Writing Reflections: Part 6 · 1:25am Mar 2nd, 2017
Hello, everyone!
With a new story soon to be released, I thought now would be a great time to do a writing reflection on my last tale, The Wonder of Winter.
When I first envisioned the story, I knew what I wanted the tale to be about. I knew that I wanted it to be about why Equestria had winter. But I had no idea who the characters in the story-within-the-story would be, nor who Lyric would be telling the tale to. To the latter, I debated between her telling the Faroefield foals the tale, or telling it to the C.M.C.s in Ponyville. For the Faroefield foals, I thought it would be a good way to have her tell another food/weather related tale to them, but I did not know why she would be back in Faroefield. For the C.M.C.s, I thought it might be interesting to have her tell the tale to Apple Bloom as she is from a farming family, but I had similar reservations as to when I was writing The Earth Ponies' Specialty. I did not want to force Lyric to interact with canon characters even though I had a reason for her to be in Ponyville. Eventually, I came up with the idea that Lyric could be travelling to Faroefield to deliver presents to her family, and so the setting of the story, and the story's listeners, were decided upon.
The characters in Lyric's tale came next. I struggled with this for a long while, until trying to sleep early one morning (I am a night owl). I remembered three cloud types I had learned about in my sixth-grade science class - the cirrus, stratus, and cumulonimbus clouds. Then, as I tried to finally go to sleep, I was inspired to use these terms as character names, and so the Cloud siblings were born. From there, I gave them each a personality and a role in the story.
With that came the actual writing. As I stated in an earlier blog post, this was done in three stages. But there is one turn in the story that was to be completely different - Stratus' solution. As Stratus speaks to his siblings in the Summit about how the areas outside of Equestria are green and growing, Cirrus and Nimbus were originally going to be much more skeptical, and not even in the Summit when Stratus came to them with this information. Instead, Stratus was going to convince them to fly with him and see the proof themselves. However, I remembered how in The Earth Ponies' Specialty, earth ponies had a connection with the earth, and so this became the basis for Stratus' conversation with the earth ponies' leader in the Summit. It also took a few re-writes for this conversation to happen as it did, and I am happy with the result.
When I had first finished the story, I was not too taken with it. I did not feel that it had the same magic that some of my other Lyric tales have. However, as I went through it again to re-read and to make necessary edits and small re-writes, I felt it come together. I still did not feel that it is one of my best, but I was much more pleased with the result. And I do look upon it with fondness now.
I hope that you have enjoyed this, my friends, and I look forward to my next writing reflection. But, until then, cheers!
I still need to read the story. I've let my feed get out of hand.
4443950
You and me both. But I hope that you enjoy it!
4443965
How much feed do you have? And I'm sure I will
4444127
It's gotten up into the thousands. But at that point, I just clear my feed and start anew. It would take way too long to catch up.
4445270
I once had 2000 feed, It took me a long time but I looked at it all. But this time I did it until my computer became slow from all the windows loading.
4445410
That's usually why I had to stop. For me, though, most of my feed consists of one story being entered into groups multiple times, so it's not so bad for me if I don't see it all.
4445756
Me too, so I don't have THAT much to respond to.
4446039
So that definitely makes things easier.
4446057
indeed.
I still need to work on keeping it in check though.
4446142
Same.
4446645
And no matter what it always seems to be one step ahead of me D:
4447144
Yeah, seriously. The only way I can really keep up is by checking in a few times a day.
4447383
At least this makes a good use for spare bits of time I get around the day. I sometimes let my notifications get out of hand as well.
4447458
And if you let it go for too long...
4447523
Then it gets FAR out of hand
4447581
Eeeeeyup.
4447639
I now only I have one feed, this gives me a small window of opportunity to get it under wraps!
4448287
Awesome!
4450653
I'm doing pretty good.
BTW. How are you?
4450787
Doing alright, thanks.
4456602
Great to hear