Bitmore Theater: A Post-Mortem

Don't worry, there isn't going to be some suddenly tragic epilogue or sequel, and you haven't missed any chapter. No one is dead. Everyone is happy! A post-mortem is what they do, in my industry, when a project wraps up. It's basically a great big report at the end of everything when everybody thinks back over everything that happened and was done, and what went wrong, and what they can do better next time. As Silver found out, the first step to doing better is to figure out what's bad, and grab hold of it so you can start steering it right.

Bitmore was a damned big project. While it's not the longest story I've written, falling behind The Colour You Bleed by about half, and even 10K words behind Our Eminence despite it not being finished, it is longest I've ever worked on a single project. Consistently, anyways; I am very sorry to any Our Eminence readers who still exist. Starting on May 25th, 2015, and completing on January 7th, 2016, The Secrets of Bitmore Theater updated at a rate of about one chapter per month for seven months. Compared to a previously demonstrated once-a-week schedule, it doesn't seem very impressive. Still, life moves on, and situations change. I don't have the time to obsess over my writing the way I used to(Though make no mistake, the rain might not be as wet as the ocean but that doesn't make it dry). As much as my updating schedule could frustrate me at times, though, I'm proud of myself for continuing to work consistently and put what time and energy I could into the story.

There were more reasons than just my schedule as to why any given chapter took longer, though. I've been writing and making stories in some capacity or another for a long time, now, and my skill has, I like to believe, continued to grow as I worked. Maybe I've never made anything with quite the consistent fanbase that TCYB had, or the explosive response of Good Enough, but I've seen myself consistently improving in small, but important ways. My grammar and proofreading has improved, I'm getting better with clarity and tone, though I still need to work on being a bit more even-handed and not going too heavy. Redundancy is still a problem, but I'm getting there. Still, it's inevitable that as our skill grow, so do our standards, and as I found more time to read casually this year I found myself less and less pleased with my work. Around the middle of the project, though, I think I hit a tipping point. I started to actually plot out my chapters before diving into them--not rigidly, or too securely, but before a chapter where I didn't know what I was doing I would sit down, and spend an evening solidifying what the themes of that chapter would be, some major points that I needed to keep in mind, and plotting out story beats. I didn't always follow them perfectly, mind you. Oftentimes I would find that a new, better idea struck me during the act of writing, as I included some casual detail or mulled over the hows-and-whys of a given situation, and the chapter would steer itself in a new direction. There's still a value to looseness: A lot of the core elements of the story wound up coming from random conversation faff. Silver's hatred of theater, for example, wasn't planned, but came about through the flow of conversation. Despite that, the story behind it and the effects it caused wound up being the framework behind the entire story. So while learning to plot out chapters and take notes was good for me, I've also started working my way towards a good balance of looseness and planning.

With all that said, it just sort of leaves the question of how I feel about the finished result, doesn't it? Well now...

Bitmore is, in many ways, flawed. Many significant ways, even. However, while there are many places where my writing could have been better--awkward character voices, hard-to-follow actions, overwrought emotions, etc--I think Bitmores biggest flaw comes down to a failure in structure.

As mentioned earlier, I didn't have a huge amount of plans when I began Bitmore. I knew I wanted to write a Silverbelle story, but it took me a while and a bit of brainstorming with friends to even come up with a basic idea to build off of. Strictly speaking, when I sat down to write the first chapter I had pretty much only that: A premise, a conflict and a 'villain'. There were a few things I had in mind, however. I knew from the beginning that Silver and Diamond would remain friends. I've always had a lighter opinion on Diamond Tiara than most, I think, and I tend to give her a lot of leeway based on her age. I've worked with children before, and sometimes it takes them a little while to really get the idea of being nice. I also had the idea of alternating chapters between Silver Spoon and Sweetie Belle, as the nature of the plot meant that having Silver's perspective was borderline necessary to keep tension. Finally I knew, or at least had an inkling, that Silver was ultimately going to graduate into the main character. After all, she was the one who had the most character development to do, and the most to lose. Silver was already well-adjusted with good friends. Silver had social anxiety and Diamond Tiara.

That last point, I think, is the main flaw of Bitmore: Silver Spoon was destined to become the main character. Become. She didn't start out that way. At best Silver started the story as a co-protagonist; more realistically given the way the story began she was a deuteragonist. It wasn't until the second chapter that Silver really became a principal character, and even then she still shared the spotlight with Sweetie Belle until chapter five. After that point the plot hit the fan, a wedge was driven between our characters, Silver stepped into the role she was meant for, and something new started.

I'm a huge nerd, and therefore a fan of anime, but as much as I love the animation there's an element of Japanese storytelling that's always bothered me. So many of the movies I've seen feel like two stories in one: Two conflicts, to climaxes, two arcs. It always left me feeling confused and kind of exhausted for the second half of the movie, because my mind was still in a frame with very different tones and stakes. With that in mind, there's really nothing I can do to defend my reasoning here: I wrote a plot structure that I myself don't really care for.

The final three chapters of Bitmore are simply a very, fundamentally different beast than the initial five chapters. We moved from a pair of very condensed, claustrophobic settings--the Bitmore and the Manehattan Manor--to a place that was much more open and vague. Three new characters were introduced in large roles, with one significant guest character, and a previously minor character stepping up to a bigger part in the story. The tone changed dramatically, from one full of tension and adventurous excitement to one that was dour and anxious. Worst of all, Bitmore lost a main character. Sweetie Belle disappeared from the story entirely, and even when she reappeared it was in a less vital role. I worked hard to avoid it, but writing the final chapter I found myself worrying that somewhere along the line, Sweetie Belle had stopped being a character and started being a trophy for Silver, a reward for overcoming her self-doubt. Even when I made it clear that Sweetie had her own desires and motivations, it still felt... Manic Pixie Dream Girl-esque. A fairly significant character misturn, I think.

More than that, I think the story as a whole lost something. If my editor is to be believed, I'm far from wrong about that. The abandoned indulgence of the Manehattan Manor, the opulent ruin of Bitmore, these were locations with character and atmosphere. The icy pinks and extravagant emptiness of Silver's Manehattan bedroom has more character to me than all the posters and books of her Ponyville home. I remember the throbbing, thumping brass heart of the Bitmore Depths more than I remember any schoolhouse or orchard or boutique. Part of that is my failing as a writer, for not doing enough to describe those locations, but even so they feel somehow... mundane. The character of the story changed. Perhaps it was because there was no second perspective to work off of, perhaps it was my focus character was in less of a position for dour imaginings. Perhaps I had already begun to see something wrong. Even the plot was different, as we lost the back and forth and it shifted from being about a budding romance amid adventure, to being about a girl's character development amid a damaged love affair.

Whatever the reason, though the story might hold up on the whole, and while each part might stand up on its own, there is still an undeniable gulf between them, and sadly I confess that it was one that I planned. I knew Silver would become the principle character, and I knew that there would be a falling out, and because of that I knew that we would lose track of Sweetie Belle for a while. I simple failed to understand what that would mean. The trouble with working on stories serially, posting chapters as they're completed, is that it become difficult to really understand how something will feel until you can see it as a whole, when it's already too late to change it. If I was writing for publication, I could call this 'draft one', and go back and correct my mistakes. Sadly, I don't really have that luxury now.

So, do I like Bitmore? Am I proud of it? Do I like how it turned out? Well... yes, actually. I like it a lot. In spite of Bitmore's flaws, I think there are things about it that are strong.

I love Silver's character and her development in it. I feel like I found an interesting place for her in terms of personality, and gave her a resolution that doesn't feel like it came out of left field, but also wasn't as simple or arbitrary as being 'good all along'. She still had work to do and lessons to learn, and I think structuring the story around those lessons lead to a good story. I like the theme of agency, although on a second draft I think I'd work harder to keep 'agency' distinct from merely 'believe in yourself'. Silver's main flaw may have stemmed from a lack of self-esteem, but it was ultimately her willingness to let others dictate her life that lead to her problems, and her decision to... make decisions that lead to things improving for her.

I like the symbol of The Phantom and how it worked with Silver. I like the Phantom/Christine duality in her character, and the idea of The Phantom as some sort of representation of Fear, and although I sort of lost it here and there I think it's sort of the string holding the story together. I like the way Silver and Sweetie Belle interacted. I like it a lot, actually, which is part of why I'm so disappointed with myself in the second portion, I think. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff in this story I'm proud of, and one way or another a 75K word story is nothing to sneeze at. It could have been better, I won't deny that... but I think it turned out alright, in the end.

With the end of the project, I just want to give a bit of a shout-out to especially important people on it. Those, of course, would be my two primary editors. For most of the story that would be Absolution, who was with me from Chapter 3-onward, and has provided me with more help that he seems to understand. He provided a great deal of useful feedback and information, and his comments helped me chart my course at least a little. The second would be Clever Pun, who was only with me for the first few chapter. He left due to a combination of time and disagreements on style, but despite that I do retain a significant amount of respect for him. Finally, I'd also like to offer thanks, unseen though it may be, to MustLoveFrogs, also known as Kaemantis, who both gave me permission to use the story image, as well as gave me an enormous amount of inspiration. Were it not for her astonishingly, insufferably cute Silverbelle art, I never would have become interested in the ship, and this story wouldn't exist.

It's always strange, finishing projects. Especially long ones. You kinda feel like a part of you is gone, even if there are always new ideas waiting to fill in the gaps. Even now, I find myself sort of mentally stumbling, as though I were walking down the stairs and miss a stemp I expected to be there. I find myself thinking of what to do next in the story, only to remember that there's nothing left. Not yet, anyways.

Maybe there'll be another Silverbelle story, some time. Not for a while, though, at least not likely. It's been a long time, too long, since I worked on my portfolio for my career. I need to polish up some pieces, maybe produce something new. I'll be stepping away from writing, for the most part, while I do that. It'll take some weeks at least, probably a few months. I might put out a short story, or a chapter of something here and there, but I can't say when I'll take on my next project. To be honest, it's been... far, far too long since I've worked on my career. You get complacent in situations that are comfortable, even if they aren't ideal, or even that great. Breaking out, even to find something better, is scary. It is better though, in the end, and when you look back on it it'll seem silly that you were ever scared at all. Sometimes, you just need to be a little brave, and take a leap.