Writing style - evolution, dark and chilling.

Warning: this blog is about 2.5k words long and it contains spoilers to few of my stories, most notably Tools, The Sharpest Tool, A Kingdom Divided, Creation and Crow Maud. Be warned.

So, if this thread is any indication, some people are apparently interested in my writing style. Well, to be honest, I don’t have a single writing style (this probably applies to every other author on the site). Since July/August 2013, when I started to write fanfics, my style evolved from simple, minimalistic and dialogue-driven to much more vivid (though I still don’t consider descriptions to be my strong side). It also divided into at least three substyles.

As I said before, my beginnings as a writer were rather humble. Before I started to write pony fics, I wrote some short stories in my native language, Polish – mostly mystery/horror, though I also wrote a lengthy steampunk/adventure/fantasy story (which I never finished). Then I turned to poetry. Your mileage about its quality may vary. Some of them could be Maud Pie’s poems, if you replaced “rocks” with “big, dehumanized towns”. On the other hand, I won a few awards on poetry contests. Also, my attempts are poetry are probably the source of some machinery descriptions in my fics. I was always interested in how machines work and often used machine-based metaphors.

There are only two pieces of prose from that time available in English: a short “fairy tale”, originally written in Polish in 2008, which I later translated for my friend from Latvia:

Once upon a time, over the hills (formed by the glaciers in early Ice Age) and far away, lived a prince Slavislav. He was a son of the wise king Andrew, and he's been lacking nothing except one. There were no princesses in the neighbourhood, owing to the outbreak of dragons and witches few years ago. Everyday, Slavislav has been running through the fields, looking for the frogs, as the oldest mountaineers living nearby were saying, that long time ago the witches were turning princesses into frogs. However, the spell had a small flaw, it could be removed by a kiss.

One day Slavislav went on his quest to a dark, old forest. He examined some bushes, but there was only and old, toothless vampire there, begging for a cup of blood. Slavislav looked into a deep well, but only thing he saw was an octopus, shouting at the top of its voice that its name was Cthulhu.

Suddenly he turned around. There was a frog sitting on the edge of the well. He ran behind it quickly. He's been chasing it through the half of the forest and then...

'I got you, bi–' he paused, as his nanny had forbidden him using such words. He closed his eyes and kissed the frog. He felt the waves of magic around him. He opened his eyes and at the same moment he jumped away with a scream.

The frog was an enchanted prince.

The second story is my old shame, an almost 2k long Naruto lemon (that’s, dear kids, how we used to call clopfics back in my days). It’s still available on fanfiction.net and people still favourite it, even though it sucks in more ways than one (maybe because it’s a three-way…).

Up till recently, I had a long break in writing. Then everything changed when My Little Pony attacked. I read Cupcakes because deep inside my soul I’m a sick bastard (ever protested against animal research? Well, guess why I didn’t…), then I read Rainbow Factory and Scootaloo became my favourite filly. Still, I treated fanfiction as a guilty pleasure, till I read Milesprower06’s Cupcakes Chronicles (I didn’t have a fimfic account yet, I read it on deviantart. It was also my first contact with clop). Shortly after that I made an account, but I told myself that I’m never gonna write fanfics myself. It lasted for 2 months.

Okay, enough of that backstory, now time for what’s this long and boring blog post is about: the style. Just like my very first attempts in writing in general, I decided to write a mystery story. The beginnings were difficult…

"Ahh, Cloudsdale! Long time no see!" exclaimed a tall, black pegasus stallion, taking a sip of cider. His navy-blue companion muttered something under his breath, looking at his glass suspiciously through his thick-rimmed glasses.

"What’s up, dude?" the black pony asked. "I brought you to the home of the most beautiful pegasi mares you can imagine, and since we came here, you barely said a word. Who are you, and what you did to the good ol’ Cloud Counter?"

"Nothing, I’ve just been wondering, why are we sitting in this pub instead of hanging out in the place where there actually are some mares, or do what I should be doing now, work," Cloud Counter deadpanned. His friend sighed.

From Tools.

Well, there’s some description in the first chapter, but it mostly consists of dialogue. Also, when I reread it after a long time, I noticed that the first chapter (and large parts of the second one, especially when Vinyl shows up) have traces of what I call my “comedy style”, including the frequent use of insane troll logic and Arson, Murder and Jaywalking. For example, this line by Vinyl (who else but her?) in chapter 2:

"Mistakes of the youth… besides, what was filly doing at 2 AM in that district of Canterlot with a bag full of bits? If I haven’t mugged her, she’d get mugged by someone else… Hey, watch out with that syrin- ouch! Or mugged and killed. Or mugged, foalnapped and sold to the circus…"

This also marks another trait of my longer stories: frequent mood changes. When Vinyl says this line, she’s being interrogated after Bon Bon almost got killed and Lyra was arrested as a main suspect. Vinyl herself is arrested for drug possession. The third chapter marks the shift in mood to more dark, and in chapter 4 shit finally hits the fan. The description isn’t the best, but Lightning Dust will forever be the first pony to die horribly in my fics.

I’m not going to describe the whole plot of my debut story. It’s quite short (only 19k words) and some parts of it, especially the beginning are, frankly, quite weak. I used too many OCs, and the pacing sometimes is off, though I still like that little twist with Rainbow Dash at the end. There are however, few themes in it that I later explored more in my fics:

- Nightmares: first seen in chapter 5 of Tools. Dreams later became the common theme of my fics, and they often drive the plot forward. Examples include chapter 9 of The Sharpest Tool, the closest thing to Twixie I ever wrote, and, most recently, Rainbow Dash’s nightmares/hallucinations in chapters 3 and 6 of A Kingdom Divided (trivia: while writing the first version of the scene from chapter 6, I had a fever and that’s probably the reason why it’s so trippy).

- Flashbacks – in Tools’ chapter 5 author’s note I wrote: I swear, it's the last time I'm putting flashback in a flashback…. Well, it’s not. Recently, while writing A Kingdom Divided, I also grow fond of foreshadowing and putting a lot of Chekhov’s guns in the plot (I still can’t forgive myself an occasion to write a literal Chekhov’s crossbow in Tools… Maybe it’ll wait for a rewrite.)

- Hospitals: I’m a student of a medical university. Over the last 5 years, I spent most of the days in two hospitals in my town. The hospitals are a common location in my fics. Tools and The Sharpest Tool are notorious for that, though field hospital also appear in A Kingdom Divided. Kinda justified – the first two are murder mystery stories, and the third one is a warfic.

- Use of foreign languages: Latin and Dutch in Tools, German and Polish in The Sharpest Tool and A Kingdom Divided, German and Russian in Berry Punch Takes Manehattan. Except of being a biotechnology student, I also study English Philology. Foreign languages are my hobby, no wonder they end up in my fics too.

The aforementioned sequel of Tools, called The Sharpest Tool is, in my opinion, much better written. It isn’t much longer as a whole, but single chapters exceed 2k words more often than not. It also the first fic where I explored my fascination with fire.

Speaking of it, the similarities between a fire scenes from the chapter 8 of The Sharpest Tool:

She woke up on something soft. Around her flames were roaring, but she couldn’t hear anything. She felt something warm dripping from her ears and realised that her eardrums were shattered.

(the description later delves more into other Flitter’s injuries, which is too gory for the blog to be SFW but it generally just mentions them).

and a fire scene from chapter 7 of A Kingdom Divided:

Around them, the flames were roaring, engulfing the remains of the tents, the trees and bushes, slowly cutting off all the escape routes. Apple Bloom was sweating, trying to get back on her hooves, with Sweetie moving frantically on her back, trying to shield herself from the sparks. She was screaming, obviously, but Apple Bloom, her eardrums shattered after the bombs had exploded only few feet from her, couldn’t hear that. Once more she looked at the ant, carrying its load peacefully, and an image of Applejack appeared in her mind.

can show, how my style evolved between these two stories. The first description simply states what happened. The second is more dynamic and emotional. The pacing is more varied: scene from The Sharpest Tool starts with the pony waking up in the middle of the fire. Chapter 7 of AKD begins in another way:

An ant was crawling slowly through the layer of dry leaves, completely unaware of a small filly, lying on the ground in front of it. Apple Bloom was panting heavily, watching the ant carrying a pine needle. Somehow, its indifference toward the surrounding world impressed her. For a moment, she considered staying there and watching the ants for a few minutes.

Which, in her case, basically meant “for the rest of her life.”

Now, listen to this song, while reading chapter 7:

Slow intro, then a dramatic scene…

So far, I mostly told you about my “dark” style, with some mentions about comedy. Yet, the story I consider my darkest isn’t written in it. Creation isn’t the first story I wrote in what I call “eerie” or “chilling” style. I’d say its spiritual ancestor is “Głód” (“Hunger”) – a short story I wrote in 2011, following the story of a truck driver picking up a hitchhiker. Hell, I even translated it for you.

It’s less focused on gore (while the events forming the backstory of Creation are quite gory, they’re mostly described using sounds) and more on exploring the character’s mind, relying heavily on description (Creation was actually my first story without any dialogue… Long way from the dialogue-driven fics…). Some may call it purple prose-ish, some may call it poetic. It also utilizes nightmares and hallucinations to create the dark, chilling atmosphere:

Vinyl downed another can of an energy drink in one go. She was now seeing everything brighter, hearing better, pulsating rhythm almost tearing her eardrums, resonating under her ribs. She could almost see the sounds, visualising bass drums as a steady, black waves with a silver foam of cymbals. The cello was like the distant breeze above the surface of the black sea of bassline, air having an intriguing orange tint. Vinyl felt as if she was on the beach, wind sweeping the blue dust under her hooves, its whooshing similar to the crowd of cheering ponies, her hoofsteps on the sand sounding like her lover’s moans.

(...)

The song ended, soundscape, however didn’t fall apart. The surface of the sea became still, black water having now additional, crimson hue. The wind was still blowing, covering Vinyl with the blue sand, despite her desperate attempts to get herself free. She tried to spit the sand out from her mouth, but it was covering her muzzle, depriving her of air. She thrashed, trying to reach her the headphones with her foreleg, but they were too far. Her mind slowly drifted away, drowning in the crimson ocean. When her heart beat for the last time, the whip-poor-wills started to fly around the house, their calls no longer resembling the last breaths of a dying pony but rather a laughter of a thousand of demons.

This story, despite its distinctive style, still uses some common traits of my fics: for example, there’s a description of a machine, in this case a drum synthesiser.

Recently, I revisited the chilling style, writing Crow Maud. This story is a bit different from my other fics – it’s the first one to use first person narrative. It starts almost slice of life-ish, but then I put lots of little hints about the backstory and use the description of nature to create an eerie atmosphere. Not to mention that Maud Pie is a perfect character for that style:

I look at the sky. The stars shine just like a week ago when I was also walking this path, back to the farm after running some errands in the town. I look at the Mare in the Moon – a silent witness of everything that happened on that Friday evening. For a moment I have a feeling that she knows exactly what I’m going to do. I shudder, but she doesn’t react. Just like she didn’t react back then.

Well, Mare in the Moon, Luna, or whatever you were called back in the days when the two sisters ruled over Equestria, you can’t stop me now. I made my choice. Next time it could be Inkie or Blinkie who’d meet twenty miners coming back from the inn on a Friday evening. They aren’t as strong as me… Well, Nightmare Moon, I guess you don’t really understand that. You and your sister didn’t have so good relationships, did you?

The air is cold, but it’s not bad. It helps me clear my mind and focus on what I need to do. I can’t let emotions rule over me. I have to be precise. Twenty ponies. Twenty bullets. I trot forward, repeating these words like a mantra. The wind blows across the rocky plateau, littered with rickety bushes. I can hear the crickets chirping and occasional squeak of a mouse.

The next to analyse is my comedy style, but this blog is already longer than some of my one-shots, so I guess I’ll come back to it soon.