Think Tank and Other Ideas! · 12:46am Sep 14th, 2016
First off, thanks so much to everybody who favorited Friendship Doesn't Pay the Bills! I'm so happy with it's success (well, successful for me at least), and I am so glad it made people laugh. I want to get into writing out comedy stories more often, although I know that I have been fairly slow in getting it out there. I tend to stew for a while and demand to have these long projects. It can make it hard to see it through to the end, but FDPTBS did get finished and I'm glad it was worth the effort. A surprising amount of it was just started by sitting down and letting the characters banter, which was kind of a groovy process.
So, I've always loved shows like Community, The Daily Show, Arrested Development, ect , but what always vexed me was that I could never compete with them. Its not exactly surprising, they are professionals and they have large think tanks that help throw around ideas. They are just going to be better than me, I get that, but I also don't particularly enjoy being reasonable, so I'm probably going to be flailing and rolling around in misery to the tune of my own vexerie. That said, I love the process, so I thought to myself, "Hey, Self! What if we tried to get a think tank together? That could be a fun experiment!" It is the sort of thing that I think could have wonderful results, and could be a learning experience for me and others. I'm only have a couple of people at the moment, but it would be cool to get a comedy community going. Fimfiction is pretty dead in that respect, and they could use an AED or IED of humor every once in a while. If people are interested, I'd love to have people join in, or if you know somebody who might be jiving for something like that, it would be cool to send them my way.
Anyway, I like writing longer comedy. I know some people swear by 1 to 2k stories, and honestly I was expecting Friendship Doesn't Pay the Bills! to flop simply because nobody would want to read 30 pages regardless of how funny it was. I was proven quite wrong in that respect. It makes me want to keep trying with some of my other ideas. I've been throwing around ideas of stories about things like Equestrian Pub Debate (informal debate where heckling and other obnoxious behavior is not only legal but encouraged. It has less to do with facts and more to do with charisma. Its like politics but for people who aren't evil.) or stories about higher learning at a tacky school with absurd levels of Equestria shenanigans like mandatory friendship. I've had a story in my pocket about a group working under Celestia, where the reality is that nothing in Equestria functions as it is supposed to happen, and would involve a lot of background shenanigans to fill in the discrepancies between the reality and what happens in MLP episodes to make sure everything works out, among other antics and horseplay. I think at the end of the day, it really comes down to picking something I can get people to read, which means writing MLP cast characters and curbing myself to write for EQD. I tried getting Friendship Doesn't Pay The Bills! through EQD, but they haven't responded to me in three weeks. I have some complaints about the first time I sent it in, but I am not going into that. I want to write a story about Sirius and Shenanigans, who were characters I designed before I had the account, but it is probably going to look like they are self inserts, which I don't want them to be. I'm certainly going to have to figure out how to add more canon characters to have among the OCs.
EQD response time varies from a few days (if several pre-readers happen to have already read your story before you submitted it) to a few months. 1 month is normal.
Guess I'll stick to politics.
I like the idea of a comedy think-tank, and maybe of a community-written story. How do you imagine bouncing ideas? Email, IM, voice skype?
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Thanks, I'll keep that in mind.
My idea would be to have a skype or discord chat where we had a bunch of comedy writers and we would be able to work on general pitches for story ideas. Who ever's pitch it was would basically be the director of it all and would have final say on what goes in and out, but they would work with everybody else on creating character dynamics and working out gags, sketches, and bits for such a scenario and, in exchange, would be accredited for helping write, with particular mention on each chapter and singling out any outstanding contributions. You would have a group to throw your script at to try out your comedy against, and in the editing process they can help you reevaluate the scenarios for rewriting, which can be incredibly powerful for comedy. Some people don't like rewriting story bits and choose to try to get stuff out quickly, but the best skill about comedy is that it fights expectations, so every revision is an opportunity to reassess the expectations you had with it. Arrested Development is as amazing as it is because the writers approached the project with the idea that they would rewrite the script several times, filling it with more and more complex humor.
I figure it will be something where we share our story ideas and we all get to share in other people's stories. I am hesitant to give it full power of friendship and have a single story written by an entire think tank, because too many cooks can spoil the broth. It can be hard to know what direction to take things in and hard to keep it consistent. I think people can pitch ideas and, if it is well received, the director can allow somebody to write a chapter or section for it, sort of getting into the way that MLP is written.