Looking Back On Three Years of Ghosts · 1:33am Jan 1st, 2016
Today marks the end of a very extended story. Where Loyalties Lie: Ghosts of the Past has reached its conclusion. Along the way, I’ve learned a great deal about writing, and I wanted to record and share some of that, both for my own reflection, and because maybe some of you can benefit.
The first chapter of Ghosts of the Past was published a little more than three years ago, by a very different author than I am today. Honor Guard (or just ‘Where Loyalties Lie’, as it was called at the time) was something of a rising success, and I was high on the unbounded opportunity presented by the new opportunity of our new Price of Loyalty project. I felt on top of the world, like I could do anything I wanted with my writing and it would just work.
To be clear, while I’m disappointed in Ghosts (and to a certain extent, I’m disappointed in myself for the sheer hubris I see when I look back on the decisions that led to its current state), I still believe in the story it wanted to tell. I just went about it the wrong way. That sort of experimentation is part of the exploration in form and style that comes with writing fanfiction. And in this case, I recognize that my experiment failed.
Honor Guard told a fairly compact story (at least, relative to Ghosts). Shining Armor and Rainbow Dash may have been in different places, taking different actions, but they were pursuing the same goal. Neither portion had a ton of ancillary characters to that needed to be remembered—or at least, I can’t think of any stand-out complaints about it being hard to follow. This isn’t to say that there’s nothing I would change about Honor Guard, were I to take some time and polish it. But by-and-large, I feel that story is a success. It doesn’t need major surgery or restructuring to really be appreciated.
Ghosts of the Past is not a success. It’s three major character arcs pursue wildly different goals, and their characters interchange and entangle and interfere in one-another’s plots in ways that appear to have been confusing to a lot of readers—my editing staff included. The fact that work obligations dramatically slowed my writing speed only complicated matters. When a chapter only came out once a month, and each character’s arc received focus for only one chapter out of every three, the result was a narrative that simply required too much focus over too long of periods to track. Combine this with compromises and mistakes on my own part as a result of making The Price of Loyalty work, and the result was… what I’ve described above.
With that basic framework out of the way, let’s see if we can learn something.
1: Bigger is not Better
If you hear laughing somewhere in the distance, it’s probably Imploding Colon, who is an excellent example of an author that clearly learned this lesson a long time ago. A foolish, younger Loyal Liar once thought that those 500 word chapters were silly. He was an idiot.
To an author—especially a beginning author—it might seem that the length of a chapter ought to be a secondary concern, at the mercy of the length of a scene or an idea or a cohesive theme. What I’ve learned from feedback on Ghosts, from some excellent panels by more experienced authors at Everfree Northwest and Bronycon, and from similar sources is thus: chapters are not actually about the narrative. Chapters exist, first and foremost, for the benefit of the reader. They separate narrative into easily digestible chunks, so that a reader can casually keep track of their place in a longer story. Dividing a long segment across two (or more) chapters is not a bad idea; in fact, it’s often a very good one.
Consider that the average literate adult reading English reads between 200 and 300 words per minute. If that person wants to read some Austraeoh, they only really need two or three minutes. They can fit that reading in between other tasks in their day, and they likely won’t be interrupted. In stark contrast, for someone to sit down and read a chapter of Ghosts, they need to set aside an uninterrupted hour and a half for some of my more egregious examples (20,000+ words). An hour and a half is a huge portion of someone’s time to expect uninterrupted, and thus it is likely to drive away all but the most dedicated of horse-fiction connoisseurs.
There are certainly cases where a ‘chapter’ can mean more than just a division for the reader, but if you’re clever enough to have a chapter mean something diegetically in your narrative, you’ve probably already considered the lesson I just hashed out above. To repeat the wisdom of a thousand con panelists, repeated until it’s truth causes bleeding out my ears, “There is an exception to every rule—but only break the rules on purpose.”
2: Don’t Write on Borrowed Time
There are two kinds of readers you will encounter when writing ‘serial fiction’. One reads as you go, starting when they first see the fic and using our wonderful bookshelf tools to keep up as new chapters come out. The other waits until a story is finished, and then sits down to read it all at once. I have nothing against the latter group, but since they haven’t read Ghosts yet, it’s hard for me to derive a lesson from them.
When a fan is reading a story, or a webcomic, or whatever the medium may be, they have a certain finite capacity for details. The more invested in a narrative, they more they will remember about it—just ask that friend you know who loves Star Wars what Jabba the Hut’s little rat-monkey thing was named. They’ll know off the top of their head.
The correct answer was Salacious B. Crumb, portrayed here by a malnourished chicken.
For the reader who reads along as you publish, your publication schedule matters. A lot. If a story takes too long to update, people jump ship. And, arguably even more importantly than the number of readers you have, your update schedule can and will actually affect the way that people perceive your story. Take this excerpt from a fantastic comment by RoboRed:
Add all of this together, and I just no longer felt like reading Ghosts at all.
However, I realized that I am a fallible human being. I am prone to forgetting details over long periods of time, there are a bajillion other fics my brain is trying to remember the lore of, so sometimes stuff can get forgotten, mispercieved, or jumbled up. For this reason, I decided to give the story a second chance, and give it a reread.
This turned out to be a good idea. It helped realign what was going on in the story, settled some misperceptions, reminded me that not every character was unlikable, and had some earlier things make more sense given future knowledge of Loyaltyverse lore. I'm interested enough to start following it again.
So what do you do about this as an author?
Don’t publish until the fic is done.
I’ve received this advice from more than a few of FiMFiction’s more seasoned authors, but I think it may have been the comment you read above that drove it home for me. Ghosts lost readers for a lot of (valid) reasons, but this was one that stands out because it has nothing to do with the quality of the underlying narrative, beyond that it was somewhat complex. I was just too busy to keep up an update schedule that would satisfy the story I was trying to tell. And the story suffered.
3: It’s The Little Things
As I discussed initially, Ghosts is really three stories. While there are little entanglements here and there, you can appreciate Rainbow’s journey to Suida and not have any knowledge whatsoever about Twilight’s search, or Luna’s mission east. And whenever I consider what a story about just Dash would have been like, I kick myself, because it would have been so much better. The same with a story about just Twilight, or just Luna.
To that end, when you sit down with an idea for a narrative, ask yourself “What is the smallest way to tell this complete story?” In a way, this ties in really strongly with finishing the whole story before you start publishing. When you’re writing the sixteenth chapter of something, and you realize a plotline isn’t going anywhere at all, it’s a lot easier to trim it if nobody has seen the beginning of that plotline way back in Chapter 1. Once you’ve show the readers something, there’s a burden to see it through to some sort of end.
Even if it’s an end as blunt as the Ghosts.
So what’s next?
As I said, I still believe in a lot of the story that Where Loyalties Lie is trying to tell. I “just” butchered the execution of the second part. In one sense, I’m pissed at myself to a pretty substantial degree. But in another, I’m glad. Fanfiction is an opportunity to work on writing skills without pressures like the free market requiring you to get everything right on the first try. And this failure has been a learning experience for me.
To that end, here’s the future for my writing.
• In the extremely immediate future, I’m doing a single quick pass of editing and cleanup on Honor Guard. Actual changes to content will be extremely small, but in many cases meaningful. In particular, I’m going to slice its chapters up into much smaller portions. There will be some new content (I’d feel bad having it show up on the front page update box if there weren’t), but those who have read it will be under no compulsion to re-read it from scratch. Everything you remember about it is still true.
• Ghosts of the Past is going to be split up into several distinct stories.
- Sins of the Father, following Rainbow
- My Brother’s Keeper, following Twilight
- Remembrance of Me, following Luna,
- and entirely new content in Shadow of Death.
In the course of this split, large parts of Ghosts will change. I’m trying to keep my hands away from the big red retcon stamp as much as possible, but I suspect some of it is inevitable. Regardless, the process described above will not be terribly much of me copy-pasting the current Ghosts apart into separated fics. As written, it relies on reader-knowledge of the parallel plots, so there’s going to be much more “new text” than the above might initially appear to suggest. I’m also slicing these up into much shorter chapters. However, and I stress this above all: I’m not posting the first of these (probably My Brother’s Keeper) until the entire fic has been written. Then I’ll probably be using a once-a-week (or maybe twice a week) update schedule.
• Lots of short stories. I need to get more material out, and now that I’m looking forward to a substantial decrease in time spent on college writing, I should be able to spawn a few more of these. I’ve got rough plans for a sequel to Hello, My Name Is, a couple other funny standalones, and an idea for a sort of I, Witness-esque noir story which might or might not end up falling into Price of Loyalty canon.
• The Faithful Student (working title) is something I really want to do. It’s a Price of Loyalty story that’s way lighter than the Where Loyalties Lie work I’ve done, following two very young mages learning their craft.
• Maybe I’ll de-hiatus My Father’s Shadow. I really don’t know.
• More Blog Posts and Reading and just general site activity.
Well that certainly was a wild, entertaining 3 years!
I would certainly agree with the criticisms of the story. It certainly got a bit rocky at various points, but as you said you were still experimenting and learning your craft and most importantly
IMHO any experience or experiment you can walk away from with an applicable lesson learned is a success of sorts. (Just look at the early works of wildly successful authors like Steven King!)
Looking forward to what you have next!
Still important to publish one chapter at a time though, otherwise the fic won't show up on the update box as much as it should and it would scare off new readers with it's twenty chapters and 100k words or however long it is. This is for new fics though, not republishing old ones.
Have you checked with mods to make sure you won't be breaking any rules about republishing your fic in three different fics? That seems like something that can get you in trouble if you don't get permission.
Robo is my dude.
YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
Also, just curious but is TFS coming before, or after WLL3 and FSWL2?
Anyways, once again, thank you for having me as part of your prereader/editor team, it's been a great half-year. To many more successful years ahead!
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The rules are actually explicit enough about my case that I did not feel the need. Specifically,
Some (many, maybe even most?) events will stay the same, but words are new.
I'll make a blog post more specifically addressing plans for what is changing in the narrative, and why, at a later date.
3655636 I still think you should probably contact a mod to be safe, it's not like they're particularly hard to get in contact with.
I would just love to have synopses of each story before I dive into the next one.
So much happened in these stories...
Right now I'm on XVII of ghosts. Do you think I should wait for the split or finish it now?
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27/27? Finish it now, I'd say.Being tired from New Years makes Roman Numerals hard. 17... Up to you, really.
I didn't even know you were stopping it. I've waiting patiently for an update to Ghosts of the Pasts, whether a continuation or an ending.
Still, and I know this probably doesn't sound like constructive criticism, I don't really care if it takes you three weeks or three more years. I'll probably still be invested in reading ponyfics for a good while (and it's really weird because pony fanfiction is the first time I've been this invested into a fanbase's fiction--sure, I've been a fan of Touhou for years but I never really dabbled all that much into the various comics and fanfiction that came out of it; I did some, but not to the extent I have for MLP), so I can wait for however long it takes.
And I do like the story. I'll also admit that a lot of the details have left my mind due to the schedule slipping (and in part due to my own mind, blah), but what I do remember I've been really interested in and want to see you finish and wrap all of this up. So, please, keep going, keep working. You have at least one fan right here who'll see it all through.
(as a side note, I know i have quite a few pony stories in my mind, and listed out in some of my blog posts, and in light of this post I'm kinda glad that I've decided to not post them until I at least have chapters ready for editing.)
You know, I never really thought about chapter length. It's usually a bygone thing for me, since I don't generally look at things like that
until I've already read several chapters into a story. Still, even I can agree that 20k words a chapter is insane, even if that probably won't keep me from reading them. After all, based on rough calculations from the paragraph below I might be able to do 400-500 words a minute on a good day with nothing else to do and it would still take me 40 minutes to read that long of a chapter. Personally I tend to think that between 2k-8k is probably the correct range, even if I can barely manage 1500 words/chapter. Maybe unrelated, but reading online is more like 8 1/2 x 11 pages than your average paperback which means less page turning involved.
Not sure how I feel about your plan to slice stuff into bits, even if not doing so means the story is fairly large. Twenty seven chapters and 300k+ words only makes about 730 pages (based on this site ->wordstopages.comhttp://wordstopages.com/) of fairly tight spacing and 12 pt font. I read the longest Harry Potter novel (Order of the Phoenix at ~257k, according to the internet) in less than 8 hours (
) For what it's worth, the real world doesn't happen in nice, distinct, separate chunks, but rather all at once and simultaneously.
Doesn't seem worth the bother to me to split it up and I think it might take something away, but you know carry on I guess.
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Somehow, I don't think that'd be a problem, particularly if this version was removed first. Particularly because between disentanglement and revision/rewrites, the stories will inevitable differ from the mere parts of this one. It's not like he's posting " Where Loyalties Lie: Ghosts of the Past v2" or something where both copies would exist live.
Loyal, is there any hope of this revamp happening anymore?
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I wouldn't cross my fingers, and I certainly wouldn't hold my breath.
Tales from Everfree City , the upcoming sequel to A Beginner's Guide to Heroism, will actually address a little bit of this, and maybe in a year or two that will lead to an actual direct continuation of this plot, but right now there's no plans here. Ghosts burnt me out of its own plot.
It is very weird to remember that BGH was originally going to be "The Faithful Student" and have a B-plot about Twilight as a filly under Celestia's wing prior to the show. I'm really glad I scrapped that.
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memegenerator.net/img/instances/43146689/oh-okay.jpg
lol, but totally understandable. I know Ghosts ended up quite ambitious and convoluted, but I still miss the story and where it's going to end up.
But I am glad to see you back at least and excited about the BGH verse and Morty's story. I enjoyed it even more than I had expected.
WLL still holds a special spot though as one of my favorite fics ever. I like to reread acts 1 and 2 from time to time. Any continuation of that will be tremendously exciting.
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Assuming things continue to go to plan, Tales (From Everfree City) might scratch that itch for you somewhat. It assumes that after Honor Guard and FSWL, things have been quiet for a while. Masquerade is still petrified in Celestia's control, Ink is serving in the Honor Guard, and show canon has largely happened.
Dash still has her... Shall we say "unique condition" from Honor Guard, and perhaps, just perhaps, that might relate to Celestia's request from the epilogue of BGH.
I really need to figure out what to do about Dash's show parents... They're quite inconvenient.