Weatherpony Writer's Notes · 12:34am Mar 21st, 2016
Hello. With there having been around two weeks since the Everfree Northwest Scribblefest began judging, I thought it'd be cool to spend a little bit of procrastination time to talk about how Weatherpony (my entry) got written. Quite a few changes got made throughout the story from its original form (for the better, in my opinion).
So, without any further ado, I guess I'm gonna talk about Weatherpony. The long version. Not the version I stuck in the author's notes in the story.
It became pretty obvious early on that the award I wanted was the Dash award, since she's my favourite and is awesome. There were other reasons for this as well. Last contest was very slice-of-life-y (as is this one, in fact) and I wanted to do something radically different from last year's entries. This might have been a strange decision considering one of those entries got an honourable mention, but personally, I rather liked the change.
I knew I wanted to write something that involved a much more action-y story with big stakes and epic challenges. Something I also wanted was a character that could pull off the Dash award. She needed (in my mind) to surprise as well as impress. That's when I began leaning away from using Rainbow Dash as a main character, since I didn't believe that her doing casually awesome feats would be as much of a surprise. Characters and ideas that ran through my mind were instead Applejack, Rarity, and an original character.
The idea I had was that if a character was forced to be awesome outside their chosen field, or otherwise surpass a limitation imposed on them, that'd make them badass. It also means the conflict would be central to the story. I settled on the idea of an Earth pony becoming a Weatherpony (who I very briefly considered making Applejack, using lasso's to reign in clouds) and moved onto my next stage of writing. You can see elements of the Applejack idea in how I tried getting Windy to swing from cloud to cloud. In early versions of my idea, it would have been Applehorse using her lasso.
Since I wanted high stakes and overwhelming odds, I decided to use the idea of Cloudsdale falling apart. I hoped this would give me a bit of license to use all manner of unforgiving weather, as well as use the factories and streets a bit to get in the way. All I needed then was to populate the story with characters.
The feel I originally went for was going to be incredibly cheesy. Windy was going to be much more confident and appear to have a much easier time navigating the skies, and would spout a lot more catchphrases. I even gave her a cheap rip-off of the Green Lantern oath, but for weatherponies, which although stupid, I still really like.
Her name was also much sillier. In the early versions of the story, I had named her Belladodo Diver, in relation to the flightless bird and the somewhat downwards motion you make when you jump from a high place. The onomatopoeia also partly came from that much sillier origin.
I changed these when I realized I was having a hard time making her likeable within such a short span of words whilst making her very cheesy. I knew I'd be playing the OP character tightrope by introducing her as the best weatherpony. I found it very difficult to mitigate the silly over-the-top-ness with some genuine character moments within 6K words, so I scrapped them. Later, she became much concerned about her surroundings, although she is prone to the odd moment of businesslike boasting.
“Don’t worry!” Windy shouted. “I got the hang of flying years ago. It’s just falling upwards.”
"If you wanna clear the weather, you gotta do it yourself," she muttered, landing heavily on a nearby cloud. She wrapped her grapple-hook and rope around her barrel, securing it in place for later use. "Time to work for a living."
However, the onomatopoeia stayed. I remember seeing older fanfictions include them, which has been piquing my interest for a while. Additionally, they reminded me of comic-books, which are also usually rather action-packed, so I hoped to translate a bit of that into the story. Experimentation probably isn't the wisest thing to do in a contest, but I had been wanting to try it for a while, so I left them in.
One thing that remained mostly unchanged from the original version was the ending scene, however. I wanted to end a story that starts very abruptly with a quieter and more peaceful scene. I kinda wanted it to feel like the calm between the storms, which for Windy, it would be. Interestingly, the only reason we don't get to hear exactly what her mother says in that scene is because I had to remove them to limit the word count. I prefer it this way, though.
Another thing I cut out that I wish I didn't have to was an early idea that it wasn't Rainbow Dash who saved Windy near the end, but Weathersmith, using Windy's artificial wings after he got his daughter to safety. I thought it'd have been really cool, but I found it was taking way too many words to set up. Maybe once the contest is over, I'll add the change in, but it's unlikely I'll go back and make such extensive changes now. I was a bit unhappy how Weathersmith and Darter more or less fell out the story after they helped introduce the situation and characters.
Through the story, other small things changed too. Darter Distress (who I later like to think grows up to become a rescue-pegasus) and Weathersmith were originally named Sparrow Shine (which I changed because I didn't like the sound) and Cloudwarrior (named after a very fun lecturer I have).
Everything I did was to make the story try and have as much impact as it could without going over the word limit too much. FimFiction decided to add a whole 500 words to my GDoc word count, which I found very irritating indeed. Still, the story was supposed to present a badass character perform things she absolutely shouldn't be able to do. One of the first things I try and think of when writing things like this is 'is it impossible, improbable, or very, very unlikely, and if it isn't, how can I make it harder?'. This story was aimed solely to present an impressive and resourceful character overcoming great odds in a field they oughtn't be able to thrive in, which was to try and put myself in the best position to take the Dash award, AKA, bestpony award.
So, I hope you found that at least a bit interesting, if you ever wondered what kind of things go through my head whilst writing. I've wanted to do one of these for a while to give a bit of insight on my process, what I think about, and what I prioritize. Weatherpony feels like a good story to do that with since I approached it very methodically and had a great deal of restrictions to work with, which isn't as true for a lot of other stories. In short, I feel I've got more to say and talk about with Weatherpony instead of, say, One Week Year or The Many Complications of Interspecies Romance (which I also had goals in mind for, but with less restrictions and more nebulous).
I like how this comic style story went, you haven't changed it in the last couple weeks on here at all have you cause then I'd have to reread it? It's sort of a lighter version cross between Batman, Daredevil & Elektra that works well I thought, but with team backup. You covered the Cloudsdale tech with enough savvy that it made sense (whether it's the same as canon don't know & doesn't matter). Hope you do well, when do you hear about the results?
3818117 I think I changed a spelling error. Nothing major. I don't like going back and making major changes.
I'll find out about the results when they're done. EFNW haven't released a date for the results as far as I'm aware. I'm glad you enjoyed the story. I rather think it turned out all right.