To Be Different - Reflection · 6:18am Oct 24th, 2019
Hey everyone,
So I finally finished writing To Be Different. After 6 long years, it's done. I apologize for taking such a long time to complete the story, but a lot of things happened in 6 years. I finished school, took on different jobs, and had my own share of problems. Now, I've reached a comfortable point in life, at least for the time being until I seek out a new change in my life.
As for the story, spoilers down below!
When I first started writing this, I was playing around with Chrysalis as a character. As far as villains go, I like how hers revolved around deception during the Canterlot Wedding (wow, that's an old episode). Originally, I wanted to write about her character through a different point of view, hence the introduction of Nymph. Throughout this whole story, I tried to stick to the motif of duality by juxtaposing changelings and ponies in a way that made them almost mirrors of each other. E.g. Changelings were afraid of being found out by ponies and ponies were afraid of changelings. Of course, this felt like a complex message to write about and I didn't know where I was going with this story early on. It was a spur of the moment that ended up being published.
Also, because this story is 6 years old, my writing style has changed a lot. It's changed so much that I wanted to go back and edit whole chapters, but I only stopped myself at some minor fixes to a few words. In my head, I also saw this change in writing style as also a way to show Nymph maturing in her language. The only concrete example of this was when I switched her usage of "Mommy" to "Mother" in the later chapters.
The writing process has been a whole mess of its own. I had a starting point and an endpoint, but filling the gap between those two took a lot out of me. A filly is going from the changeling hive in the Badlands to Canterlot (and in the span of days). I had to fill out that gap somehow, which led me to adding other characters to interact with the protagonists. I added "stopping points" in the journey to give the characters some action. Now, the problem I created myself was when I wrote about the interaction with Twilight. At this point of writing, the show has aired more seasons, which I struggled to catch up with. Also while writing Twilight (which ended up being an alternative universe version of her because I went back and forth on following canon and AU and settled on AU), I made her more resentful towards changelings. This is also writing out Thorax and all the changeling reformation (honestly, I wasn't a fan of their design). Once I split Nymph from Happy, then the whole story became...an even bigger mess. I had so much trouble trying to keep track of Chrysalis, Nymph, and Happy, especially when I pick up this story and then put it down again. Re-reading this story just so I knew what I was writing was a nightmare in itself.
I think the biggest challenge I had was writing the actual events of the story because I focused so much on the themes and messages I'm trying to convey. I talked about the nature of lies of whether they're good or bad, which is symbolized through changelings because their disguises are a form of a lie. I touched on the topic of fate and trying to fight against it, and again, this is shown through changelings. There's also the importance of love and a person's duty to their family. The entire story is a bildungsroman to show Nymph growing up to be an adult. This is played on her name as well which according to Wikipedia is "immature form of some invertebrates, particularly insects, which undergoes gradual metamorphosis (hemimetabolism) before reaching its adult stage". So yeah, it took a long while until I decided on that name. While watching the show, I tried to make the connection with the holes in changelings as a metaphor for the lack of love or emotions (then IDW comics have a canon where it was just shot by Princess Celestia which doesn't entirely make sense to me). Playing around with this idea, I gave the changelings a struggle to gain emotions and individual thought. The story was a way for changelings to break out of this role. At the beginning of the story, I wrote a quick recap about the Canterlot Wedding and in the end, I wrote about another invasion that is supposed to mirror the first invasion. This mirrored event of the beginning and the end represented the cyclical conflict between ponies and changelings, and Nymph provided the means to break out of the cycle. Her presence made the difference between the two invasions. Happy, himself, I wrote to give a changeling drone's perspective on the state of things. I had trouble writing him because I often made him seem like a prop in the background that follows Nymph, but I think towards the end, I felt somewhat satisfied at giving him speech and a personality. He is also an adult changeling that is more of a "best friend" figure than a father or a brother as he acted as her guardian while in Equestria.
As for the writing process itself, I was/am a busy person. I'm not exactly a prolific writer, but I like to play around with ideas. If there was a thought in my head that felt deep or meaningful, I wrote it down, and I feel like that sums up how I did things. I had a lot of interesting scenes and dialogue written down, but connecting the scenes was an issue, which required cutting things out and doing my best to fill in the blanks of the narrative. I used to work with editors, but for a while, I wasn't active enough in writing to provide material to edit, so I ended up editing the chapters myself. Grammar and punctuation are more or less ingrained into my head. I had the most trouble trying to write natural dialogue and getting the tone right for characters. The beginning half of the story is an example of that. Towards the last few chapters, I worked weeks straight trying to finish the story as fast as I could (I told myself I wouldn't be watching the final episodes of the show until I finished the story). I ended up using Google translate to read the story back to me using text-to-speech just to see the flow of the conversation. Also while writing the story, I tried to be as show accurate as possible with certain settings and even dialogue (I think at one point I tried to see if anyone ever mentioned the words "arms", "hand", the measurement "feet", etc.).
I put a lot of effort into this story because I want to be able to read it on my own sometime in the future. My rule for publishing chapters was if I could enjoyably read it, then it can go up. Also, I didn't think this story would get this number of likes or get noticed, but it did. That also played up the anxiety of publishing and made me doubt if chapters were ready to be published. I tried really hard not to look at the story ratings.
I also made the cover of the story using Photoshop because I didn't want to commission anything for this at the time. So I learned how to use Photoshop and Illustrator.
Where am I going from here? I want to finish the stories that I want to finish. After seeing how long it takes me to finish a series, I won't be writing anything long for a while. I'm mostly going to stick with oneshots. I'm not done with the series in terms of writing because this series has been a big part of my life, at least not for a long while. Even when the new generation airs, I'll probably still be on here reading the creative works that the show has inspired.
That's all I could think of at the moment regarding this story. Feel free to write any questions or comments. I withheld answering some before because I honestly didn't want to get people's hopes of having a chapter published soon, and rushing chapters is stressful on its own.
You made a heart-touching story, be proud of your completed work. Also I agree, I don’t like the Changelings’ new design. It turned them into Colorful bug versions of ponies
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Thanks! It does mean a lot to me (especially considering this is the first multi-chapter story that reached completion).
I remember following your story because I loved the premise and I certainly enjoyed seeing you finishing this story in a way that is, not only well written, but satisfying to read. It really feels like there was a proper conclusion and ending to this that makes it stand out from other stories.
I really wish you for the best.
When Nymph awakes on the pony hospital and they've mentioned the trim, I always related a trim to cut or close a stage or a cycle but also the base or origins does not change e.g : a filly that was raised by changelings, the ponies may change her way of thinking. But the changelings are always going to be its origin.
That story reminded me that :D
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so deep