Eakin's A Taste of the Good Life · 1:30am Nov 15th, 2013
I’ve always thought of myself as the arch-nemesis of fluff, but A Taste of the Good Life finally convinced me that fluff and conflict can live together in harmony and both be better for it. In this interview, Eakin talks about the relationship between fluff and conflict, as well as some of the ideas in the story and the choices he made in writing it.
Plot summary: After Main Course’s Manehattan restaurant burns down, he goes to visit his sister in Ponyville. There, he buys an abandoned building and turns it into a restaurant, but with the building comes an unexpected tenant: Scootaloo, who has been living there since she ran away from her abusive father and alcoholic mother in Canterlot. Main Course ends up taking care of her. Pretty soon, his restaurant is a success, and Scootaloo is really warming up to him. He even meets a cute mare, and there’s the possibility of romance... until the mare turns out to be Scootaloo’s mom.
There’s so many things to love about the story, but my favourite has to be Main Course. He’s a big old softie who can’t resist doing the nice thing, even when it’s a terrible idea. Open a restaurant in a town that he’s just supposed to be visiting? Sure, why not. Adopt a damaged little filly? Of course. Fall in love with the wrong mare, and try to make it all work anyway? Yes, that too. He’s good, and he’s daring, and we can only hope that maybe, just maybe he’ll be clever enough to make it all work.
I’ve long been a fan of the kind of story where Scootaloo’s an orphan and she ends up gaining a family. Something about it just resonates with me. Maybe it’s the warm and fuzzy feeling I get from reading about something wholesome and good happening to a character I love who so desperately needs it.
The idea, of course, is nothing new. I’ve read tons of stories with a similar concept. Scootaloo is an orphan living under the Ponyville bridge. She’s a runaway living in the CMC clubhouse. Her dad is abusive and she just wishes somepony would save her. But there’s several things that make A Taste of the Good Life different.
First, it’s not about Scootaloo and Rainbow Dash. I’ve seen that plotline enough. Second, there’s a sympathetic antagonist. It’s easy to make us hate an abusive parent; it’s much harder to make us forgive one and love her in spite of what she’s done.
But most importantly, while Scootaloo is a big part of the story, she’s not the only part: it’s also the story of her mom seeking redemption and Main Course trying to fix his restaurant and, in a way, also fix the people in his life who are broken. I like a story with meat to it, not just a wish fulfillment fantasy, as nice as those are sometimes.
Italics are me. Regular text is Eakin.
1. What inspired you to write this story? Why tie together Main Course and his quest to rebuild the Knoll with Ebby and her quest to regain her daughter’s love?
I've always liked to cook, so I had the idea for a pony running a restaurant from the get go. It was even starting to creep into a few of my other stories, so I decided to get it out of my system. I also liked the thematic connection. Main Course fixes two very broken things over the course of this story: The Knoll, and Ebby. Scootaloo, for her part, gets to learn from his example and fixes her own relationship with her mother. It's no coincidence that the culmination of all she's learned about cooking and that final reconciliation happen at the same time at her birthday party.
2. Why did you tell a story about a chef and end it with Scootaloo learning to cook? Why not something about flying instead? Was it just because you wanted to be different? Or you didn’t want to get Rainbow Dash involved?
Dash is a good big sister, but being a mom is probably a little much. My take on Scootaloo's character, at least as it exists in this story, is that she's really desperate for approval from some parental figure after the way she grew up. Once she'd glomped onto Main instead of Dash, it made sense to me that she would show the same passion for his interests. Plus as I said above, she's learning more from Main Course than just how to cook.
3. You said in your comments that you were trying to keep Ebby sympathetic, even when she was the antagonist. I think you succeeded, and once she gave up on forcing Scootaloo to be with her, I started to cheer for her. Was there any point when you were worried that you might not be able to pull it off?
I worried that I would make Ebby too likable too soon, actually. Judging by the comments that got posted right after Ebby called in FPS, I needn't have worried. Rarity's 'heinous bitch' line, though a great line that I love, probably primed the pump in that regard. More generally, I find sympathetic antagonists more interesting. A lot more people are going to remember Queen Sparkle that Chrysalis from my other major stories.
Better get out of the habit before Count Obsidian shows up in the sequel. Seriously, fuck that guy.
4. How do you feel about Scootaloo’s choice by the river?
I thought it was justified. That and the scene after it were the turning point for both of them. If Scootaloo hadn't come to terms with just how deep her anger at Ebby ran, and Ebby hadn't gotten the message that she needed to back off hard, I don't think they would have ended up a family again.
5. The Pinkie Pie scenes were some of my favourites in the whole story. What made you decide to bring her to the Grassy Knoll?
Pinkie is just a character that I find genuinely fun to play around with. She's not there to advance the story in any really meaningful way, just to throw in a bit of levity to offset the heavier moments. I never really plan out exactly how her dialogue is going to go, I just try to let it flow as much as possible and see how ridiculous I can get with her table numbering system, for example. Badly written Pinkie is the character I find the most grating to read, but well done Pinkie is my favorite (in small doses, at least). Structurally, it was so that scenes revolving around Main running the Knoll could keep happening even after he'd opened it and the whole Ebby situation starts to take central stage. I didn't want it to be scene after scene of him with Scoots and Ebby, and leave my readers wondering when he was finding time to run the 'Knoll,' exactly.
Also, Pinkie, in my mind, is the most 'Ponyville' of the Mane Six. She knows everypony in town and is most emblematic of the general level of insanity that pervades the supposedly dull, rural town. She was also the inspiration for the whole extended metaphor I tried to weave in around the color pink being strongly associated with ponies or moments that are gradually strengthening Main's connection to the town and his new family. Generally, if Main comments about something pink the comment's really about Ponyville.
6. How do you create an interesting and likeable OC? Honestly, I was impressed that you made us care so much about Main Course and his quest to rebuild the Knoll without even showing us any significant canon character until chapter three.
I think the decision to take a chapter fleshing out his life in Manehattan and one on the relationship with his sister after he arrives in Ponyville was a good call. I think people like him because he's likable. He's a good guy, not some great epic hero or anything but just somepony who has his own identity and relatable goals and goes about accomplishing them in reasonably clever ways. And if he ever gets too cocky about it there's Silver Scroll there to keep him in check. That brother-sister dynamic was a great way to flesh them both out a bit and show what a good team they are.
7. How do you get the voices of your characters right?
I don't know if there's any magic trick to it. I'm gonna sound crazy but I just sort of listen to them talking to each other in my head and write it down. The same conversation can happen twenty or thirty different times in slightly different ways and I just merge together the ones I like. I actually ended up with another different version of that scene between Main and Ebby in her apartment completely written, a bit racier and a bit darker in tone, for example.
8. What do you do for your minor characters? All of your main OCs are good, but I also found your minor characters memorable, like Palomino with his martial-arts threats. Even Mayor Mare was interesting with her wall of photos of herself and the line where she laughs and says she’d forgotten how direct “you city folk” could be.
I think I just try to imagine that these are ponies going about their own lives and we're just getting a little snapshot of their day. Mayor Mare I wrote as a consumate politician, and I think she stands out because she feels like she got where she is by being ruthless. She's reasonable, but you really don't want to get on her bad side. That scene at the end of chapter two was a lot of characterization for her and Main both, establishing that Main is good at finding unconventional win-win solutions. So when the flip side of that comes around and he gets himself in trouble with Grace by trying to do the exact same thing it feels a little more real. Palomino is the chilly professional who's been doing a rough job for a long time, so while he does care he comes across as a little detatched. The trick for me is that you have to give your readers something to latch onto about them fast. They don't have a lot of screen time to waste and they usually have something the story needs them to accomplish, so in all three cases I had them open with something that said a lot about them: Palomino's threat, Mayor Mare's photos, and Briggs' 'Relax' notepad.
9. Why did you start the story where you did? Orphan Scootaloo as a hook in chapter one would have been the first choice for a lot of authors.
I think that honestly the orphaned Scootaloo trope is so overdone that leading with that would turn people off. I'd rather have people invested in the story revolving around Main and the 'Knoll,' then sort of slip Scootaloo in as what that story's leading into.
10. Why did you end the story where you did? And why did you add that extra epilogue chapter after marking it complete?
I almost didn't. The story loses a little bit of its focus, I think, after the 'Somepony Save Me' chapter. I kind of wish I had done a little more to strain his relationship with his new daughter, either via Grace or by having her react more negatively to discovering that he's dating Ebby. Couldn't find a way to do it that felt organic, though. Forcing Main Course to choose between Ponyville and Manehattan, or Scootaloo and Ebby, just felt like they were questions with only one reasonable answer and that trying to pretend otherwise would just leave people rolling their eyes. I can't stand blatantly manufactured drama. Once they were clearly on their way to becoming a happy family it felt right.
Had I decided to stretch it, Ebby's slip up with the cup would have happened after the party and forced Scootaloo to decide whether or not she believed it was really an accident, maybe Main Course takes Ebby's side over Scootaloos... see just writing that it doesn't feel like something he would do to Scootaloo. Anyway, since the conflict was over I wanted to briefly jump ahead and show the three of them were a family working in the Knoll together. Then my Unnecessary Epilogue Syndrome flared up and I threw in that little 1,500 word bit at the end for good measure.
There is going to be a sequel though, where an older Scootaloo goes to a culinary school in Baltimare.
11. How did you structure the story? It starts with Main Course wanting to rebuild the Grassy Knoll in Manehattan, and it ends with him settling down in Ponyville with a new family instead. In the middle, there’s the whole drama with Scootaloo, getting the Ponyville Knoll up and running, and romancing Ebby. What ties it all together?
Everything Main Course does ends up tying him more and more tightly to Ponyville. The successful big city professional who has all the trappings of success but then discovering true happiness in a small town is a cliche, I'll admit, but cliches get to be that way because they work. I knew that I wanted to link together several smaller, overlapping story arcs. The Knoll arc more or less resolves by the middle of Scootaloo's, and in turn their relationship more or less finishes resolving in the middle of the battle with Ebby over her fate, which in turn leads to them falling for one another eventually and settling down. Someone in the comments called the way their little family came together a 'reverse divorce' which I thought was a neat description for it.
12. Why did Main Course and Ebby fall in love, despite the fight over Scootaloo?
Main Course and Ebby's relationship, though somewhat odd, basically works (I hope...) because they're fundamentally compatible individuals with some immediate flirtatious chemistry when they meet for the first time at Rarity's fashion show and then undergo some really intense stuff together. I think that if they'd met earlier, before Snare Drum got thrown into prison, he wouldn't see her as much different from the other rich and spoiled nobles. It took life beating her down for a few years to make her a little wiser and humbler.
It also damaged her, physically and psychologically. She feels like she's poisonous and completely unworthy of love, which is only reinforced by how Scootaloo rejects her. Main Course, though, is the kind of guy who can look past that kind of damage and see the potential within her. On a more mundane level, they're both well off ponies from big cities who share their love for a daughter. Given the stuff Ebby reveals about her past and Main's almost compulsive need to be the nice guy it's not surprising he'd want to help her, if only to give Scootaloo a chance to forgive her and move on if nothing else, and he falls for her in the process.
13. How do you balance fluff with conflict? Because your story has a good mix of both. I actually think the fluff adds value to the conflict. We wouldn’t be so invested in the bitter custody battle if it weren’t for the silly condiment battle earlier and Scootaloo’s cute attempt to ship Main Course with Rainbow Dash.
The fluff is indeed the bread and butter of the story. When you have characters that have every reason to be at one another's throats or not to trust each other, it helps to show why they more or less get along anyway. Scootaloo, the CMC, and Pinkie are all great for that. Like you said, it helps the reader understand why they want to root for a character or a pairing rather than the story just telling them they should. It also makes the story feel like MLP. That slice of life stuff is what the show does really well. Besides, the resolutions of the conflicts are really fairly predictable from the start. I wouldn't count on those to drive interest for very long. If you know what's going to happen you better enjoy watching the way it happens anyway.
14. What part was the most fun to write? What part was the hardest?
The hardest part was structuring the middle of Somepony Save Me to get everyone in the place I needed them to be for that cliff scene. Took me days.
Pinkie taking over the Knoll, the CMC trying to get Rainbow Dash 'knocked up,' and some of the Main Course/Silver Scroll back and forth while they were investigating the Knoll for the first time were fun. While not fun per se, I also found writing the wine scene after the cliff and Ebby's talk when she gives Scootaloo her pendant to be very cathartic.
15. Can you elaborate on the difference between badly written Pinkie and well done Pinkie?
Bad Pinkie Pie is really quite bad. It's the awful kind of randomness, like a tween girl posting something like 'purple banana screwdriver! LOL I R Random pay attention to me' as her Facebook status. You still have to anchor the over-the-topness to something genuine. I think a badly written Pinkie is just throwing random comments into a story because that's Pinkie and that's what she does. But that's NOT what Pinkie does. Pinkie makes ponies smile and laugh, and crazy zaniness is merely one arrow in her quiver. Sure it stands out the most, but if you disconnect it from that core purpose it becomes annoying rather than endearing. It also helps if the reader can understand her thought process. That sounds odd, since she's known for having a rather bizarre one, but what I mean is that looking in from the outside you can see the strings of improbable logic she's using. She doesn't always have to be over the top. Giving her understandable worries and motivations that peek through the saccharine stuff goes a long way. In this case, it was worry that her employer's business would go under or she'd be replaced as their daughter figure by their actual kids. Those are pretty grounded, relatable concerns. My point is that you don't have to pick between silly Pinkie and mature Pinkie, they're perfectly comfortable existing together in the character.
16. I think your comment on fluff just blew my mind. I was always told to try to cut the fluff and make everything tight and full of conflict. But if fluff is there to make us care about the stakes and the characters in conflict, I might end up having to tell authors to add fluff to their stories. Scary thought. I guess too much fluff is just a problem with pacing: we've seen enough that we're invested in things, but the plot isn't moving along. How does the fluff level in this story compare to the other stories you've written?
As for fluff, well, that's kinda a pejorative term for slower, more relaxed character-building moments. None of it should be there just for the sake of being there. It's still advancing the story and the relationships. I think another key is not to start to repeat yourself. Like, I have one scene of Main Course and Scootaloo playing Frisbee in the park. If I tried to put a scene like that in every chapter, it would start to get repetitive and people would start wanting to skip ahead. I can say they make it part of a weekly routine or something, but if I'm going to include multiple scenes in the park they'd better be different enough to justify each one's existence.
All my longer stories have it to some degree or another, otherwise your reader never gets a chance to slow down and catch their breath, and the characters start to feel less like people and more like pieces on a chess board that the story is cynically maneuvering to put them where it wants them to be. Those other stories were more action oriented so there was less of it. Actually, I'd say my 'exception that proves the rule' is You Can Fight Fate, at least the first four chapters of it, which were very 'go go go don't stop keep moving' (for both in-story and meta reasons) and frankly the story was a bit of a step down from Stitch in Time. Even Hard Reset had the loops where Twilight gave up trying to solve the main problem of the time loop to gorge herself on donuts (For science!), have tea with Chrysalis, and beat a bunch of changelings to death with a baseball bat. Hell, the baseball bat even ended up basically becoming a recurring character.
And you know, even though you obviously need conflict to keep things interesting and stir the pot, I think it's the slower, quieter moments that, if they're done well, are what sticks with your readers after they walk away from the story. Ask anyone who read Fate which parts they remember better: The recruitment of NMM and Discord leading into the attack on Canterlot, or Star Swirl's bratty teenage daughter and 'Well, that worked.'
Interesting interview, and definitely a great story.
*holds up spork*
I really like this interview! Good questions, and good insights.
Also,
Say what now? I feel a mighty need to go back into the story and search for these moments.
It worked. One of best endings I've ever seen.
1508602
Think of when Main Course looks at Silver Scrolls' house.
1508602
Yeah, it's a bit wobbly in chapter two even thought it's potentially present (frankly, all of chapter two is wobbly) but from chapter four-ish it's intended.
1508704
I lucked into it.
No, that's not entirely true.
I wrote the 'Well that didn't work' parts as a recurring joke. I didn't think to re-purpose it into what are probably the three most impactful words I've ever written until FAR later.
Loved the story. Loved the happy ending for Scootaloo
1508731
Yeah, I remember the room, but I'm trying to think of other times it's used... This is intriguing.
1508740
The last epilogue of You Can Fight Fate is possibly the greatest thing to ever come out of UES (Also, one of the greatest things to come out of ponyfiction, period). Though really all epilogue are awesome.
Unnecessary Epilogue Syndrome is basically the best disease ever, IMO.
A very interesting interview to be sure, though your answer to Question 9 raised my eyebrow...
Which would be an honest answer, had you not tipped your hand with the story's synopsis...
...and the big picture of Scootaloo parked right next to it...
...and the Scootaloo character tag.
Seriously, most of us went in knowing it was gonna be an orphan Scootaloo story from the start.
1508903
I might be wrecking it for you, but...
Chapter 4:
Chapter 5:
Chapter 7:
Chapter 8:
Chapter 9:
Chapter 11:
Chapter 13:
1509204
I knew you knew, but did you know that I knew that nevermind this is stupid.
Yes, I was upfront with The Scootaorphan theme, but what I meant by my response was that jumping straight into that has been done every conceivable way. So I baited, switched, then switched back to the thing I originally baited you with. Or something.
Speaking of thus-far off-screen ponies... I notice that Snare Drum is in Never Found The Body territory. Commence speculation.
Oh god that line. I don't think any final line I've read has been that memorable since maybe "'Well, I'm back', he said."
1509700
I can't hold all this pink!