Why is that story called “The One Who Got Away?” · 7:40pm Sep 11th, 2019
Well, to tell that story, is to tell another one.
I can’t remember who I was chatting with (either Ghost or Bad Horse, I believe) when I brought up the concept of three sons inheriting a barony, where one got everything to the east side of the river, the other got everything to the west side of the river, and the third one got smart and took the river, which was the most valuable.
And then Ghost or Bad Horse said “And it’s full of seaponies, right?”
The title fell into place right after. It is a fish story, after all. And you notice it is grammatically correct, as opposed to the song The One That Got Away. ‘That’ refers to a person, so it should be ‘Who’ if you’re going to write right.
So that set the scene. Under Orson Scott Card’s MICE theory of writing, that took care of Milieu, leaving only Idea, Character, and Events.
So, what kind of story did I want? I didn’t want an epic span, because I had other things to do. Just doing it in a chapter or two would suck a lot of the possibility out of it. How about… a romance? Heck, I’ve written a few of them. Gender roles were easy to assign, because a young mare showing up at the site would be a lot harder to ship, so female seapony, male incoming new baron. Two characters down, and to keep the scope from blowing up, I anchored the time frame into one week (with 7 pieces of dragonfire paper).
But, wait. The sequence is so far: Baron arrives at castle, falls in love, story ends. So I established more characters: Ripple, the 8 year old seapony, and Pearl, her mother, leaving all the other seaponies as unnamed background ponies. Now the sequence reads: Baron arrives at castle, meets Ripple, meets Pearl, falls in love, something for an ending. Hm… Still need a Spike character, or the baron will be walking around his broken-down steamship talking to himself. So I made a crusty old earth pony seneschal for the ‘castle’ which made the sequence: Baron arrives, meets seneschal, meets Ripple, meets Pearl, falls in love, decides to stay. That gives me a neat 4-character matrix in seven days, so good.
So I do some cleanup to the concept, and mind you I haven’t written a word down yet. It’s all just smoke until I start typing. I only have placeholder names and vague descriptions.
So I start typing, and keep it up as the story takes shape. Baron gets barony, meets Sen the Seneschal, meets Ripple, has some character building, meets Pearl, has a case of infatuation, some more character building takes place, they finally have a ‘date’ and a kiss, Baron comes to the conclusion that he needs to stay there and protect the seaponies since they are so fragile and broken.
Tada! Done, except for editing. Over a few weeks, all the splinters get sanded out, everything lines up, all the chapters get set up in the Fimfiction document and I’m starting to publish a day at a time.
Just one thing. The title didn’t fit. Nobody got ‘away’ in this. I had thought about pulling the rug out from under the baron and having Pearl flee, but I hate downer endings. Still, the title is too good to throw away, so I keep it, and it wasn’t until I published the NEXT TO LAST chapter in the story…
Commenter Not_A_Hat makes a remark that Baron Gaberdine is the one who gets away from Canterlot.
Duh!
I’d like to credit genius, but I’m afraid it was just serendipity. Sometimes the most obvious things escape us. Just remember that luck is where preparedness meets opportunity. Having good readers with more insight than yourself helps.
Second question: So how did you wind up writing a sequel to this?
Well… One is without a doubt too short for proper character development or to bring a romance to fruition. This can be guessed from the immediate calls for a sequel. And I mean immediate, as in a dozen requests on the first comment page.
So I started with an idea about an orphan running away from an abusive orphanage by drifting down the river on a raft.
I didn’t like the ‘abusive orphanage’ approach right off, so I looked for another motivation. One of the things I do while writing is to explore new areas with every story. I had played with a Magic Tutor with The Traveling Tutor and the Librarian, running a coffee store for Her Royal Morning Coffee, Harry Potter in Harry Potter and the Little Pony Problem, et al, but I had never written about an artist.
Hm. That would let me go into great detail in the world (and get me practice doing that). Artists are angsty creatures, so that gives motivation if I make his home town artless, and the town he’s headed to very arty (or at least in his head) To do the details right, the pacing would need to be SLOW.
I had the title right there: Drifting Down the Lazy River.
Now I had 4 characters from The One that would fit into this like puzzle pieces, so I built a sequence:
1 - Character meets Ripple
2 - Character meets Gaberdine
3 - Character meets Pearl
4 - Character meets Sen
At that point, I needed to name Character. I pulled up a list of painting terms, didn’t see anything I liked, mused about naming him Linseed, decided I liked Turpentine better.
Note: I still hadn’t really written anything.
Now, to slow pacing in a story, have the character encounter obstacles in his way. The sandbar to strand the raft was easy. Having Ripple show Turpentine around the river flowed naturally from that, and having Gaberdine chastise her for exposing the Seapony Secret followed. I still mentally had Turpentine determined to go to Baltimare, so I wrote from there until they got the raft unstuck… And found out I didn’t have any way to introduce Pearl.
So I gave the kids the flu. I’m evil.
So that got Pearl’s introduction, Turpentine placed at the steamboat for some good character development time for recovery… and darned if I didn’t want him to paint Luna.
In short, I discovery-wrote the story much as you read it, with a few snippets dropped ahead for scenes I wanted like Gaberdine’s reaction to Luna’s painting, or the Speedboat Incident (Waaaagh!). The thing about discovery writing is sometimes the characters just grab the pencil and write their own scenes. I had *planned* to have Gaberdine/Turpentine/Ripple visit Canterlot, then return to the steamboat for a heart-to-heart with Pearl. It didn’t flow well. Then I hit the lunch scene with the Princesses and Gaberdine’s parents and a little light went off. If Turpentine can be driven so hard to achieve his goal of becoming a great painter, and Ripple can be driven so hard in her goal of being with Turpentine, then Pearl can be driven so hard by her love for her only child that she travels to Canterlot. It’s a very fish-out-of-water scene that I didn’t realize until it was over what I did to build characters for all of them.
1 - I took Turpentine out of his environment to expand his view of his goal, to look up.
2 - Ripple was willing to expand her magical talent to achieve her goal of being with Turpentine.
3 - Pearl was able to overcome her fears in order to be with Gaberdine and Ripple.
4 - Gaberdine had to step up in order to provide a father figure to Turpentine *and* Ripple, as well as his role with Pearl (under development).
5 - Sen was able to step back out of his lifetime job in order to allow Turpentine to go where he needed to be.
To be honest, I was still groping with just how I wanted to end it *while* I was writing the ending. I didn’t want Turpentine adopted by Gaberdine or Pearl, because that would taint any relationship (in a non-Game of Thrones fashion) between Turp and Ripple. (ahem) I didn’t want Gaberdine and Pearl married because that would interfere with the direction I was moving the story, but I wanted them in a stable and growing relationship.
That’s when I came up with (5) above, and finished writing the end in about an hour, plus sniffle breaks. Because every trip down the river should end at a dock.
And an Epilogue. Which I wrote in fits and starts while we were taking a month or two in order to iron out all the typos in the rest of the document, because darn it I wanted to show Ripple and Turpentine’s Happy Ever After.
However, it is rumored that if one is very lucky and happens upon a small riverboat working its way up or down the river, a miracle may occur, and one of these miraculous paintings will find its way to your home. The description of the mysterious boat is different in every telling. Some say it sails without a crew, a mechanical spirit of the river itself. Others claim it is really a haunted castle, and the ghost of a beautiful pale mare walks its halls, vanishing without a trace when confronted. A few even say the rumor is false, and the riverboat is just an ordinary speedboat, piloted by a young earth pony diver and his unicorn engineer wife who travel up and down the river to mark the underwater snags for the river Fen’s barge traffic.
Still…
And they painted happily ever after.
Not sure what spurred this retrospective, but I'm glad you wrote it. It's always a treat to look under the hood of someone else's creative process, especially since I could he a lot better about preserving my own.
Also:
Booo.
5119676 Bad Horse asked me. The simplest questions make me type forever, and by the time I was done, I just "To heck with it, I'll post it."
Thanks for sharing those insights behind the stories. As you know I recently finished reading both and have come to love them and their characters very, very much. Thanks again for creating and sharing.
I love when authors give us a making-of featurette. It's neat to see how the thoughts came, how they got all the little cogs to fit together and play nice, and how much (or little) was planned out.
So thank you to Bad Horse for asking, and thanks to Georg for sharing!
Odd, I had the same thought as Not A Hat did, in that Gabardine escaped, or 'got away' from the predictable, cut throat world of the Nobility and his overbearing and impossible to please parents.
I'm glad you helped him find his way.
Seriously though, waterways were a big deal in the days before planes, trains and automobiles. There's plenty of land that's mostly only good for being between one place and another, and a river would have been the fastest way through them.
Thanks! This is useful.
And now i need to reread both a... third, fourth?? time. :D
These are an amazing "I want a fluffy story to make me feel better" stories.
Would love to see something similar for Little Princess Monster series if you feel up to it.
Neat.
I just start with 5 scenes and do some Beautiful Minds corkboarding to link them together.
A very charming and fascinating inspiration for such two wonderful stories you've written.
5119742 Well, Letters From a Little Princess Monster was considerably more complicated. After I finished Monster in the Twilight, I really had not planned on writing anything else along that line. The obvious plot lines were there, of course, but that's a lot of work. So I wound up writing an arc of a couple chapters when I had some time, and it was received well. So I wrote another arc. And I had to write one that showed where Twilight *thought* she had killed her parents, but they were actually alive (because some readers were just *stuck* on that). And I'm cooking on the 2019 arc where she deals with Discord's test.
That was pretty neat.
In hindsight, the seaponies in the river... they're river horses, right? Or, to get fancy, hippopotami!
5119676
I believe that counts as your evil deed for the day, Georg.
But that was a week ago. What have you done for me lately?