7/14 · 7:30pm Jul 14th, 2014
I'm really getting to wonder what the hell I was thinking. The first few scenes of Preserved were actually written a long time ago with no forethought as to where I would take the human. I rewrote the scenes using different names for the gryphons and got as far as escaping the castle. Later on, instead of having him hitch onto a train heading to Ponyville, I decided to take a less cliche approach and have him collapse in the paws of the diamond dogs.
When I got that far, I was practically improvising, as could be easily inferred. As the story continued onward, I thought on exploring basic differences between human and 'Equine' society. I had actually written an entire stupid document on the three tribes and their mating rituals. Another element I wanted to add was Luna's delusional thinking, something that leaked into my head probably from Princess Molestia's Tumblr blog. I wanted Jenner to flee from Luna's abusive and psychotic advances and go into a romantic relationship with one of the other ponies- either one of the main 6 or Celestia herself, while the basis of the plot would be Luna's attempt to destroy the relationship that sprouts. In essence, Luna would return to herself in the Nightmare Night incident: Luna being unable to relate to her people and the changes that their society made because of her thousand years' absence. The foremost of those changes would be the ponies' progressively strict views on sexual relationships.
Even reading over that last paragraph gave me a WTF moment there. It's not even a story, just a bunch of unoriginal babbling from a newbie writer. Of course, much of this was written before I understood the extent of the material already written about humans and pony relationships. I wanted to make my own original twist on it, but it turns out to be nothing but a combination of unoriginal ideas into a non-cohesive series of weird events.
What I should have done was write out the entire story and published it part by part one chapter every couple of days. That way, I'll establish the skeleton of the story BEFORE I go off rambling nonsense. Despite the high ratings, I understand the comments on how this started off as a good original story (up to the diamond dogs) and turned into a complete fiasco due to my lack of foresight. This is why my ponysona would have a set of piano keys for a cutie mark, not a pen on paper.
I realize that I've learned absolutely nothing. I know that My Lack of Faith was nothing but the barfing out of contradictory ideas in no real structural form on paper. I should have taken the prettiest of the scenes there and turned them into one-shots rather than make a pathetic attempt to make a story out of them.
I'm taking a trip to Missouri for a week starting tomorrow. If I don't get any inspiration for a better take on my story, which I'm going to tear apart and reässemble anyways, I'm going to scrap it and quit writing for a while. I just can't seem to get my ideas out in a way that other people can read them. It all comes out as stupid, even to me.
I should be adapting to my new diet and getting some exercise, not hiding in my cave to avoid melting in the sun.
You think I don't improvise entire stories? Shit, my best one, Last Brony, is almost all improvised. Reader comments have swayed that story more than anyone realizes. I started off with 2 chapters written in a matter of hours off the top of my head, and absolutely no idea where it was going to go.
But I'll admit that's not a pretty way to write. It becomes too easy to write yourself into a corner, or wind up with a complete lack of plot. So what you can do, instead of writing the whole story first, is just to plot the whole story out on a timeline sort of. A list of bare-bones events that sums up the entire thing.