Streets of Cóltoba- Some Notes on "The Trail of Your Failures Will Lead You to Memory" · 2:42pm Nov 20th, 2022
There was a moment, after I hit publish on the story, that I thought about writing some notes on it. But I realized that it would be inappropriate—it may influence the judges’ decision, after all, and obviously for a contest that would be most unfair. Now that the contest is over and the winners have been announced, I feel that it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to talk a little about this story, what went into it, and why.
I said in this introductory blog that the story took me eight drafts. That was not an exaggeration, but now I have the liberty of being even more specific: it took me eight drafts and four separate stories before I found one that made sense.
“Trail” began as a completely separate story focused on a completely separate set of characters. An initial draft was about Fluttershy’s dad, Gentle Breeze, and him going to a store only to meet a belligerent kirin. It felt cliche, however, and I didn’t trust my characterization of Gentle to go anywhere significant. Two drafts in revealed an untenable idea, so I placed it to the side and started over.
I wanted to still write about that family, however, so I tried to write about Posey Shy. It was here that the city of Cóltoba began to reveal itself in my mind, though at the time I did not have an idea for it so much as a sense, brief and inexact. I thought about writing a vacation that Posey took to this unnamed city, following the marriage of Fluttershy and Discord.
Soon, however, it became just as obvious that I didn’t have an idea of what the story’s “draw” would be—what made it intriguing and special. But I wanted to write Posey in somehow, so I changed gears and came up with a different idea.
That was where Stormy Flare first showed up—four drafts and three separate story ideas later. I had thought this would be an interesting premise: Stormy Flare has acquired, from a distant relative, a villa in the city of Cóltoba that is starting to go to ruin, and she spends a month in the city trying to get it repaired. There was a little romantic interlude that went awry, and she also ends up meeting, by chance, Posey and Gentle in the city just as she’s entertaining the idea of leaving for good. The general thought process was that Posey would convince Stormy to keep working on the villa despite its failures.
Even this wasn’t really satisfying. It felt too “on the nose,” too drawn to a very specific point, artificial and thin with actual meaning. The prose was getting there but the voice was not, either. I felt that the story had too many actors and too many premises—why was Posey and Gentle there at all? Why was Stormy despairing in the first place?
The contest deadline loomed, and in my frustration, I tossed out this idea and the current drafts and decided to go back to how all writers try to solve writer’s block—see what came before.
I have a short story collection on my shelf called Strange Pilgrims. It’s by the late and great Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whom I’ve expressed much love and adoration for. I decided, with academic precision, that if I was going to solve this issue of drafting, it would be best to read a short story, mark it up, and examine how it worked. I began with the anthology’s first short story, “Bon Voyage, Mr. President,” which is about an exiled politician being met with a chance encounter in a city far, far from his native land.
You can see where the seed of an idea sprouted. But what I noted primarily when I annotated this story was how tightly structured it was. Marquez is, certainly, a stylist, with a long, drawn-out style, yet in reading the story, despite the length of its sentences, it was actually very sparse. Details were exact but not numerous. Dialogue was quick. Narration, Marquez’s bread and butter, filled in 80 to 90 percent of the story’s text, and yet the narration sounded less like narration and more like a voice from within.
I realized that what I could do was use the story’s structure as a template. I analyzed three settings: there were two restaurants and one home. These seemed to be the story’s three “centerpieces,” around which the plot revolved or was revealed. It made sense to have three places to establish this progression, because it allows for a concrete understanding of the story’s flow. I figured the same could be done with my own short story.
So a fourth story idea and a fifth draft began.
At the same time, I think I was also dwelling on some old industry news. Specifically I was thinking about the fallout around the Theranos scandal.
My new editorial job primarily is about developments in in vitro diagnostics, and Theranos, for a time, was one of the industry’s biggest stories and scandals. Founded by Elizabeth Holmes, its claim to initial fame was that it had developed a novel blood test that could detect a majority of infectious diseases with extreme precision and accuracy—a goal of in vitro diagnostics and liquid biopsy developers in general.
Blood tests that could detect disease are not to be understated, and hold several potential advantages. One is that they are generally non-invasive—aside from a fingerprick or a blood draw, it requires very little invasive procedures. Blood also has the benefit of being an excellent source of certain biomarkers that may indicate either the presence of or future pathogenesis of a disease—proteins, changes in their levels, etc. In cancer patients, the bloodstream may contain traces of cell-free DNA (cfDNA) that can indicate the progression of a cancer, how extreme it is, and so on, without the need for biopsies. In general, the world of in vitro diagnostics has been working towards early detection methods, and blood tests have demonstrated strong possibility.
Theranos touted that their test could do all that and then some, but in 2015, investigative journalism revealed that the test was a hoax, and Holmes had essentially cheated investors out of millions of dollars. The company dissolved in 2018, and Holmes was sentenced to 11 years and 3 months in prison.
I had this in mind due to my work, but also because I found the conspiracy fascinating. I suppose that led me to consider the plot point of a rogue CEO or a superficial development company, especially one that works in health. But I had no characters who seemed “evil” enough to lie. So, I thought that turning things around and only alluding to a corrupt board would suffice.
Stormy Flare ended up being the victim—and the whole story evolved from there. Some writers say that the best kinds of stories are the ones that are part of a larger narrative—a frame without saying it’s a frame, in a way. I suppose that rings true here, because “The Trail of Your Failures Will Lead You to Memory” is basically one story told after the fallout of another—another whose details do not get revealed until the very end, in a kind of “punchline” manner that served to recontextualize all of the other events in the former story.
It was originally an OC who came up to Stormy, but I thought back to her debut episode, “Rarity Investigates,” and wondered if it would be better to tie some aspect of the OC to the two ponies whom Stormy met: Rarity and Rainbow Dash. It would definitely give some greater weight to her actions, even the alluded-to ones, and it would allow me to set the story subtly within the canon of MLP:FiM.
Scootaloo was a somewhat obvious choice. Her connection to Rainbow Dash is self-explanatory, but what of her connection to Rarity? There are a couple of hints I provided to make this connection not seem artificial but, instead, incidental—giving it a kind of “lifeness,” as it were. Establishing that she was in a relationship with Sweetie Belle was the first step. The next was having Scootaloo reveal towards the end that “a mutual friend” made the cloak she wore. Small things like that lent themselves to the idea of Rarity. But I also wanted to lend something to the idea of Rainbow Dash, hence Scootaloo’s optimism and also energetic gumption, in contrast to Stormy’s melancholic reservations.
Several times I even had Stormy indicate that she had the faintest impression of remembering two ponies in Scootaloo’s behavior. This made the reveal of Rarity—and the non-reveal of Rainbow Dash—work more strongly. With how old Stormy is suggested to be, it made sense to also suggest she’d have trouble remembering ponies’ names and faces—but not how they made her feel, to paraphrase Toni Morrison.
Finally, Scootaloo as the secondary character made sense given my thoughts on Theranos and my desire to spin things a bit. Her disability proved an excellent “catalyst” for establishing a reason for Stormy’s company to exist and for it to eventually fall into corruption. Then I thought about how athletes sometimes face debilitating disabilities in their careers not too dissimilar to genetic ones, and working from there, came up with the idea that Stormy would make a foundation for the development of prosthetics for a specific kind of muscular atrophy, which, in my story’s headcanon, is what Scootaloo suffers from, and which Spitfire also apparently suffered from.
It was important not to make the story about Spitfire until the very end, in order to fit with the parameters of the contest, and also to give weight to Stormy’s decision to leave Equestria. This is a story about the distance we travel to forget, and how that trail inevitably leads us to remember. Hence the title, whose structure reminds me of song titles, and of another story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: “The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow,” which dealt with completely different premises altogether.
If I am struck by anything about the contest, it was the general consensus of the judges that the story is original. It isn’t. It pulls from a lot of sources, published and unpublished, real and fictional, in order to generate its form. I wear the influences on my sleeve because I recognize and acknowledge their effect on me, and wished, in some way, to pay tribute. I suppose the only original thing I can grant it is that it joins a very small library of stories about Stormy Flare. I was certainly not surprised to see, upon entering, that this was the only Stormy Flare story.
I think the story falters or fails in some ways, however. I think that some lines are a little too “telly,” and that the coincidence of Scootaloo being in the cafe could be taken as contrived. I think Cóltoba emerges as a hybrid of the two cities themselves (who both share the same name), and some natives may take this as offensive.
Its strengths, however, are in its structure, its tightness, and the slow yet meaningful reveal at the end. Its prose, also feels true to its form, and while it is deliberately an homage to Marquez, I still hear traces of my combinatory style—a mix of Tolstoy, and Marquez, and Woolf, and Morrison, and a bunch of others who have always been talking through me as I write.
Just as a trail of failures leads you to memory, a trail of your words leads you to feeling.
Dang, no wonder I almost never place in contests if so many other folks put in this level of work.
It was different from the other entries, not necessarily unique in everything. In the sense that you took the road less traveled by (not that nobody every walked that path before), it was pretty cool to see how the prompt could be tackled from such a different angle. (I mean, this is a fanfiction contest.)
And that's not really why you won. In short, it's the concepts and characters and settings and theme that you took and assembled to make the best use of all of them, something that I sure hope is common by the time a writer has gone through so many drafts and is relatively happy with the last one.