RCL feature and reflections on "Each Small Step" · 8:58pm Feb 3rd, 2019
I'm thrilled to announce that “Each Small Step” has been chosen for a Royal Canterlot Library feature! 
In addition to talking about the story, they also did an interview (my first ever 
). It’ll be posted on Fimfiction on Friday, but you can read it right now on their website 
This seems like the perfect time to talk a little bit about my own thoughts regarding “Each Small Step”.
When the Sunset Shipper contest rolled around, I was sure I wouldn’t enter. It sounded nice, but I had other things to do and didn’t have any ideas for it. Then the prize money got boosted and my poor ass started thinking of ideas because poverty sucks yo. So I decided to enter and was debating between telling a story I’d like and selling the fuck out and pandering to the judges, then I realized I have no idea what the judges like anyway so that probably wouldn’t work. If I did, I would’ve written that because fuck artistic integrity I’ll words for cash 
But with selling out not being an option, I thought about what kind of story I could tell in 15k words that I’d be happy about whether it won or lost. And if anyone’s curious how entering a contest largely for money worked out for me, I spent about twice as much on the cover as I won from being an honorable mention 
A while back, I wrote “In Quiet Moments”, a story about anxiety that just happened to be 14k words. It’s one of my favorite things I’ve written, a story I look back on and feel genuinely proud of. Not just the story itself, but the fact that it felt important. And I’m not naïve, I realize I don’t have nearly the audience to make a huge impact on the world or whatever. But it felt like the kind of story that might inspire good things in the lives of some of the people who did read it. The kind of story a certain kind of person might need to read. It may not be important to the world, but I felt like it’s the kind of story that could be important to someone. Maybe I am naïve after all, but it’s a story that I feel good about having written, even though it’s a long ways off from being among my most popular fics.
So here I have this story about anxiety that holds a really special place in my heart, and it’s a shipfic under the 15k limit for the contest. Thinking of that convinced me to enter the contest. I knew I could write something meaningful in under 15k while shipping; I’d already done it. I just needed a story.
It was easy to decide the theme. Anxiety and depression often go hand in hand, and I struggle with both. When I wrote “In Quiet Moments”, I thought anxiety was my biggest problem because I had misunderstood what depression was and how it affected me. I thought some of my behaviors and the way I felt was normal because I had no frame of reference that things could be different. Since writing that story, I’ve learned a lot about myself and my mental health, and I now know that depression is my biggest struggle. Making the jump from writing about anxiety to depression was only logical at that point.
I decided to start with Sunset’s POV becuase I had this idea of showing Aria only from the outside at first, where all you’d see is this bitch who can’t get her shit together and acts like a jerk for no reason. Right from the get-go, I knew if I was doing depression I wanted to do the ugly depression. Not an attractive brooding character who just needs to find love, but a useless bitch who won’t take a shower for a week unless someone tells her to. Because stuff like the former is why I didn’t think I was depressed. I had an image in my head of what depression was, of people who were just sad all the time, who never laughed, who were pessimistic about everything all the time. But for me and many others, that’s not what depression is like. It’s never cleaning my house, it’s wearing the same clothes for days at a time, it’s getting upset at people I care about for no good reason, it’s not eating because food is effort, it’s wanting to do something productive and then not doing it and not knowing why, it’s feeling like a useless piece of shit because I just can’t find it in me to do the dishes that have been sitting in my sink for over a year now and I know there’s mold there because how could there not me and one time I saw a roach crawl through and I just kinda sighed and walked away because, again, useless bitch.
I got kind of off topic. So yeah, idea was to start with Sunset to make the reader wonder why she was still with Aria, then switch to Aria to show the reader what was going on in her head while she was doing all this self-destructive shit. It also let me use the most swears per word count that I’ve ever had in that second chapter, which was pretty fucking sweet imo.
The story itself unfolded pretty quickly. I chose Sunaria because it’s one of my favorite ships that I rarely see done (it’s gaining ground a bit with Aria’s Archives, but there’s still not much out there for content). I chose to have Aria be the one with depression, because I’ve written a lot about Sunset struggling with mental health issues in “Looking Glass” already, so it was a chance to make this Sunset different from my usual “Who We Become” Sunset (incidentally, this is why I had her eat meat in ESS; it was just a little random difference that reminded me this isn’t the same Sunset). With the ship decided on and picking Aria as the one with depression, I had a very clear image in my head of Aria in a rare moment of vulnerability pleading with Sunset “Don’t give up on me...” and I knew that was the end of the story. I just had to show what it took to get her there.
That they’d fight was obvious. It’s probably a storytelling trope (I don’t follow tropes much) but if it is then it’s because it’s completely true to life. Two lovers fight, they’re left alone with their thoughts for a while, then progress is made when they make up and their guards are down. I’ve done that myself countless times. Figuring out what to put between the fight and the resolution took a little longer. All I knew at first was that Aria would spend the whole time feeling like shit, and that she’d somehow get a job. I think I was set on having two fights pretty early on, but I forget why I specifically wanted that.
Adding Adagio was the next step, mostly to give Aria even more reason to be miserable. Adding Sonata was because I couldn’t have only two sirens; I could have only Aria, or I could have all of them, but I couldn’t specifically omit one. I’m pretty sure it was someone else’s idea to have Sonata touring with Trixie. I wanted them each to have a connection to their old lives, but could only think of Adagio’s and Aria’s; Adagio has music and Aria, although she hasn’t realized it yet, has the ocean. Couldn’t think of a third until someone (and I feel bad that I can’t recall who, or else I’d do a shoutout) suggested performing, and Trixie came up as a logical extension of that. Workshopping, y’all, do it!
The suicide attempt (or at least consideration; I dunno if that was far enough to be considered an attempt) wasn’t planned until I was writing it, then it just felt like the logical conclusion for me, because that has been me multiple times. I’ve been in Aria’s state of mind where she was in that chapter, and that’s where it took me so that’s where it took her. More so than any other part of this story, that scene was basically just written out of my experience, complete with her thoughts about why she should and then her confusion at why she didn’t, since like Aria in the fic I’m an atheist and don’t have a reason to fear going to Hell or whatever. (Note, I’m talking about past me here. Present me is not suicidal.)
And I knew there was only one way to end it. Of course it had to end with the “Don’t give up on me” scene, but along with that, I needed to bring in therapy. I think we’re making progress as a society of destigmatizing therapy, but it still gets a bad rep. At least when I was growing up, it was understood that therapy was for people who had something awful happen to them (PTSD) or people who were batshit crazy. To this day I get anxiety any time I bring up that I go to therapy with someone irl because I’m just always wondering what horrible things they’re thinking of me. And on that note, this is largely a story about my experiences with depression, and my experiences include therapy. If this story were to get a sequel, Aria would also be on medication because good fuck does that ever need to get destigmatized too.
It should be pretty clear that this is an important topic to me and that I put a lot of care into how to present this story. So let’s look at the flipside, because fuck am I disappointed in it. Not that I dislike it. I reread it the other day after I was told about the RCL feautre, and I really love the majority of it. I like the first chapter more than I thought I did, and most of the second chapter was great. But then that ending just... was not all it could be. And this isn’t a “nothing’s perfect” thing, this is a “this fic has a very legitimate problem with its weak ending” thing. The second fight is way too rushed and I didn’t get across everything I wanted to in it. It feels like there’s something missing between chapters 2 and 3. The third chapter could benefit from being from Sunset’s POV so that we see outside of Aria after we already know what’s in her head, and can see that first small step as Sunset sees it. It could have a chapter between 2 and 3 from Aria’s POV showing her deciding to take that first step on her own (Sunset even says Aria has to be the one to save herself, but that’s never followed up on), then the final chapter from Sunset’s POV. I think about making that change all the time, but I just don’t have to time to dedicate to that right now.
It’s worth noting that these changes, particularly the extra chapter, would push this over 15k. That’s the biggest problem, that I wrote this for a contest. Not just the word limit, but the time limit. To go back to the comparison with “In Quiet Moments” for example’s sake, I spent months planning out the story for that one while I worked on other things, just mulling it over in my mind. Then I spend months writing it (three, I think). Then I read and edited it, then I did nothing for a while. I let it sit then came back to it to reread before posting, to make sure I was happy with it before anyone ever saw it. With “Each Small Step”, I went from concept to publication in under a month to meet the deadline. I figured out a few weeks later that I wanted the last chapter to be Sunset’s POV, and then sometime later realized I wanted an extra chapter in it. If I had waited to publish it, I would have caught these things and fixed them before bringing the story to anyone. Probably would’ve fixed that second fight during editing at some point too, since it being rushed is painfully clear to me upon rereading now.
But I don’t want to get too negative. Within the confines of the contest, I did the best I possibly could. I just learned I’ll probably never do a contest again since the format doesn’t suit me. And even aside from that, I think I did a lot of great things with this story, and while I think the ending could’ve been much stronger, I do think it got exactly where it needed to go (I would’ve absolutely left it on the same open-ended but optimistic note that I did). And most importantly, this story has a similar feeling to “In Quiet Moments” in that it feels like something that could be important to someone. Maybe even more so, because in this case, it’s fair to say the “someone” is me.
I’ve plugged this enough that I’m assuming you’ve seen it somewhere by now, but if you somehow missed it, I do have a Discord server if you feel like dropping in and hanging out!
Wooooooo! I am so proud of you for getting into the RCL.
Congratulations!
Congratulations on the feature! It makes me rather tremendously happy to see an Aria-centric story in the RCL, since she's always felt like the most underappreciated of an already-underappreciated trio. Nicely done!
Congratulations are in order! I hope it draws interest to some of your other stories; I've long been impressed by your writing ability and it's great to see others recognize it as well.