Writing Philosophy: How a 1400 word chapter can take 3 years to write.

It's not everyday you see a story that hasn't received an update in 3 years finally get one, so I figured I'd give an explanation as to what brought about the revival of An Expedition. And if nothing else, writing this down will be a nice way of concretizing my thoughts on this. So here goes:

I consider An Expedition to be my first real attempt at writing pony fan-fiction, and it holds a special place in my heart because of that. I had written one non-serious, somewhat-promising attempt at a sad-fic before starting on An Expedition, but that was more of an experiment to test myself and find out if I could even write at all. So after that, when I decided try my hand at seriously writing a piece of fiction, I contemplated what I would want to see in my ideal pony fic, and then set myself a problem to try to solve within the narrative to give myself the motivation to keep writing. First though, I needed a problem worth solving, so I'll take you through the train of thought which lead to me settling on a problem:

• Society can be viewed, at the very least in a metaphorical sense, on a spectrum between chaos and order. With totalitarian repression on one end, and total lawless anarchy on the other.
• If society can be viewed in those terms, then it's reasonable to assume that smaller groups of people, communities, can also be viewed as existing on a spectrum between chaos and order.
• If differing sizes of groups can be construed in terms of chaos and order, then the smallest possible group (two individuals) might also be reasonably thought of in these terms.
• If the interactions of groups of people can skew more in the direction of chaos or of order, then perhaps the individual can skew one way or the other as well.
• If this schema is to be regarded as having truth to it and worthy of intellectual pursuit, rather than just being empty words, then figuring out the dynamics of chaos and order at one level should reveal patterns about the dynamics at other levels.
• Finally, if the different levels of analysis mirror one another to some degree, then perhaps there is an optimal method of behaving which is the same across all levels.

(It took me four years to be able to write this out in this orderly of a manner.)

With that as my starting point, I started writing and followed my intuition as I set up the characters and backstory for An Expedition. This continued smoothly until about chapter 7 which I regard as roughly the turning point of the story. What I hadn't expected was that the problem I had set myself, was really, really difficult to even begin to grapple with, and I needed some kind of understanding for me to be able to continue writing.

I could have given up on the idea, and just written an ending to An Expedition. But that didn't sit right with me, because I didn't want an ending, I wanted a real ending. As far as I'm concerned, stories have correct or incorrect endings. That seems to me why people bother with them in the first place. Either a story says something valuable about a little corner of Being, or it fails at that. And it's entirely likely that most stories have multiple correct endings, but many more incorrect endings.

Now, after four years of exploring my problem through various avenues I feel like I have the tools to begin constructing a genuine solution, and I owe a lot of that to Jungian analytical psychology, which more or less uprooted all of the foundations of my beliefs, and changed the way I look at everything. Now, I'll openly admit that that's quite the extreme outcome for someone just trying to write a story about ponies.