Five Years Ago This Summer · 7:37am Jul 3rd, 2017
To any of you who may have read the one story on my account, and have any interest in it... this is a bit of background that I've wanted to post for a long time, but haven't been able to for various reasons creative and practical in nature.
Five years ago, in 2012, in May or June--I can't recall which--months after I had finished reading Fallout: Equestria, which happened to be the very first work of fanfiction I had ever read, I had the idea to try writing my own spinoff of that story. Thus was born this character, this little pony:
She is the narrator, though perhaps not the main character--I'll come back to that--of my sole fanfic, To Bellenast.
Her name is Crystal Dew, and the artist who drew this is none other than the talented Amarynceus. Crystal doesn't look exactly the same as I had originally envisioned her, five years ago. Originally, she had blue hair; but, just as one's appearance can change over time, so too can a character. More than just her mane color has changed. In fact, the only thing about her that is largely the same as when I first came up with the idea of her is her general appearance.
When I first thought of this character and started shoveling out thousands of words in MS Word, I had all kinds of ideas, many, in retrospect, utterly terrible and lacking any redeeming characteristics. Once upon a time, Crystal up there was a depthless, cybernetic badass with power armor, a 30mm cannon/rifle/terrible idea/thing, and rocket launchers out the wazoo. Once upon a time, Crystal was some kind of gun-for-hire vagabond on a quest for misplaced vengeance and a need to find out why she was a badass cyborg death mare with no memory of how she came to be such. She was cool, young, pretty, and completely devoid of any character.
Oh, and she was a lesbian unicorn protagonist in a Fallout: Equestria recursive fanfic. You could guess how the story in my head dissolved from there. It was utter garbage.
My best friend from high school, whom I dragged into the pony fandom, pestered/trolled me into writing Crystal as lesbian, mostly as a joke, but I went with it... and, more importantly for her character, later on down the road, years later, I stuck with it.
I had no clear picture of what I wanted to do with the story; I was simply writing for the sake of seeing what I could write. Around the end of 2012, I had lost all steam and couldn't find the energy to write or think of any new scenarios or continuations of the tentative story I had tried to make. At that point in my life, I was going through the hassle and turmoil of having to move both out of my house and away from one of my parents as a result of their less-than-amicable divorce. So, I suppose I could say that I took to writing as an escape from that situation, and though I made very little progress with the actual story, writing what little I could did provide an escape.
Then, after I moved, I stopped writing. I had to focus on other things, such as getting a job and paying rent with the rest of my family, with whom I lived for a while. It was my first job, actually. Having money to spend at that point, I began playing a lot of video games, Fallout: New Vegas among them. I had played that one before, of course, on the Xbox 360, but I had heard of the joys of modding from friends, and I had a rather good laptop that was capable of running a decent number of PC games, so I lost a lot of time in 2013 to that.
I lost a lot of time to reading delightful fan fiction, as well. I had read Fallout: Equestria over Christmas break of 2011, of course, but that was just the introduction, and oh was it a good introduction. Ponies Make War (Now The Immortal Game), The End of Ponies, The Best Night Ever and This Platinum Crown, and The Stranger and Her Friend are just a few of my favorites, unfinished though some of them may yet be. Those were just the more notable ones I found early on; I read many others, in many different narrative styles and with many different characters and quirks and references and intriguing plots and, perhaps most importantly, exposure to those different styles.
I had left my story to gather dust for a year and more, going back to it in my word processor only every month or so to look at a scene and see if I had any more ideas, any more inspiration for an actual plot or ending or characterization or narrative structure or rising action or climax or resolution or... hang on, those sound like basic story composition elements.
Oh.
Yes. That's right. At that point, in 2014, after mostly stepping away from that which I had wrought, for a bit more than a year, I realized that I did not, in fact, have a story. I had a pile of drivel. Trash. Garbage. Tripe. Words and words and trash and nothing consistent or enjoyable or even remotely resembling a cohesive narrative.
I scrapped it. All of it, save a few things.
Crystal Dew, though at that point in time her name was simply Crystal, was born anew. I kept her physical appearance largely the same as I began to write a new story. I stepped away from the roots from which I had drawn her, though I kept some characteristics and ideas that I did, in fact, wind up working into the new story. I changed her age several times as I progressed though a tentative outline, and even a couple times during writing, and, believe me, rewriting portions of scenes to account for such a change is not as easy as you'd think, for with a drastic change in a character's age (for example, going from nineteen to fourteen) comes so much else. A young woman of nearly two decades would be far more self-assured than a scared little girl of fourteen.
A scared little girl of 14: That is the thought I had at one point, some time in 2015; I can't remember when, exactly, but it was a galvanizing thought for me and for how I wanted to write her character. It was at that point that I truly knew what kind of story I wanted to write.
I didn't want to write a story about a cool cat mercenary, or a wise shaman, or a stealthy ninja, or a powerful wizard, or a crafty scavenger, or a destitute slave, or a former raider, or any of the various characters I'd seen in other Fallout: Equestria spinoffs. I wanted to try something that, at the time, I thought was a bit more original, though of course, someone must have done it before. I will let you be the judge of that.
I wanted to write a story about a bystander, someone who happens to be travel buddies with the heroes. A Tagalong Kid, if you will: A person who is trying to go somewhere, who is simply trying to find someplace to live, but happens to stumble into them whom you could consider the real main characters, who get into all the firefights, who run into all the trouble, who have plans and overarching goals, who have enemies and nemeses, who have adventures and romance and intrigue and risky shenanigans.
It is precisely that premise that forms the core of my work-in-progress, my magnum opus. Perhaps it isn't grand, perhaps it isn't a web of moves and counter-moves, perhaps it isn't an intriguing mystery or a daring adventure or a tale of a hero's sacrifice... but those aren't what I'm going for.
I'm going for a pony out of her depth flying into the unknown with only a destination and the friends she makes along the way as her guides, with a little action here and there, with some danger and sight-seeing, with boredom punctuated by peril... a long road with a little adventure, a lot of downtime, and maybe a little developing romance and intrigue happening in the background. She isn't the hero of her story; she's just along for the ride.
What are your thoughts, my readers few? How am I doing? Have I made something cohesive and interesting, or is it all just the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota?
I love. I have just started to read it, only at chapter one but soon will be well into it. I too have grown tired of the hero types of the wasteland (I have no problem against them, it's just getting old now). It is refreshing to see the perspective of a bystander to the heroics that go on.