Author Interview » Inquisitor M's "Every Mare Needs Her Stallion" [Royal Canterlot Library] · 1:27pm Sep 25th, 2015
The Royal Canterlot Library is gearing up to celebrate our second year! We're asking you, the readers, to nominate a second story from an author we've featured already. Find out more and where to nominate here!
Secrets lie beneath the surface of today's story — though they might not be the ones you're expecting.
Every Mare Needs Her Stallion
[Sad] [Slice of Life] • 7,967 words
After Fluttershy threw a tantrum in Ponyville's marketplace, Rarity invited her over for some good old girly gossip. The Fluttershy that turns up on her doorstep, however, is absolutely not the one she was expecting. Somefilly has a secret and Rarity isn't above using a few tricks to find out what it is.
FROM THE CURATORS: This story also isn't above using a few tricks to keep you distracted until the reveal hits — serving some shipteasing from unexpected quarters — but we were too engrossed by the prose quality to mind. "This is a super-showy piece, dense not just with character drama, but with scenes and looks and touches that weave the tapestry of the central friendship," Horizon said, and Chris added: "Inquisitor M keeps the focus here tightly on his characters' emotional reactions and impetuses, sometimes to the exclusion of all else."
That narrow focus gave this story a chance to dive deeply into the depths of its protagonists. "It's about the best use I've ever seen Inquisitor M make of his 'emotions tightly-clamped' style," AugieDog said. "The events of the story, if told any other way, wouldn't be nearly as powerful." Several of us cautioned that that reliance on showing made this story a dense one — "readers with a taste for implication-heavy literature will definitely be impressed, but make no mistake; this isn't light reading," Chris said — but for all that, Every Mare Needs Her Stallion was a clean read. "All the buildup to this story was 'pay close attention,' but I didn't feel at the end as if I'd missed anything," Present Perfect said. "I really feel like this story has itself wrapped up, even if there's room for interpretation."
In the end, it was that combination of comfortable density and depth which impressed us. "It's the kind of story that rewards readers for investing in it. Isn't that exactly the sort of thing the RCL should be featuring?" Chris said, and AugieDog summed it up succinctly: "One of those rare stories where I find just about every word to be vital."
Read on for our author interview, in which Inquisitor M discusses half-questions, unshipping, and the great war against chaos and despair.
Give us the standard biography.
Scott ‘Inquisitor’ Mence, 1976–1988. Born in Southampton, England.
School killed my soul, but my mind is still trying to make sense of a world that cares nothing for it. In 2003, I finally fell into all-consuming depression and gave up on life. It wasn’t until 2007 that I found a small measure of actual help and started the long climb towards feeling human again. Eight years of counselling later, that climb is far from over.
I have no formal skills, I have developed few practical skills since school, and I haven’t had a real job in forever, but I love to be engaged creatively and sweating my fat ass off playing badminton is absolutely the highlight of my week.
I am a pattern-seeker, and the patterns I see all around me drive me to despair. In such chaos, my only succor is truth: philosophy.
How did you come up with your handle/penname?
I used to be a big Games Workshop fan. Later, I became a big fan of CCGs. In 2001, Sabertooth Games started working on a Warhammer 40,000 card game and some friends who ran a shop got us in on the playtesting team for the primary release. We did some damn fine work, and of course, the company had forums that we were encouraged to sign up to. Taking up the mantle of an Inquisitor of the Imperium seemed almost mandatory: I had a penchant for asking ‘why’ and not accepting facetious or superficial answers. In essence, I was a pain in the ass that thrived on being outside the system.
I used the moniker all through my time working with Sabertooth Games, but it was only after I discovered philosophy that I came to realise how apt it was, so the title stayed after that period of my life had ended. I discovered that there is far more mileage in analysing question than analysing answers. So few people know how to ask a good question — one that will lead to a meaningful answer.
Speaking of which...
Who's your favorite pony?
I detest oversimplifications like ‘favourite pony’; it’s like asking which is better out of honeysuckle yellow and Ladislaus Bortkiewicz’s criticism of Karl Marx. It’s only half a question, requiring speculation in order to even guess at an answer, and I do not do well with half-questions — like, bordering on pathologically incapable of answering them.
Since this is an open forum, however, I can oblige with some form of answer.
I can identify most closely with Fluttershy’s duality of kindness and anger, while I find Rarity to be the most emotionally complex, most realistic, and most useful pre-existing character to use when writing stories.
Lastly, I think Luna constitutes the best concept, thought that is somewhat spoiled by the knowledge that everything about her that worked was pretty much a fluke. While she constantly inspires me to do interesting things with her (minds out of the gutter, people), I’d have to say it’s in spite of canon, not because of it, so she doesn’t count.
What's your favorite episode?
*Glares*
Luckily, this one only has one answer anyway: "Filli Vanilli". It’s the one Fluttershy episode they got right, and seeing her bursting with joy and vitality is just a shoe-in for any and all values of ‘favourite’ (yes, with a ‘u’).
What do you get from the show?
As of now? Zip. I was in one hell of a dark place when a friend cajoled me into giving the show a fair shake, and the world Lauren created was just what I needed at the time: bright, fluffy, and with emotionally rich conflicts actually had value to them (aside from the opener — the less said about that the better). After season two …
Let’s just say it’s now about what I can make from the good ideas that were once there.
What do you want from life?
I want to know what it’s like to want to be alive — I mean actually want it. That seems a necessary cog in the machine, and it’s one that I don’t seem to have access to.
Why do you write?
Expression. Sometimes it’s about taking something I need to process and making it into a thing; sometimes it’s about just creating something so that people can see as a proxy for merely existing. The former was definitely where I started. I’ve never been backwards about saying that there’s a lot of me in Shades of Grey; the conflicts there are ones that I have very intimate knowledge of. The better I got at writing, the more it became about the latter, and that’s been a much harder thing to cope with emotionally: it becomes about being good at something rather than just doing it for kicks.
There is something both ironic and infuriating about writing getting harder the better I get at it.
What advice do you have for the authors out there?
Learn the difference between feedback, complaints, and critiques. If someone says there is something wrong with a story, ask them why. If they can’t explain it, don’t give it too much credence.
Which is not to say that feedback and complaints aren’t great. If you write a story and 50 people downvote it without explanation, you can be sure there is a lesson to be learned there, but you can’t just go assuming the problems are valid. Take rational discourse over subjective opinion every time.
Mare has definitely been the most controversial of my stories in this regard, and there have been a few times when I dropped any pretence at neutrality and ripped on some idiot who thinks that his personal assumptions make or break a story. They don’t. They never will. Not mine, and not yours. Obviously you don’t have to take a swipe at anyone, but you don’t have to take it seriously, either.
Of course, for a reasonable person, that comes with an unwritten caveat: you should be doing the same in return. Don’t stop at ‘I didn’t like it’ or ‘it doesn’t work’ when you read someone else’s story. You don’t have to say a word — critiquing isn’t for everyone and can be very stressful — but if you want to be the best writer you can be, you owe it to yourself to not just take the next step but the next five steps.
Was something contradictory? Was something impossible? If you didn’t feel the conflict in the story, try to work out what the author intended the conflict to be and figure out why it didn’t reach you. Did the dialogue put you off? Why? Was it the mechanics? The language itself? Was it the characterisation? How could you have done it better?
The questions are infinite. If you can make your critique to another person who can, in turn, critique your critique, all the better. Rules can be broken; make sure you know why one thing works and another thing doesn’t. Have an opinion — have it loud — and be willing to change if proven wrong.
Do not accept superficial answers that fail to expand your knowledge.
What inspired “Every Mare Needs Her Stallion”?
Like so many things, it required several things to be in place for the magic to happen.
Firstly, I’d read AugieDog’s Biology: A Romance some time beforehand and, upon disliking it, a conversation ensued with its author. With both of us being reasonable people, that conversation was both rewarding and productive, and one of the ideas that came out of it was the idea of ‘unshipping’ ponies — a light but poignant jab at the generally rabid nature of this fandom’s shipping enthusiasts that involves de-escalation into a meaningful friendship.
Secondly, part of my mental health recovery involves a lot of psychology and philosophy. I’ve always held to the idea that all of the main six’s character traits are best explained by failings during their respective childhoods, but Fluttershy and Rarity both strike me as being mostly about paternal neglect, characterised by impaired emotional control and anger issues. The number of children being raised without fathers in the western world today is reaching epidemic levels, so it’s something I’ve looked into a lot.
Lastly, the spark was just that one day in counselling where the right thoughts collided and I realised that I’d been glossing over some of the ways that my own Dad had contributed to some of the scars I’ve been left with simply through compliance with the norm. I wasn't mad at him or anything; I was angry at the kind of world where those things were normal. The fire was well and truly stoked; the counselling was on a Thursday, the story was up on Tuesday — no pre-reading, no editor, no cool-down (though it’s had its fair share of tweaks since, mostly thanks to The Royal Guard).
This story had to exist. It didn’t really matter whether the majority of people ‘got it’ or not. I knew a lot of people would be hard-pressed to follow some of the interactions, but that wasn’t important. This one was for me, and if anyone liked it, all the better.
I suppose if I could narrow it down to something simpler, I’d have to say that anger inspired this story — anger at a world where it was even necessary, and where countless children grow up without a full and complete childhood because so many of the adults can’t get their own $#!% together and act like decent human beings. And that’s before I even go off on a rant about the numbers of fathers incarcerated for victimless, non-violent crimes.
In fact, I’d go further. What inspired Every Mare Needs Her Stallion was rage.
The emotional content of your stories is often quite sprawling, but the writing itself is careful and tight. Do you gravitate naturally to such a controlled style, or did you arrive at it over time as fitting best with the stories you wanted to tell?
Like everyone else, my writing started looser than a politician’s morals. But since I learned to analyse it with the same pattern recognition skills I use for most everything else, I eventually simplified almost everything down to the point where every aspect of a story was a meaningful choice. Even when my words meander, you can bet that there is a considered reason for it.
Whether those reasons amount to anything useful is a whole different matter, of course, but the fact is that the approach is completely automatic now, and only half because I want it to be. Now that I understand the systems involved, it would be very hard for me to write intentionally loosely.
But the answer I think you’re hinting towards is that I love character interactions and personal drama, and I think these things are almost always optimised by massively prioritizing show over tell. I couldn’t begin to count the number of times that a single explanation I didn’t need has completely killed a scene for me. So, I write what I would want to read, but you could equally say that I write very much the same way that I experience the world around me. I am often confused and appalled by the number of physical and verbal cues that people are oblivious to. People just aren’t that hard to read. Hell, half the time I read people just by analysing text.
Sadly, I am still awful at poker.
Your work tends to reward the attentive reader. Are stories that take a little unraveling the sort that you yourself enjoy reading the most?
I remember Professor Oats asking me the same question after reading one of my stories. It’s not entirely accurate, but it’s pretty close. I don’t need a story that ‘unravels’ so much as leaves me lots of room to figure stuff out. Estee’s Five Hundred Little Murders is always the first to spring to mind for me; in the first scene alone I know who this character is, where she’s been, what makes her angry, and what she wants out of life, and Estee didn’t have to spend a single word telling me — it’s all there in her thoughts and behaviour.
All I really need is good characterisation. If your character is well constructed, I will enjoy figuring out who they are and what makes them tick. If you tell me this information, I will get bored very quickly. But a well-delivered mystery does me just as well — give my brain something to chew on.
You do a lot of editing and reviewing as well. Do you find that helping other authors with their writing helps you with your own?
Well, I used to. It’s a real shame that it’s fallen so far to the wayside in the last year, but yeah, editing and reviewing was critical to honing my skills. As I said above, it’s not enough to just like or dislike something if you really want to get good at writing. If I know why something works, I ought to be able to explain it in detail. I ought to be able to suggest alternatives for poor constructions or dodgy mechanics. Picking out typos and missing commas is one thing (irritatingly, the one thing I’m not so good at), but breaking a flawed piece of writing down so that every issue is explained and alternatives are provided — including explanations of all the choices I made coming up with that suggestion — is a top-notch way to examine your own skills for where you can improve.
As it happens, I wrote a whole guest article on it for Chris’s blog about it.
Enjoy.
Is there anything else you'd like to add?
Yes. Since I’m unlikely to get a similar platform again, I’m going to leave people with my all-time favourite quote from anything, ever:
"All of life can be broken down into moments of transition, or moments of revelation. G'Quan wrote, 'There is a greater darkness than the one we fight; it is the darkness of the soul that has lost its way.' The war we fight is not against powers and principalities; it is against chaos and despair. Greater than the death of flesh is the death of hope — the death of dreams. Against this peril, we can never surrender. The Future is all around us, waiting in moments of transition to be born in moments of revelation.
No-one knows the shape of that future or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born in pain."
—G'Kar (Andreas Katsulas, Babylon 5)
Storytelling is conflict. Conflict is life. If you try to pretend that a conflict doesn’t exist, you’re only adding a conflict with reality to your life, and reality always wins.
Everyone has their own conflicts and their own pains, so be excellent to each other, always.
Scott ‘Inquisitor’ Mence
You can read Every Mare Needs Her Stallion at FIMFiction.net. Read more interviews right here at the Royal Canterlot Library, or suggest stories for us to feature at our Fimfiction group.
Vote for The New Crop. You know it makes sense!
The biggest problem I had with this story was that it didn't actually hold together in the end. It was a well-written piece up until that point, but the whole thing was building up towards a climax... and the reveal, where we find out what was going on, didn't really feel coherent, because it was a "The Ending Changes Everything", but there was a lot of stuff in there which... just didn't work in the new context. The very final scene - Rarity crying over not being daddy's little princess anymore - killed it for me, because it didn't feel like a capstone to the piece I had just read.
3419044
Didn't work for you.
For me, the bottom line is that, when asked what 'didn't make sense', you failed to actually pin down anything specific. That's exactly the kind of shoddy feedback that I warned against. When I queried you before, your answer itself was nonsensical so I didn't bother following it up. There's a big difference between not making sense and actually being contradictory. You claim the latter but what you say only implies the former.
As I've said multiple times, I am not at all surprised that this happened in many cases; the story was never written to be easily accessible. However, that is not justification for baseless claims.
3419190
Er, what? I went into that in the comments of your story weeks ago.
The problems lie in the climax and conclusion - the recontextualization doesn't work because some of Fluttershy's behavior makes less sense in the new context, and the ending, with Rarity crying about not being daddy's little princess, relies on an emotional transition which occurs only at the very end of the piece; no mention is made of parents prior to Fluttershy's dad appearing in the piece, and thus the ending ends up not feeling like an ending to the piece as a whole.
It isn't a matter of accessibility; it is a matter of story construction.
Compare your story to The Sixth Sense, which is probably one of the best examples of The Ending Changes Everything. In The Sixth Sense, the ending recontextualizes a lot of the stuff we saw, and the fact that Bruce Willis was dead throughout the entire movie was set up by the rest of the piece - he was shot at the beginning, the kid can see dead people, and Bruce Willis interacts with almost no one other than the kid during the course of the movie. The perspective flip changes what his wife's behavior meant, but it still makes sense - in fact, it makes even more sense now. Indeed, that's the case with everything - all of what we see at the end, when it gets put together, makes the rest of the movie stronger. All of the things that happen over the course of the movie gain new power.
The same applies to Fight Club; when we discover the true identity of Tyler Durden, suddenly the behavior of other characters towards the protagonist makes more sense. We didn't see what was "really" going on, but we suddenly realize why he was an insomniac, why his girlfriend thought he was crazy, why he terrified his boss, and several other pieces fall into place. Indeed, I realized moments before the movie told me that the narrator and Tyler were the same that they were the same person, which is an amazing feeling to have - you get this sudden rush, and then the movie affirms it, and you get the same feeling as the character does when the find out just what has been happening.
Excellent fandom stories like Trust and The Writing on the Wall also give that rush at the end, when you realize what is going on, and all the pieces fall into place, and everything gains a newfound clarity.
When I read this story, though, I didn't get that rush of feeling. The ending of the story didn't clarify all the characters' actions; some of them made more sense, but others made less sense. There's no mention of parents prior to the conclusion of the piece. The scene with Fluttershy's dad didn't make all of Fluttershy's behavior make sense in a new context. The physical intimacy was given a considerable amount of focus, and much of it did not fit the new protective parent/protected child context. And the conclusion, with Rarity crying over not being daddy's little princess, was following on only from the climactic scene - it didn't feel like a resolution to the story as a whole because you didn't set up for the final two scenes in the rest of the piece.
These are all very specific issues. The rest of the piece leading up to the end is very nicely written, but without the climax and resolution tying it all up, the piece doesn't feel like a coherent whole. This is true of all stories, but it is especially true of stories like this, where the climactic twist is so crucial to the story as a whole.
I nominate myself. Can I do that?
3419305
I'm going to go with 'no'. But it won't matter if you don't post in the correct thread!
3419527
I transcend the threads of space and time, so when I post I post in every thread simultaneously.
3419215
Yes. I asked you why you thought it didn't make sense, because you were very vague. You 'clarified' by being equally vague, and more than a little baseless speculation. I didn't bother bringing it up again because I didn't feel you had anything worth contributing, but I had no intention of making an issue out of it. Now you've dragged that same nonsense here and made me want to challenge it.
Makes less sense to you.
Didn't make sense to you.
It didn't fit to you.
Every single facet of Rarity's characterisation throughout the story leads to that end. So does Fluttershy's. Generally, this seems to be what impressed the people that really got it.
It seems to me that what's confused you is that you're looking for the story to conform to some common way of presenting a twist, but it isn't that kind of twist at all. Woods for the trees and all that. The twist is 'Fluttershy's' Dad. What comes after is the key to piecing together Rarity's underlying drive with Fluttershy's behaviour. Further – for those really keen on psychology – you can extend the paradigm shown to explain both characters' personalities as they are shown in the show.
As I said, many people didn't quite put it together, which was no surprise. A few people did, which made me happy. Most of the people in the middle just enjoyed the character study and the prose. If you want to assert that there is something actually contradictory or nonsensical then go ahead and make that case. But if all you're going to say it 'it didn't make sense' then I'm afraid I have no reason to take it as anything other than bluster that it looks like.
For other people reading:
This is exactly what I'm talking about. He may be entirely right, but unless he can make actual logical arguments he doesn't have a criticism, he has an opinion. Opinions are great, but they shouldn't be taken as more than that.
-Scott
3419682
I'm not doing this to be mean. I'm trying to be helpful. Asking for clarification, then implying that the person just isn't smart enough to get your story, does not make it seem like you really want help.
Stuff like this:
Is not constructive. It is you trying to win an argument on the Internet. Trying to beseech your audience is extremely defensive behavior, and it almost always comes off badly, as if you're trying to deflect. It is generally best to directly address the other person, rather than trying to argue to the audience at large.
As for the story itself: it ate six downvotes today, compared to only ten upvotes, and my comment, which had been sitting at 4 upvotes, went up to 5. That is evidence that, yes, people do in fact think that the story has issues, and at least some of them agree with my analysis.
Claiming that I am not presenting "logical arguments" is a miunderstanding of literary criticism. Evaluation of stories is based on a combination of subjective and objective assessment. Logic is a purely objective thing, which is incompatible with subjective analysis. If there is a purely logical way to construct a story, we haven't discovered it yet. As such, all arguments are going to be based on subjective judgement to some extent, informed by our understanding of writing.
Some of the criticism it is as close to "logical" as it can be - the lack of mention of parents prior to the ending, yet which is the crux of the ending, is as objective a problem with the text as is possible. The conclusion centers around Rarity's relationship with her own father being contrasted with Fluttershy's, but as neither relationship is brought up until the end of the text, it makes it feel incongrous. Oddly, you didn't mention this bit at all in your post, despite it being a clearly articulated thing which is obviously true and fits with general writing conventions.
Likewise, my criticism of the piece's handling of The Ending Changes Everything - the twist in the story - is quite standard. Anyone with experience with twists like this will tell you the same thing - the story needs to hold together after the twist, and the story should foreshadow the twist without giving it away. The Sixth Sense is brilliant in part because it is so brazen - it blatantly tells the audience what the twist is, and yet the audience doesn't see it coming anyway.
The Ending Changes Everything can be brilliant, but it can also be awful because if the stuff doesn't all feel like it fits. If there are pieces which only make sense with the original interpretation, and don't with the new one, then instead of getting the rush of realization, they're left feeling like the writer was just outright lying to the audience, or made a mistake, or that the story doesn't actually make sense, or that the events in the story didn't have any impact because the ending removed the context that made them meaningful (the last is the reason why It Was All Just A Dream is such a dangerous trope).
Here, it didn't work so well, because some of the intimate physical contact didn't make sense when recontextualized by Fluttershy's behavior towards her father, and because of the lack of foreshadowing of the parental relationships being significant in the first place.
Finally, as far as this goes:
Of course it is "to me". That goes without saying. All literary criticism is coming from the critic. But equally important is the understanding that if a critic finds a problem in a piece, many others will likely do so as well - and in this case, at least five people have taken the time to upvote my comment on the story. Someone took the time to upvote my comments here. Clearly, I'm not alone in my evaluation of the piece.
And indeed, as a member of the Royal Guard and a critic, you should understand this already. When we are evaluating stories, we're using our personal judgement to determine whether or not other people might like the story. If it doesn't work for us - if we see flaws in its construction - why would we expect it to work for other people? Do we think other people are too stupid to notice? Or do we think that our readers are as likely as we are to pick up on the flaws?
This is at the core of what we do as critics, and indeed, it is our ability to take our own experiences and present them to others to allow them to make educated decisions about what stories to consume that makes our reviews valuable.
3419682
Look. I'll be frank. I have a mild disliking of both of you. I came here because I saw Flarity featured and I was trying to decide if I should read it. I was going to just sit back and watch the fireworks, but since this is clearly a debate between a chimp and a titanium dragon...
TD is being completely fair. He's bringing up exactly why he doesn't like your fic. He doesn't feel like things led up to the end or that the end really fits with what he read. That's fair, and he even explained why. As he noted, you've accrued downvotes since being featured, and his comments here and on the story have gained a few upvotes. That means that there are other people who agree with him.
I called you a chimp. Your tone implies that you believe this to be a one-sided debate, and you're not wrong about that. But much like a chimp, you're simply flinging feces at TD instead of even addressing his points. At least TD is trying. You're just responding to everything with "To you." "To you." "To you." That's so ridiculously childish that I feel embarrassed for RCL. You've been featured by them now, so you are one of the authors representing their standard. To completely thrash about and discard any criticism because someone "wasn't smart enough to get it" or whatever rubbish you're on about now is absolutely disgraceful.
Not only have you sealed my decision not to read this one (I was still on the fence, since I thought I might see if I agreed with TD or not), but you have ensured that I will never read any of your stories, ever. I can't even trust your judgment in TRG if you're acting this elitist.
3419682
Pretty much what 3420838 said. Seriously, M, you're a TRG reviewer and you got a fic featured on RCL's site blog. Whether or not you agree with 3420549, this would be the time and place to take his criticism with grace and professionalism, and set a good example for the younger writers on the site. Should disagreements persist, continue the discussion somewhere private. Like PMs. Or Skype. Or friggin' post cards. Literally anywhwere but here! Instead, you're throwing a fit like a child in a toy store, putting potential readers (of which, I was one) off your fic and yourself as an author because of your attitude, and, quite frankly, putting a bad image on TRG because you've shown that you can't take criticism from one of your fellow TRG reviewers!
In short, way to go.
3419682
3420549
3420838
3420886
All right, folks, time to take it elsewhere, please.