Behind The Story: The Friendship House

Sometimes I’ll randomly get an itch to write. Last night was no exception, since my brain seems to be hard-wired to stay up late after several nights of doing such, so I thought up some story ideas.

Now, nobody’s read this story, but it’s still on the recently uploaded stories list, so that’s hopefully privy to change. Now, for how young I am, I like to think I’m a popular writer for my age, but then again, nobody really knows my age. They don’t grade me on that.

Anyways, since I liked doing this so much for A Series of Letters, I’m doing it again.

So, this was one of those stories I started writing approximately ten minutes after getting an idea, and the rest of the ideas flowed onto paper. The title of the story came first.

So, I was in church on Sunday morning when our pastor mentioned something about a ‘friendship house’, so I made a mental note that that would make a fantastic story title. At 10:30 last night, my mind started wandering, as it always does, and I thought a little deeper about what the story should be like.

Well, it being the same war as The Meeting Place was another idea I had. It doesn’t really have any effect on the story, but I think connected universes are cool. I also really love examining the effects of wars on people everywhere apparently.

Realizing I’d never talked about who the war was with, I came up with three ideas.

1. Zebras
2. Changelings
3. Griffons

I crossed off zebras immediately because that’s to much like FO:E. I then crossed off Changelings because A Series of Letters took place during a Changeling war, and I didn’t want to use it again. So, that left griffons.

I did never explain why the war was being fought, but I did imply very lightly that it was due to differences in opinions, a lot like the Cold War, actually.

Yes, I did think of Griffons vs. Ponies as Communism vs. Monarchy.

Regardless, this idea just popped into my head, so in order to not forget it, I got up and wrote the entire story.

My stories more or less write themselves, the only two that didn’t were The Endless Cycle and Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay, both of which I ran by some WoF Wikia people and got praise for.

So, The Friendship House was similar. To think up OC names, I literally came up with Grimace’s name by essentially asking myself,”Do we have a G— dang that’s a cool name”.

Rough Diamond was originally called Green Tide, but I realized her colorization didn’t match the name. So it was promptly changed to Rough “Diamond”.

Also, speaking of which, I talked about not using metaphors or any deeper writing tactics in my last “Behind the Story” before I promptly turned around and used a very subtle one here.

Both Grimace and Diamond have a color scheme of grey and black (Diamond has eyes as bright as the sun because I’ve been listening to a lot of Ballroom Blitz). This is meant to symbolize that both sides of a war aren’t good or bad guys, all of them are varying shades of grey.

Of course, I wouldn’t fault you if you didn’t catch it, because I’m not a professional writer.

So the idea was to have two mortal enemies meet up and become great friends due to shared pasts. So, I came up with ‘The Friendship House’ in Ponyville. But then again, I couldn’t have it be like the thing that inspired it, because religion is a bit of a touchy subject. So, it’s literal.

Of course, it’d have to have a story associated with it, so that’s how I came up with the ‘story within a story’ idea. Now, the story you read isn’t intended to be what the overseer tells verbatim, but it more or less came out that way, which I’m actually fairly happy with.

I tend to come up with a beginning and an end to my stories, and this usually has the side effect of me rushing the story’s events to reach the ending. That’s generally my biggest fault as a writer. This story unfortunately came out this way, too.

In fact, one of things I love about A Series of Letters is that it didn’t do that.

Regardless, this story was essentially leading up to the ‘From then on it was known as The Friendship House’, which is why it travels at breakneck pace. Or rather, as fast as a conversation between two budding friends can be.

As for Grimace and Diamond’s fate before they died, that’s ambiguous. I actually debated about making them lovers (which probably would’ve been more powerful anyways), but that would change the tone of the story a lot. It doesn’t help that I suck at romance. So, I’m like,”Eh, I’d rather kill them off instead, and have that affect the future.” So, I did.

That’s about it for The Friendship House, and if you stumble upon my blog without a clue at what the frick I’m talking about go on and read it here.

And, as always, be awesome!
-Dahite