to switch to shorter chapters of a few thousand words to help maintain momentum, especially if comments help motivate you.
3377370
I see what you mean about the first two. The first would be about as good as a more anecdotal retelling as it would be as a chapter, and the second could also be made more compact and told in a less time-intensive way.
A point I made a while ago regarding the Griffon invasion (and, by extension, the third segment) was that a significant reason the changelings lost so badly was that shortly before the invasion, the griffons had signed a nonaggression pact with the changelings, which was merely a means of distraction in reality.
This is a point that needs to be made, and probably via a speech from Chrysalis to her subjects - given that she has apparently secured peace with an enemy they'd had for centuries, you'd certainly expect a speech of some kind. A good subject to touch on (in brief, of course) when making that speech might be the dark years before and after Chrysalis's coronation, since those times would make for good contrast with the great news of the peace treaty (and remove the need for #2 to have its own chapter entirely).
Cutting the list down to just #3 (with a brief mention of #2) and #4 seems like a better idea. There were about seven different segments of the original Chapter Five in part one alone, so reducing it to a single segment should make writing it a lot easier.
As for your suggestion of smaller chapters, these two (and some major chapters later on) will inevitably be around the usual length, but it has been increasingly difficult to get ideas for chapters that long, so a shorter chapter length seems sensible. Aiming for 7000-odd was quite ambitious in hindsight, and that was only because the first chapter ended up that long and I wanted to keep things consistent. I've been writing my other story with 3000-4000 word chapters, and that has run into far fewer problems thus far, so I'm likely going to switch to a similar length (say, 4000?) for GH apart from the chapters which need the length to work.
Thanks for the advice, and as always, thank-you for reading.
3377577 I am happy to help, and it sounds like you finally have a plan you are confident in which is a very good thing. As for chapter length, don't be too afraid to split this next one up to get it down to around 4000 words. You can write the speech with a bit of a container to make it clear it is a memory being put back together and publish that without waiting for the rest and then repeat with as many short chapters as needed to get through this section.
Also, on a related note, you may want to stop trying to force the chapter numbers to align with your initial plan because it seems like that is just causing problems and will look kinda silly at the end if every chapter has two or three parts.