Thursday thoughts: My Princeton interview · 12:48am Jun 26th, 2015
That Princeton fan-fiction course that covered "The Magician and the Detective" finally posted my interview on their blog… 2 weeks after the course ended, so nobody read it. But you can! It was posted here, but no point going there. You can’t leave comments there, and the slightly-improved version is right here:
AN INTERVIEW WITH BAD HORSE
by Evan Cole, Cara Hedlund, A. J. Ohiwerei, and Chet Reyen
Thank you very much for agreeing to interview us! We’re fans of your work – the “The Magician and the Detective” was assigned in our class as required reading, and we thoroughly enjoyed it – and we were looking to get your perspective on both the FiM [My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic] fandom and fanfiction writing in general.
Cara: What is your process for writing fanfiction?
Sometimes my starting idea is something one character and no one else would do (“It’s a Trap!”, “No Regrets”, “The Quiet One”, “Fluttershy’s Night Out”). Sometimes they’re character-independent propositions or “high concepts” (“Interior Design Alicorn”, the central analogy in “Keepers”). Sometimes they’re just moods (“All the Pretty Pony Princesses”) or plots (“The Mailmare,” stolen from David Brin). “Pony Play” began with the mood that Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body left me in. “Elpis” was a reaction against Harlan Ellison’s “The Deathbird.”
I think the best ideas are two or more of these things simultaneously, inextricably. “Experience” is a concept that applies to only one character (the one pony who loves sunrises the most can never really experience them herself). “Corpse Bride” is a plot that hinges on Twilight’s arrogance. “Bedtime Stories” is a subversion gimmick, but also a character. “Moments” began with a mood of desperate tenacity that’s half heroism and half Twilight’s obsessive-compulsive neuroticism.
For long stories I write an outline. For tricky stories I may start at the end and write backwards to the beginning. When I start, I know the plot, but usually not the themes. If I’m lucky, a theme emerges. “Moments” turned out to be about Twilight believing she couldn’t be a princess or a mother. “Magician and Detective” turned out to be about pride, racism, and self-loathing. “Mailmare” turned out to be partly about pragmatism versus morality. “Alicorn Cider” turned out to be about… feudalism, I think.
I do want my stories to be about something. Very old-fashioned of me. My opinions on what makes something a story, as opposed to just a narrative or something published in The Atlantic Monthly, are like those expressed by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren in their excellent (really, you should read them instead of this) books Understanding Fiction and An Approach to Literature: Fiction is an imaginative enactment of life which increases our knowledge of the possibilities of the self. A piece of fiction represents the writer’s ideas and feelings about life and its meaning. A short story should usually have a plot and a theme, where parts of the plot symbolize parts of the theme. We inhabit the characters, feel the plot as they push on and are pushed by it, and through the plot, we feel the theme that it symbolizes. (Some good stories don’t fit this pattern. Many bad ones don’t.)
Tony Earley said it more simply: “A story is about a thing, and another thing.” See “The story isn’t over when you wrap up the plot.”
When I finish the “first draft” (after rewriting most sentences several times), I send it to a few people and hope one of them can tell me what it’s about. Once I know, I rewrite it. I may set it aside for weeks until I figure out what it’s missing, or how to fix some structural problem. Sometimes I never do.
Between stories, the idea that I could type interesting words about fake people seems absurd. Samuel Johnson and Robert Heinlein said that anyone who writes for anything but money is a fool. But nowadays, the person who writes for money is also a fool. Ipso facto, writers are fools. I know writing is impossible; I try not to write; somehow, like a wino waking up in the gutter, I always find myself doing it again.
I never sit down to a blank page with no idea what to write. The story has to make me write it. I don’t get writer’s block. I get writer’s fork, when I have to choose one story path and set aside all the others. I'm always either knitting or unravelling. If you're lost in the woods and don't know how to go forward, you did something wrong; go backwards. (Unless you're actually and not metaphorically lost in the woods; then you should probably sit down and wait for someone to find you.)
I don’t “write for myself”. The last time I did that, I ended up with three pages of Celestia lecturing Twilight on the connections between deism, Buddhism, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Christianity, and BDSM. In fan-fiction, it’s just you and the readers, and you know how many read your work and what they think of it. It forced me to admit that I want a lot of people to like my stories. I want it enough to choose ideas they might like over ideas they won’t. I’m a popular writer now on fimfiction, but only because I once sat down and asked, “What can I write that people will read?”, and came up with “Twilight Sparkle and the Quest for Anatomical Accuracy” and “The Saga of Dark Demon King Ravenblood Nightblade, Interior Design Alicorn”. I prostituted myself for popularity, and it was a lot of fun, and afterwards some people hung around to read my other stories.
(I said that I don’t write for myself, and that the story has to make me write it. These sound contradictory, but it doesn’t feel that way. I’ve internalized my goal to write for others enough that stories compel me more when others might like them.)
Evan: Despite mostly being based in the FiM universe, your works display a diversity of writing styles. Do you edit your works to specifically fit certain modes of writing after completion, or do you find yourself able to channel your style of choice even while working on the initial draft?
I check afterwards that my style is consistent, just as I check each character’s voice, but I need to find the style early on. Sometimes the style guides the story more than its seed idea does (Moments, Pony Play, Old Friends, Bedtime Stories, Elpis).
Having a personal style is overrated. Nobody read Charles Dickens or Henry James for their style. Having a personal style only became a big deal in prose in the early 20th century, when modernists decided reality was unknowable, and so art should be about art, not about the world. Becoming famous became a matter of contributing not great art, but a new style. (This began earlier in painting, probably because of photography.)
Ironically, this focus on art itself made it hard for art to progress, because any style distinctive enough to make one famous is too idiosyncratic to learn from. If you borrowed Van Gogh’s or Hemingway’s style, people would say “Nice Van Gogh parody” or “Nice Hemingway pastiche” without being able to notice whether your painting or story was good or bad. If it was un-ironically good, that would make it bad.
As a result, the true importance of style is underrated. You do need the right style for the story. Different stories require different characters with different voices. Style is the voice of the story itself. The prose writer who has only one style can tell only one kind of story. Think Hemingway or Cormac McCarthy. They’re great stories, but there’s a sameness to them. The more distinctive the style, the less that can be done with it. I love Lovecraft’s mythos, but you only need to read one Lovecraft story. They’re all basically the same.
The fetishizing of style has conspired with the agendas of literary critics and publishers to focus our attention on writers with narrowly-constrained minds, like Hemingway, [1] Thomas Pynchon, Charles Bukowski, or Philip K. Dick, who wrote beautiful stories but circled obsessively around the same few themes over and over. They can be more easily summarized, shelved, and sold than Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, or Karen Joy Fowler.
Bruce Lee allegedly said of martial arts, “The man who is really serious, with the urge to find out what truth is, has no style at all,” meaning he knows and can use many styles at will. The architect Bjarke Ingels said that your style is the sum of your inhibitions.
Cara: Is there any writing you’ve produced that you’ve been disappointed with stylistically, or that you wish you could edit now that it’s up publicly?
Maybe “Friends, With Occasional Magic.” “Mailmare” has some flat, sparse sections. “Happy Ending” is dry. But those bother me only because the story and the style sag in the same place.
I often do edit my old stories. Sometimes I incorporate suggestions from readers.
Chet: When you decide to write a work of fanfiction, do you generally create a narrative scenario based on the world you want to write about, or do you instead pick a particular facet of the source material to focus on? For instance, in The Magician and the Detective, I found the discussion of ‘cutie marks’ as they related to Holmes, as well as his interaction with magic, to be particularly interesting consequences of the existence of the character within the world of FiM. Do concepts such as these motivate you to write specific stories, or are they simply natural functions of transposing characters into alternate universes?
More the latter for me. They’re the things that mold themselves around the story once I’ve cast it in the FiM universe. I’ve asked some authors to de-ponify their stories for a non-pony anthology, and it turns out that the better a story is, the more tightly everything in it holds together, and the harder it is to de-ponify.
Evan: Have you noticed any particular trends within the themes, style, or content of FiM fanfiction as the years have passed and the fandom has evolved? What about fanfiction in general? Do you tend to adapt your own writing to match these trends, or has your artistic vision remained largely constant?
I can’t think of any definite trends. I don’t read in other fandoms because I don’t know how to find the good stuff in the slush pile. I don’t think I have an artistic vision beyond wanting to make my readers cry the sweet, sweet brony tears that I feed on.
A.J: In your blog post about Fallout: Equestria, you mention that published books are required to endorse certain lies and omit certain truths while also abiding by a set of rules about plot structure that can never be broken. In your own fanfiction writing, do you find yourself defying these conventions in the way that Fallout: Equestria does? If so, in what ways and why? Do you think that fanfiction is a medium that generally abides by these conventions or subverts them?
I tried to in “Mortality Report”, in which Celestia’s immortality forces her to see how being nice to today’s ponies is cruel to their descendants, but most readers subverted my subversion. In “Mailmare”, the good (save the world) and the just (punish the guilty) turn out to be mutually exclusive. But usually, just writing a good conventional story is hard enough for me.
But if you choose to either observe or subvert a convention, you’ve already yielded to it. You’re still bound by its assumptions. Few people can escape these chains of thought intentionally; it almost has to be done out of ignorance.
For example, Tolkien said, “A fantasy world is one in which moral and magical law have the force of physical law.” (See my post “Fantasy as deontology”.) If you act virtuously, a fantasy world’s karmic forces will conspire to give you victory in the end. That’s the point of classic fantasy. They’re all about that one scene near the end where Frodo lets Gollum go, or Luke switches off his targeting computer, and the virtuous fool defeats the pragmatist.
Contemporary writers may subvert that trope, writing gritty fantasies where awful things happen to good guys, or everything is shades of grey. But to do so they must assume that the world should have karmic justice, and so their subversions are cynical, bitter, and post-modern.
Fallout: Equestria never invoked that logocentric expectation of the world, and so went beyond modernism in a way that post-modernism never could, just by honestly not caring about its concerns. Many fan-fiction writers would say, if they thought about it, that the two-thousand year old artistic tradition of seeking the logos, and the one-hundred year old tradition of angsting about its disappearance, are equally silly. They never expected there to be a logos in the first place.
Fan-fiction writers aren’t just writing outside the box. They may not know there is a box. They’re re-inventing literature almost from the ground up, not by theory, but often blindly, by Darwinian evolution. They birth hundreds of thousands of hopeful monsters, some few of which crawl, swim, or fly in strange new ways.
Evan: As a fanfiction writer who writes primarily in the FiM fandom, why do you think that the franchise has succeeded to such a great extent in an age group that was not meant as its target market? Typical reasons given for FiM’s success with older fans focus on its intelligent writing and mature themes, as well as Hasbro’s healthy relationship with and encouragement of the “brony” community. Do you agree that these aspects of FiM are what has made the series so popular among adults?
I wouldn’t call the show’s themes “mature” if that means “too complex for children to understand.” But I wouldn’t call shows made for adults mature, either. There’s a very limited market for mature stories, maybe not enough to support a TV show. We sacrificed the word “mature” years ago just to have a shorthand for sex and violence, and nobody complained. [2]
My post “Why the New My Little Pony is 20% Cooler” suggests some story-based reasons for its popularity. These include:
– not wasting (much) time fighting villains, who suck up screen time without developing anybody’s character
– characters who each have lives, goals, careers, and problems of their own
– rejecting the Aristotelian idea that characters have “strengths” and “flaws”, in favor of the idea that characters fit or fail to fit their qualities into a social context
Another reason is that adult shows today are edgy, ironic, and full of derisive humor. It’s hard to find something nice. Sometimes South Park just isn’t funny enough to make up for the pain of watching it. Sometimes a guy gets back from his third tour in Iraq and just wants to watch ponies for a while.
I think anime paved the way for MLP. Japanese culture lets men appreciate cuteness. It’s given us a weird blend of cuteness and violence for years, in anime like Pokemon, One Piece, or Madoka Magica (an anime about schoolgirls who giggle, wear frilly clothes, angst about their crushes, and die horribly in magical fights to the death).
Thanks for getting this far!
[1] I originally included Flannery O’Connor in this list because nearly all of her stories that I’ve read are about some person who acts very foolishly and then either dies or causes someone else’s death at the end, in a sudden final orgasm of despair. I took her off the list because her reputation is very high and she’s written a lot of things I haven’t read. Your thoughts?
[2] I didn’t want to get into the question of whether Hasbro’s relationship with bronies is “healthy”.
Congrats on getting the interview! After reading this, I seriously think you could steal the title of 'most interesting man in the world' from that Dos Equis guy. (and I mean that in a great way) :)
Also, on a lighter note, I'm really curious to see how that 3-page lecture from Celestia turned out.
This is certainly exciting. :3
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Good sir, you have raised the level of intelligence in the room by a factor exceeding 9000.
3182308 Winner!
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I don't always read fanfiction, but when I do, I read Dos Equus.
The problem of art. So well summed up. Mind if I quote you on that? (the bolded part)
As an artist, I agree with this so much. My ideas are not all equally good, some are just boring in hindsight.. but I'm never LACKING in them. I struggle a bit to understand people who say they have 'artists block' or 'writers block', as my problems are more along the lines of 'can't stop, ideas will eat me'.. My current hypothesis is that it's partly just resistance to starting (ie. same as every other activity ever), and partly self-consciousness / the idea that putting down lines / words /etc that are anything less than sparkling is an offense.
I'm not sure I want to actually -read- that..
But I sure want to see your list of titles, if that's among them :)
Perhaps this is a little tangential, but the roguelike genre of games* look rather interesting through this lense, being a genre that overwhelmingly uses a 'fantasy' setting, but with success hinging on NOT being virtuous but becoming a master of dirty tricks and running away (ie.. a .. rogue ;)). It's a big contrast with other genres of game, which mostly, if they are set in a fantasy world, are true to the idea Tolkien describes -- you act virtuously for long enough, and then you win (even if you happen to turn out to be the unwitting bad guy.)
* that is, games that are actually roguelike, like NetHack, Angband, DCSS, Brogue, not games that merely are labelled roguelike, like Spelunky or Binding of Isaac.
It's nice to find someone who seems to have basically the same opinion of style as I do: "You need to use style, but it's just a tool.".
I love Flannery O'Connor, but she belongs on that list.
(Also, for whatever reason, hearing Flannery O'Connor's name just reminded me that I haven't read any Sylvia Plath in too long.)
A tremendous interview. I've sort of been around on the periphery as you were formulating some of your thoughts about fanfiction so not all of it is a surprise, but it is still fascinating to see it all in one place.
That's a pretty thought-provoking interview. When you write about how you made stories to subvert ideas about Celestia and immortality, or in response to a story of Harlan Ellison, it made me think about what exactly literature is and why a literature course would talk about fanfiction.
I think literature is about using fiction to create a dialogue between writers, readers, and other stories, and fanfiction makes this dialogue more immediate and accessible. MLP fanfiction is pretty much all in one place, just a few clicks away on Fimfiction, and places like the Royal Canterlot Library even highlight the best of it so it's easier to find. If you want to see what people are saying about a story, you just scroll down to the comments section. The blogs as well give an idea of what people in the fandom are saying. It's all right there, and you can see what people are saying right away.
But there's more to it than just being immediate and accessible: fanfiction, possibly more than any other type of literature, is clearly a response to something. We even have a word for it: canon. And we have a word for community interpretation as well: fanon. If you publish a story in response to the works of Alice Munro, you're doing literature because your story is a response to something people in the literary community find important. It's no less an act of literature to publish a story in response to current thoughts about Celestia and immortality, Twilight's neuroticism, or the fanon interpretation of Princess Luna.
I'm pretty sure you did another blog post about this at some point.
Every blog post from you just reinforces my belief that you should be teaching literature or writing at a university somewhere, if you aren't already.
It's worth noting that even Tolkien violated this truism of his an awful, awful lot.
Part of this is because Tolkien had a weird obsession with the idea of a constantly decaying and falling world, in which each time you hit bottom and bounce back, you bounce back less high than you did before. ("Always after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another form and grows again" wasn't a pithy saying about a specific nigh-unkillable devil analogue; it was a bedrock statement about how Arda functions)
But part of it was that even people who really like writing narratives in which karmic payback is an actual thing and good and evil have physical force in the world, if they're good writers (and some of the best have believed in that very strongly indeed) recognize that if you actually adhere to that strongly, you end up with kind of a rather dull situation in which the good guys go from victory to victory to victory and virtue is always rewarded.
And that's rather uninteresting. Tolkien recognized this at least on some level, because his genre-defining fantasy trilogy is built on top of the weird hybrid fusion of greek tragedies, heavily Chrstianized creation myths, and Anglo-Saxon sagas that is The Silmarillion, in which virtue is rarely rewarded, and when it is rewarded the inheritors of those rewards inevitable fuck it up hardcore.
I take issue with that "must." A lot of people writing "postmodern" fantasy (and while I have my issues with postmodernism, most notable in my utter contempt for the notion of the Death of the Author, it is a word with actual meaning and I hate how it has become diluted) simply found it interesting to take the way the real world works, in which there is no observable or provable method of karmic justice existing and things seem awfully more complex than good-vs.-evil reductionism, and decided "Hey, you know, if I want to read something brimming with moral clarity, a lot of writers far more talented than me have told that story well, and a lot of complete hacks have told that story badly. Imma take some dragons, and imma take some knights, and we'll make them act more like the real people I see all around me every day rather than personifications of moral principles, and we'll see what happens. It will be cool and interesting!"
Sidebar: even more interesting, I've now noticed we're actually hitting a point where people are reversing the reversal and writing completely un-ironic stories in the classical mode again. I sometimes suspect developments and trends in literature and art basically boil down to "I'm bored of doing it This Way, lets do it Another Way" and then fifty years later Another Way is the dominant mode and people go "I'm bored of Another Way, let's go back to This Way." I often avoid thinking about it to closely because it would render critical analysis a lot more moot than it currently is, and I almost exclusively work in the realm of critical analysis.
But anyway, I don't think a lot of people who rejected classical fantasy karmic engines did so because they "must" believe the world "should" operate under principles of karmic justice.
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Oh, definitely. A whole lot of accepted wisdom on art is just reactions against the previous school of thought. The pendulum principle is even broader than that, because there are other general principles besides boredom that make everything useful get taken past the point of usefulness, and then be rejected more violently than it should be, or collapse more completely than it needed to.
Okay, but I think people who set out to subvert expectations--and that's what postmodernists do--do have to buy into all the assumptions up until the one they're subverting.
I don't think I did blog about that quality of fan-fiction, but I think that's its key quality. And it's all the genres in one place. You don't have to silence parts of your psyche to throw yourself into it, like you do with any genre.
Admit it, it felt good to get a lot of this off your chest to these literary non-fanfiction folks, didn't it?
[tl;dr your artistic integrity is not sacrificed in trying to please others, as you seem to feel about yourself, Bad Horse. You can achieve both]
You know, it is the essence of this contradiction you mention--the pull between the cry to be valued and the hatred the artistic spirit feels towards its own prostitution--that has led me to a theory: any story is only good so far as it succeeds in the author's goals, period, one of which will likely be some form of "I want others to like this."
We cannot be truly content while feeling we have somehow been dishonest towards our own souls, i.e. the idea of writing to pander to people (selling your soul to the devil of popularity), sacrificing something of the expression of ourselves in the process. As artists, the desire to be true to ourselves is impossible to escape.
And yet the desire to please others is likewise impossible to outrun. How we as humans value ourselves is through other persons, alive or dead, real or imagined. Think of the question, "is this bit of dialogue I wrote any good?". Defining "good" may be too difficult for the human race to ever accomplish, but we can recognize this: what becomes of "good" if your audience, if all other beings, cease to exist? What is the question of good apart from someone to think it is good? It's nothing, because we only ask it in relation to what others may think, even one person against a tide. The answer to "is it good?" can only take shape in the form of another person's opinion. A good or bad story produces reactions belonging to people--we don't think of trees sprouting when we accomplish writing a good story. We think of someone, somewhere, liking it. Having the reaction we want. So the question of quality in fiction inherently assumes that the approval of the reader is meaningful and worthwhile.
Is it not the same for the idea of art as communication? It assumes a listener or receiver, but even deeper is the goal of understanding and acceptance. Unsuccessful communication is useless; in communicating we are striving to make others understand us, and not reject our ideas or logic. Ergo, if you are attempting to convey some theme or opinion, impression of life or a truth about a character, implied in that is the hope your reader understands and accepts it--and thus you want them open and receptive. Writing a poor story is bad for reader receptiveness, to having them say, "yes, war is hell," and thus bad for communicating with your art. And so the question of quality once more becomes central, a question inherently valuing what other people think.
And so we simultaneously desperately want to truly and meaningfully express what is in our hearts and to receive the approval of others concerning that expression. I have found no other way to reconcile these two urges in regards to objectively judging fiction, other than to say, "all that matters is getting what you the author wants"--and what you probably happen to want is to express yourself and be thought well of. As such, if there exists a deep-seeded feeling I wish to convey in a story, there is nothing wrong with doing so in a way others will enjoy (in all the many definitions of enjoy). If I pen a story in which I am honest yet others pan as poorly written, and I desired otherwise (which I would argue every single writer ever does), then I have failed myself. If I write a story others love and acclaim, but was dishonest with my soul in writing it, I have failed myself.
You can say that sometimes, perhaps oftentimes, truly expressing yourself will come at the price of approval. After all, history seems to be riddled with examples of this. But I disagree, claiming there is always a way to accomplish both, one which likely won't be immediately obvious to you, and those examples in history are the result of a creator's inability to discover it, possibly due to it taking too long, or not believing it could be done.
Having artistic integrity and being well thought of (or "popular") are not two mutually exclusive things. It is the pride of the artist or the despair of the corporate tool which leads us to believe otherwise.
This was a good read. I liked this little bit a lot:
I like when authors admit that they care what people think of their stuff, even if it's implied that it was a shameful temporary surrender to vulgar, lowbrow desires. There's this idea that good authors and artists don't care what anyone thinks. Being excited that lots of people read your story is okay, but writing a story because you think lots of people will want to read it isn't. It's very silly. Definitely harder to ignore around here where readers are ready and willing to tell it you to your face that your story is cat vomit. I wonder if it's nice only having to care what the magazine editor thinks and no one else.
Is this what the crapton of money I threw at that one thing you asked for last year netted you? What was it... some woman named Claire I think?
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Hmm... yeah, it is certainly nice to be acknowledged by the author for giving praise. It's probably nicer to have to deal with only a magazine editor after having dealt with crazy fans for a good while. I dunno. I kinda disagree with Bad and you, I guess, HBAO. I guess what I think of making art is comparable to the goth subculture. Like, let's face it. It ain't popular. It doesn't have that universal appeal, and few ever flock to it. It's considered macabre and taboo, introspective and blah blah sad woe is me, and the butt of a lot of jokes (admittedly, goths making jokes about goths is fun as hell. Self depreciative humour is fun). It delves into touchy subjects that people don't want to touch like death and sadness.
But what if all people were into that? What if there was an explosion of gothic expansion? Well, it certainly wouldn't be known as the goth subculture anymore, eh? And, quite frankly, it would lose a lot of the charm. Like, having to share the bottom of a stairwell is fine. Having to share the bottom of a stairwell with a few dozen people certainly loses its tranquility when they're loud and won't stfu! Like, goth is barely a blip on the radar.
I'm more into believing the writer should write for themselves. If a few people wanna hop on aboard, it's pretty cool. A writer writes about something extremely controversial and only a few people hop on, it's still cool. It's like catering to a niche crowd. Like, only the right people should join in, rather than people who would gawk from afar. Popularity to the masses shouldn't be a goal. Becoming popular with people who share your specific ideals, now that's nice.
But I'm willing to admit that I could potentially change that opinion. Like, I've never been put on the spot like that and given the choice of writing for myself or writing for the audience; become popular or not. And from the looks of it, it's extremely difficult to say you write only for yourself after such an experience. Only a person with heavy conviction could stay straight on that one, eh? After all, we're human. It's almost an instinct to get popular.
Hmm... in a way, Bad still does write for himself. Like, his stories have morals and lessons that he himself values. Perhaps it's due to nefarious bad horse planning, but he has a huge audience to spread those morals and lessons to now. He still writes what he feels is important. And he still does it in a way that nets popularity. Well, most of the time.
Damnit, Bad Horse. You make me feel all funny in my head.