When the setting does not suit the plot, aka, hiatus and replacement. · 8:43am Mar 2nd, 2017
So, I've spent some time watching videos by someone named Isaac Arthur. He makes content discussing hard sci-fi concepts in an analytical and realistic light. And I realized that my plans for this story were absurd. I planned on Twilight getting home within a few years at most, but that won't be possible in my setting for around seventy years.
So, this story may be redirected into something new, and I am pursuing a new work of fiction that is actually reasonable in my eyes. It will again involve Twilight trying to get home with the help of humans, but not only will it actually be possible enough in my eyes, but it's actually going to have a clear conflict and more personal depth and character interactions.
The new story already has ten thousand words and it's just the prologue and first chapter. I'm optimistic. Maybe that will be the first story I finish that is actually worth existing.
Whenever I hear an author say this, I start to worry... because, 99% of the time, it means "I'm too unsophisticated to recognize and nurture whatever conflict was developing in my story, so I'm going to throw it out in favour of something cliché and martial in nature."
In this case, here are some perfectly good conflicts you had just waiting to be explored:
- Person vs. Nature: Twilight's struggle to get home (either the immediate driving conflict for a single story or the "moves slowly but powerfully" driving conflict for a series)
While it's unclear whether this would be a story-level or series-level conflict (I'd need more details on what you had planned), this must be some kind of driving conflict and any kind of conflict "clearer" than this would feel like a spotlight-stealing interloper.
(Note: The difference between "nature" and "fate" is that nature passively opposes the hero, purely by existing while fate actively causes strife... for example, by grabbing two estranged family members, neither of them "the bad guy", and forcing them to stay together until they're willing to find common ground, despite years of festering resentment over a misunderstanding.)
- Person vs. Society: Twilight's struggle to overcome cultural mismatches (depending on the tone and what you want how you want to structure the story, I can think of three or four different "person vs. society" conflicts you could use... heck, you could use two of these at once if one or both are subplots rather than the main conflict.)
This kind of "contact" story is at its strongest when you're exploring the interactions between the two different cultures (ie. Twilight and everyone else) and what both the individual characters and the "faceless masses" think and feel about it, so you'll want this to be at least a set of one or more subplots which takes up most of the "screen time".
(Whether it can be a driving conflict, pushing the person vs. nature to a series-level conflict, depends on whether you can find a single person vs. society conflict concrete enough to feel satisfying when used to delineate the arc of one book of the story.
- Non-martial Person vs. Person: (while I wouldn't recommend this, because I think it's overdone and unsatisfying to concentrate opposition so much in a single face, you could have some politician or other public figure working against Twilight because they honestly believe it's for the best (skepticism about the return on investment for the budget involved would be less cliché than fear of The Other), or even a scientist, businessman, or investor who sees Twilight as unwelcome competition.
This would be easier to use to delineate one book in a series, but, as I said, it's harder to make it satisfying because it's the first thing a lazy or unskilled author reaches for.
Person vs. Self: You can always add a person vs. self subplot to a story if you work hard enough, though I wouldn't recommend trying too hard, since it'd seem a little contrived to shoot Twilight countless lightyears away from home, just so she can have her worldview shattered. (It could work as a subplot of some sort, though... given that there's gotta be something either in Twilight's inevitable culture shock or the Earth-with-a-capital-E ponies' preconceptions about their origins and the nature of the universe which could cause someone in the cast to have at least a minor crisis of self.
I'd be very interested in hearing about how you came to that conclusion. This is a setting with magic, which automatically means that it's not about what is possible in reality, but how good you are at manipulating the reader's attention. (Authors can get away with a lot with the right application of "confidently ignoring things" because readers intuitively understand that a good story clearly separates "what's being explored" from "context to enable the exploration". It's similar to but less well-known than using lampshading, where you make something ridiculous or contrived acceptable by having characters acknowledge its ridiculous/implausibility/etc. so it's seen as a random real-world oddity in the fictional universe, rather than a misjudgment on the author's part.)
Personally I support the idea of re-doing it, but I feel you could also recycle the existing 'verse' as you wrote it, maybe focus on a different aspect like their early years of dealing with humans and the like. Essentially you would be doing two different stories
(Also throwing OC alicorns into the mix makes things more difficult by default simply because)
I think that you need to explore more the different cultures that are surrounding Twilight in the current story. She has finally come out of her funk and her only goal has been to go home. Twilight is at heart an eternal student so she should be studying both the new cultures and their sciences. If you do reboot this story I hope you look into this and further develop your main characters.
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Those are ideas that have floated by my mind and they do seem like a better path than what I've been on.
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You are an A+ critic. I like that. In my defense, I wrote this blog at, like 1am. Anyway, I do like these ideas you've talked about and it would probably have been better to word things such that the concerns of the story would be more down to earth in a quite literally. I do want a story with a martial conflict in space, but I think I may easily make something along the lines of what people have said to me so far here.
On the subject of time scale, it essentially comes from a video by PBS Space Time which discusses Dyson spheres. It would take seventy years to dissemble Mercury into a cloud of hematite mirrors which can collect enough energy to form a kugelblitz, which can convert mass into energy at about 100% efficiency in the form of gamma rays, assuming you can overcome the problem of actually getting more mass into it. If that energy can be harvested, you could accumulate enough to power warp drives or destroy worlds, and I don't want to just give Twilight enough power to do this herself. That would be op and uninteresting. Check that YouTube channel out along with the one I mentioned in the blog for more info.
Fair enough. I know all too well how that can compromise your faculties from personal experience.
Would you mind rephrasing that? I'm not entirely sure what meaning to take from it.
The general rule is that you have to make an accurate first impression or your readers won't be satisfied because they'll use the first chapter or two (depending on length and personal taste) to decide whether to stick around, then expect the rest of the story to continue that feel.
(That's why you got the recommendations you did. Your first couple of chapters attracted a reader base who expected no martial conflict and discouraged potential readers who wanted a martial conflict.)
Professional editors will actually ask for only the first chapter when deciding whether to accept your manuscript for exactly that reason.
(Also, another tip is that professional editors want manuscripts to be between 80,000 and 120,000 words from first-time authors. Less requires too much experience to produce a satisfying story. More wears on the readers. Within that range requires you to wind down your immediate/fast-paced/high-tension driving conflict and start another if you want to run long, so the readers can take a rest without getting worn out, relying on a "slow burn" driving conflict to keep them coming back.)
Basically, if you want martial conflict, you need to at least hint about it as early as possible. I'd suggest examing how stories like Stardust and The Dread Chitin go about establishing the tone. (The latter isn't really martial conflict, but it's certainly a very hostile environment.)
Ahh, that degree of sci-fi hardness.
To be honest, I don't think sci-fi that hard would be a good fit for your story.
When you write a fanfic, your readers come in with an assumption that you're following the rules and degree of realism that the source material showed. (Otherwise, why not just go read original fiction?)
Equestria is a fantasy setting and, to get away with going that hard sci-fi, you need to expend a fair bit of effort on the setup, both to set the tone, and to flesh out all of the bits and pieces it left soft or vague.
It would be much easier to just go with the flow and treat Equestrian magic as a mostly hand-waved ("because explanation would bog the story down") extension to the known laws of physics that we haven't yet discovered. In doing so, you can then also get space travel more easily because magic allows you to build "don't question it too much" devices similar in narrative purpose to Star Trek's Heisenberg Compensators.
That said, if you do still want to go the hard sci-fi route, I'd suggest taking a look at how Days of Wasp and Spider crafts a very strong "hard sci-fi novel" feel around various aspects of the MLP setting. (And, despite being some of the highest-quality, hardest sci-fi on this site, it's still significantly softer than what you seem to be aiming for.)
TL;DR: Fiction isn't reality. Putting too much detail in is like drawing far too many lines in a piece of art to delineate the shapes. In reality, the rules of the universe bend the story to fit. In fiction, the rules of good storytelling should bend the universe to fit. (When you're authoring, causal flow can be suspended or inverted as long as the end product is looks believable.)
4441891 Definitely like having you around. Luckily my new attempt seems to preemptively follow your advice. An early and clear indicator of martial conflict is set. The year is such that I would think the settings are possible in an optimistic scenario. New concepts are limited to things that would only require short and shrinkingly frequent explanations. My target audience, I think, knows what a cylindrical habitat is. Etc. I have read two of the stories you've recommended also.
I wont be adding in things like shkodov thrusters or other exotic yet possible megastructures like shell worlds or anything.
And wow, I didn't realize how much I screwed up the statement you asked me to rephrase. That story will focus on non martial, down to earth conflicts in both a figurative and literal sense.
It's an acknowledged weakness of mine that I would tend to make the whole story into a bunch of details about tech and science if I could . It's something I'm overcoming. It used to cause problems in my speech to where I'd explain every tangent and background blurb of a story until the person got bored and changed the subject before I got to the point.
I do appreciate all the information you're sharing. I wish I became interested in writing before I got out of high school. My English teacher I had for several years would have been a great help. I'd contact him for help now if he didn't die of lymphoma the summer after I graduated. I do miss him.
Well, it's almost 1am again and I'm going on tangents. I'll stop here. Thanks again.
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That sounds very familiar.
I actually got hit by the idea which wouldn't go away and prompted me to start my new "learn to write fiction, despite character writing being, quite literally, the thing I'm most predisposed against" (I'm an aspie) hobby in grade 10 or 11, but it didn't help much. Unless you and the person you're asking have very similar mindsets, you have to understand how to investigate and refine the questions you ask before you can get personally meaningful answers... and it takes a fair bit of time and practice to learn that.
It also doesn't help that, in my experience, whether it's high school or university, academics tend to really know their stuff but they've built a habit of thinking too much in terms of criticism. That means they have trouble putting their answers (or textbooks) in terms which help to get you over that creative hump. (And authors have the opposite problem when they write books on how to write. They aim for creative... but it comes so naturally to them that they assume too much about your skill floor. For example, writing "start right into the action" without realizing that newcomers won't recognize a person vs. self conflict as "action". There's a reason "write what you know" is the most famous misunderstood advice of all time.)
That said, keep an eye on StoryBundle.com. Twice a year (usually in Spring and always during NaNoWriMo), they'll have a big bundle of eBooks on how to write fiction with $15 US getting you both tiers. (I've got a few of them and, as soon as I can find the time, I intend to cross-reference and boil down the parts not about time management or the business of getting published into something more directly useful to a "character-writing-crippled person" like me.)
P.S. As clarification for "character-writing-crippled person", if you've ever played games inside an emulator and noticed how it takes at least 10 times as much processing power to fake one processor as a program running on top of another, that's what predicting how a character or other human will behave is like for me... though just noticing when something "doesn't seem right/consistent and needs to be considered in more detail" is still fast, so I still make a good beta reader. My long-term goal is to pick apart character writing from enough angles to develop my own native understanding of how humans think.
Edit: I only just hit the aspie link. This may not be helpful to you.
4442507 I was once a terrible introvert and had little confidence, but I was really a thinker. At one point it occurred to me that I could try to look inward for a couple answers to why some people acted the way they did. When I was a college freshman, I once saw a guy wheeling around campus on a unicycle. At first I wondered why he didn't care what people thought until I realized that I didn't really care. Then I realized that most people didn't really care. So I realized that people likely didn't care what I did. That really improved my confidence in the spot.
I used my own thoughts to figure out other people. I think that for some cases, a reasonable reaction from you can be a reasonable reaction for the character if you can sufficiently remove your mental objectivity and put yourself into the situation. Perhaps you can define how a particular character is different from you and then take your natural reaction and apply that difference. I believe that people's behaviors are always rational based on their background and it should be possible figure them out this way. Either that or I'm taking out of my ass. Most of this just occurred to me. I will try testing it over the weekend.
I'll try to remember to check the site out when I get home.
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New data points are never unwelcome. Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it... and even if it isn't directly relevant, it may tip the scales when I'm filtering and merging various authors' different perspectives on what works and why.
4443448 True