Two Hours and a Year Later · 2:34pm Aug 14th, 2019
I’ve come to realize it’s all Everfree Northwest’s fault. When I was first dipping my toes in the fandom waters, I stumbled upon the 2014 EFNW fan fiction contest on Equestria Daily, and soon afterward Lightning struck.
It’s just a couple thousand words, I told myself. It’s nothing serious. Whatever happens next, I am absolutely not going to sink serious amounts of time into writing fanfic.
Fast forward four years and about a quarter million words, and I actually went to EFNW in person. I considered myself happy with my membership in the pony writing community and content to write short(ish) stories. The last thing I wanted to do was spend six months or more publishing nothing while I worked on a novel length story.
Like I said, it's Everfree Northwest’s fault.
A two hour writing contest consumed a year of my writing time.
Let's talk about Where We Belong. Spoilers abound below the break!
One quick word about formatting: Never before have I wanted more sophisticated options than simple titled chapters. If this were a published novella I would’ve broken it into parts as well as chapters. To get around that I used the chapter titles to subtly define the boundaries between different parts. I believe Yarn told me it’s a story in three parts, but for me it’s actually a story in seven 
. I’m surprised nobody cried foul for my using “Special” in the names of four chapters in a row. It’s the little, maddening things like this that pretty much define why I only publish a story when it’s fully written.
I won't rehash the whole Iron Author contest again. Suffice it to say that I returned home from EFNW with a burning desire to see where this little nugget of story could go. Sometimes once you start with one question (what if Rarity took the fall for Twilight escaping Nightmare Moon), a dozen more come about:
- How did all of the mane six earn their cutie marks?
- Did they all earn the same cutie marks, and in the same way?
- Can Equestria still be saved, and how?
- Are the mane six even the same ponies?
Very quickly this became much a much bigger project than describing when Rarity met Spike, but there’s still a definite reason for all the drama and twists:
If you want to sum all the story’s themes up in one sentence, just add a question mark to the title. That’s the question Rarity’s been asking herself all her life with varying degrees of success. That's the question that Spike thought he had an answer for before they met.
The idea that Rarity left home at a very bad time was actually one of the first things I came up with, and her cutie mark story one of the last. Still, even with our intrepid and fashionable heroine coming into focus, I wasn’t sure how the story was going to end.
The ending on the Iron Author version is nice in its own right, vague but hopeful. It was also written in about 30 seconds. I knew I could flesh things out a bit more than that.
Just about everything was on the table:
- Equestria is saved without them (ie another pony takes Rarity’s place as the element of generosity)
- Equestria isn’t saved
- Equestria is saved by others and at the end somebody stumbles across Spike and Rarity’s remains
- Celestia rescues them after the world is saved
- Celestia is dead
- Celestia is in hiding
- Celestia is frozen in ice under The Pit
- Nightmare Moon reforms/turns back into Luna through other means and rescues them
- They escape and join an ongoing war against Nightmare Moon
- (ad infinitum)
One thing I quickly decided was that they couldn’t stay in The Pit forever. For one that’s a little too easy an out for the two of them that doesn’t resolve all of their issues, and more importantly it runs headlong into a cliché that I’m going to term “desert island romance.” Rarity even calls this out in chapter seven:
She could rise above this awful cliché: developing feelings for her one and only companion on a proverbial desert island.
Therein lies the next challenge: the two of them proving this isn’t just an ersatz relationship. In other words, what happens when the desert island goes away? What happens when the honeymoon ends and they're forced back into the real world? Drama befitting our leading lady, of course.
I know some readers were dissatisfied with how quickly Nightmare Moon's return came and went. Again, I considered all sorts of options before settling pretty much on how canon plays this one out. The Elements of Harmony aren’t a mere threat to Nightmare Moon, they’re her antitheses, her total and complete undoing against which her only chance is to screw with the bearers before they set phasers to rainbow. Besides, as much fun as it would be to have a giant battle, it would’ve been a distraction that didn’t serve the theme (“Where we belong isn’t on 'Celebrity Deathmatch - Alicorn Edition', Rarity” // "Drat!").
FanOfMostEverything summed this up perfectly in this comment:
Yeah, Nightmare Moon was never the main threat. Inadequacy, impostor syndrome, and everything going horribly right were.
(you win the comments, FoME)
Speaking of distractions, I very nearly added a much, much bigger one to the story. Simply put, did you wonder what happened to Moon Dancer after she failed to stop Nightmare Moon's rise to power? I did. I wondered about it so much that I wrote a bunch of entries from her journal, some of which I’m quite proud of. Again, this was too big a distraction from the main narrative, and again having fancier text formatting options would've helped tremendously.
Moon Dancer’s story is relevant and even jives with the overall theme, but was just too out of tone with the rest of the narrative—so I decided to turn it into a standalone side story!
Thank you again for seeing this novella-sized journey through with me. I don’t know if I’ll ever write another fanfic of this length, but then again I said the same thing about Water Pony…
If you have Where We Belong questions (or even questions of a more general sort), throw them in the comments below.
Until next time!
I should hope I win the comments. Statistically speaking, I'm bound to at some point.
In all seriousness, great insight into the journey this took from Iron Author to final form. I'll be sure to check out the prequel.
5105824 What he said.
Of course it’s EverfreeNW’s fault. I thought it would be fun to attend the second one in a simple costume after seeing all the costumes the first year. Then I accidentally won the costume contest, and now I’m a semi-competent cosplayer.
Life takes us strange places sometimes.
It's always nice to see the little side bits that you don't get to hear about in main stories, especially when the narrative is only around the main character(s). Third-person omniscient is nice for telling a story, but sometimes It takes away from the drama that you really want the readers to see. Now that the main story is over, it's going to be great to see Moondancer's side of things. And honestly, even though she's only been developed so much, I really like her as a character. I guess maybe I relate to her on some level.
Sorry-not-sorry.