Hearts on the Table: An Early Retrospective · 10:27pm Nov 8th, 2019
Hello friends and followers! How are you doing on this [insert weather particulars here] [insert time of day here]? It's been raining pretty heavily in my neck of the woods, but an hour or two up the road sees cities and towns that have been placed under a state of emergency due to flooding, so I can't complain too much!
Anyway, it's been almost a day since I published Hearts on the Table, so I thought I'd run a little retrospective on the experience. It's been a very weird one for me. The story has gone from a very divisive like/dislike ratio an hour after publication (I think at one point it was something like 11:5, which I'm still hoping was more to do with the ship choice or genre than the quality of my writing) to appearing in the feature box. It's never been my goal to achieve that (I'm not a fan of the system), but it's nice that I've been given the opportunity to have a wider demographic read my work and, hopefully, comment or critique it. So that's been nice.
So, this story was basically conceived as a result of me failing to marshal my creative energies, and largely ignoring the rule about being distracted by other projects. Deep Six was (and is, I must stress that) underway, but it had hit a plot snag which was proving troublesome in undoing. I was also feeling a little stressed about the story as a whole, mainly due to the decision to move it from a 3k word story to something longer, forgetting that I'd also need to increase the amount of world-building to provide a better foundation. And then I started to feel as though it was actually a novel trying to fit into the clothes of something smaller. So yeah, that all got a little messy, and what was supposed to be a small story to tide everyone over increased in important and preference.
And I'm glad I did that, honestly, because I had a total blast writing Hearts on the Table. It's been a long while since I thoroughly became invested emotionally in the characters on a page I was writing, and I'm not sure the importance of that feeling can be overstated. I think it helped (!?) that I've been having a totally crap time of it with work at the moment, so throwing myself into something romantic was a salve to the irritations of real life. I think every now and then you write something where, even if it isn't your best work (and I don't feel like Hearts is), it makes an argument for being your most important work. This story made me feel a connection with the craft again. It made me care about characters and conflict again, and it made me just get excited about sussing out the best way of presenting something (usually with lots of adjectives and metaphors, right? Right! 
)
The starting point for this was me wanting to write a romantic oneshot, and using a character who wasn't overly prominent. Naturally I ended up with Ember, because although I'm not a massive dragon fan per se, I do really like the MLP designs, and, after Smolder, Ember is probably my next favourite character from the show. I'm basically a sucker for grumpy characters who struggle with emotional honesty.
I largely followed my usual approach to my shipfics—which character would make for an unusual partner without removing the ability to make the relationship believable. I'm keen on using interspecies differences to explore the complexities of romantic relationships, so I knew it wasn't going to be another dragon, and I've never been a huge fan of the whole Thorax/Ember thing, so that was out the window too. I did draft up a few ideas of using Moon Dancer, because in my head I wanted the romance to be a little more physically intense (Ember is a dragon after all) and conflict-driven, and Moon Dancer's (show) personality kind of compliments that dynamic.
In the end, though, I shied away from that direction. There were too many character similarities between them to make a decent fist at the conflict I wanted to explore, and Moon Dancer needed a little bit more world-building to make her initial friendship believable. Not that it couldn't be done, but the fic probably would have been at least another third as long again, and I think at 9k words I'm already pushing the limits for a single chapter oneshot.
So I fell back on Twilight. There was already a good canon explanation for her being in contact with Ember (the whole letter writing thing) and also for staying in contact, and her personality kind of both compliments and offsets Ember's. I'm a huge fan of the episodes and works of fanfiction where Twilight gets to show her grit and determination, and the use of the summit was simply as a framing device to give her a legitimate reason for throwing herself into dragon culture. I wanted that sense of her losing herself in it because of who she is, but because she's also a little bit of a mess when it comes to relationships and being able to approach them in a confident way.
I gave a lot of thought as to the starting point for their relationship; I'm a fan of exploring relationships, and this usually means that the characters in my romance stories are already in one. I didn't want to shoehorn in a 'meet and fall in love' dynamic, because outside of a novel-length story I find it quite hard to swallow. So I kind of covered both of my bases by having them already friends, and already developing feelings for each other as a result of that friendship. As someone rightly commented, it perhaps would have given the story more strength and context had some of the content of those letters found its way into the story itself. It's a fair critique; I didn't include anything like that because I originally wanted it to be a physically raw and intense story, but I won't refute the fact that the initial starting point suffered as a result. I think the fact I was originally going to write this more as a comedy also accounted for the decision to exclude the letters, as tonally they just didn't gel together very well.
I do wonder, how many of you also trial different approaches for a story before writing? Or do you already know the style before you start? Hearts could have gone one of three ways—the version you (hopefully) have read, a comedy (more cultural misunderstandings, but less emotionally deep), and a collection of letters between the two characters. I ruled out the latter pretty quickly, because I had only just finished Proximity, which is a loose collection of stories and thus quite similar in approach, but also because it lacked the physical intensity of the romance I was aiming for. The comedy stuck a little more, but ultimately I wanted something with a little more depth. That said, I did keep some of the comedy elements in there—the courting battle for one—and I think its residual influenced stopped the tone from getting too harsh.
I still have a lot of doubts about the quality. I spent most of the last day or two wondering whether I should have shifted the setting a little and made more use of the summit. Maybe covering a longer period within the story. I didn't, because doing so brought the narrative closer to the 'princess meets dragon>hijinks>conflict>LOVE' dynamic I wanted to avoid. But I do think tying it in a little more would have helped Ember's inner conflict to breathe more (and be demonstrated in practice rather than introspection). In addition, my god I had to edit out a lot of gazing, glaring, looked at, stared at, and the like. And there are still too many remaining for my liking. So a lesson for me there in learning how to describe emotional reactions and gestures a little more succinctly, and with less repetition. I can only apologise for that!
But I really did enjoy, and am quite proud of, the characterisation and dialogue in this one. I hope it comes across in the story, but I thought the parts that went well were the parts that linked Ember and Twilight's behaviour to their (hidden) motivations and desires. At least, those were the parts I enjoyed writing the most. Especially Twilight embracing dragon culture a little too keenly.
I'll probably leave it there for now—I never intended to make this a deeply structured retrospective, more just a few thoughts in the immediate aftermath of published a story that has left me emotionally drained. But if there's any discussion pieces here or questions then I'm happy to chat and reply to them. But first I think I'm going to have a nice lie down.
Oh, and finally, thank you to everyone who has read, commented, favourited, upvoted, downvoted Hearts. It really does mean the world to me, and if the story left you entertained then I'll consider it a few weeks work well done. You're all fab! 
See you next time!
I've received early divisive like/dislike ratios before, and it's generally more plausible to assume they're for useless, superficial reasons. The fact that the culprits deliver them so fast, and then virtually never explain themselves, is a pretty big giveaway.
Now there's territory I've ended up in, and several times too. Projects needing extra world-building just for set-up is also sadly familiar.
I'm sorry to hear that. Hopefully, the work is a short-term problem rather than a long-term one?
Huh, the Moon Dancer (Moondancer?) part sounds vaguely familiar. Didn't we have a conversation about her way back, in another context?
The latter, in my case. Usually, that's because I have a keystone scene in mind to focus on, and what it contains usually decides the general thrust pretty quick for me.
Glad to see you're having a good time with the writing, and that you have the experience of a job well done. Congratulations.
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Oh for sure; I wasn't bothered by the votes ratio (I generally have little interest in the 'rating', for want of a better word, systems here anyway, but I think I was just left feeling a little perplexed about the possible motivations. Fandoms confuse me at the best of times, so I was hedging my bets on it being more to do with communicating personal preferences without actually having to communicate with the writer, but I don't want to be blinkered to the fact that they might have just disliked it/my writing. That's fine too, obviously.
I think the world-building/setup issue is a pertinent one for me (and, obviously, you too). The moment you nail your colours to the mast of publishing stories about the primary cast then you're falling a lot more into 'original work' territory. That's why the whole OC tag bothers me in application; there's very little difference between coming up with a nice palette for a pony template and giving it a personality, and giving a personality to a character that appeared in the background of the show once or two.
But yeah, resolving the issue tends to add mass to the story, and when you intended to write something shorter then that can add conflict. I probably ran away a little too easily from mine and into the arms of a story that was more sure of itself. I'll go back to it when I'm ready to start writing something again, but it's been a lesson to think about.
As for work, unfortunately that's by and large a pretty broken arrangement now. Exit strategies are underway though, so hopefully I'll have something a little more happy to talk about on that front... Well, at some point anyway.
Erm, I'm not sure about the Moon Dancer thing (yeah, I don't know the official label either); was it the Gilda and Moon Dancer minific that I wrote and shared in a past life on here? That's the only thing I can think of at the moment that might sit.
I like Moon Dancer though. And I like Gilda. I should probably write something that throws them together in some way. Maybe a Poirot-esque cost crime mystery. I've been watching a lot of Poirot of late. Good comfort viewing, that.
Thanks for sharing your approach. You've always struck me (perhaps incorrectly) as a meticulous planner, so it doesn't surprise me much that you have anchors already in place when you start to write.
Thank you! I hope your writing month thingamabob is going to your satisfaction. 10k wasn't it? Definitely relieves the pressure and allows you to focus on the quality assurance as well as the production, so to speak.