Redheart's War: author's notes and after-action report · 9:57am Jun 26th, 2020
Some random thoughts and comments; don't expect anything profound. BIG SPOILERS after the cut:
(Discord user #1)
I want to give redheart a hug and a pat on the head. She needs it
(Discord user #2)
and a therapist
SockPuppet
> and a therapist
@(Discord user #2)
She has one, although it got cut from draft for pacing(Discord user #3)
@SockPuppet How is Redheart still sane?!
SockPuppet
@(Discord user #3)
> @SockPuppet How is Redheart still sane?!
The Guard has a strong counseling program, which got a hold of her almost immediately. Her husband and family have helped, too.From looking at the comments, I think the biggest mistake I made was cutting too much. The story should have had another 2,000-4,000 words of Ponyville and Redheart's everyday life. That was a full-fledged blunder on my part. Hopefully it didn't bother people too badly.
My stories tend to come in two varieties: (1) shitfics that build up to a last-line feghoot (think "Scootaloo gets a Twilight Lecture" or "Any Spell but that Spell!") and (2) character studies.
My general process is to decide what character I want to write about, and then pick the situation that will test them most sorely. Whether it's a simple bad day at work ("Pegasus Pizza") or Redheart here, I try to design the story around the character's strengths and weaknesses.
"A Story to Relate to" was about Vinyl and Scootaloo, ultimately; Nurse Redheart became a character there solely because she had a recognizable color scheme and a character tag. I tried to flesh her out enough to get the reader to cheer for her, but had no idea I would be circling back to her months later. Similarly for "The Ponies in the Caves" — Caves was about Dusky, but I decided Redheart would be known around town as ex-Guard, and Rarity would remember the day Vinyl lost her voice and young Private Redheart saved her life. I knew Caves was about the Ponyville militia, and they would need a medic, so...
My early notes on this story fleshed out Redheart's past. The show clip of her speaking to Twilight in "A Flurry of Emotions" gave Redheart an upper-Midwest accent, like Frances McDormand in "Fargo," so Redheart became a city mare from Whinnyapolis. (First draft Redheart had a much more annoying voice and accent. I toned down the Fargo speak, dontchaknow? Yeaaaah? Yeaaaah.)
This story went through about 30 drafts; I lost count, honestly. Redheart's personality changed a lot from first draft to final: as the story evolved, I modified her personality, backstory, voice, and reactions to make her actions more sensible. By the end, I really came to love her, and it hurt me to put her through what she went through.
Speaking of what Redheart went through, my two biggest fears were Darkness Induced Audience Apathy and the Eight Deadly Words.
I spent many, many drafts trying to make sure Redheart was somepony readers would want to spend time with, and that her ordeal was savage but not preposterous. I'm sure I lost readers between Chapter 2 and the epilogue from going too far, but to those of you who stuck through it: thanks!
(My outline was far darker. Redheart was captured a second time and treated like the three fillies on the schooner. That idea got the what the hell are you thinking treatment almost instantly.)
Early-draft Redheart also got around quite a bit, using sex as a "live for today, as tomorrow we may die" device. I decided this was too tonally dissonant and detracted from her character, and the story really started coming together when I expunged all of those scenes.
The framing story... someone in the Discord encouraged me to drop the framing story and especially the Apple Bloom cold open. I considered that advice, considered it strongly, but it's now clear I needed more Ponyville, not less, and I think the Apple Bloom cold open was a highly effective Establishing Character Moment.
...which leads to the next question...
...Why did I write this?
In a word: spite.
In a longer explanation, I only write stories I would want to read. Sadly, the war stories in the new column are very, very rarely readable, much less enjoyable. I decided to test myself and push my skills, and write a war fic that was (I hope) good. To prove it could be done.
How many war fics in the new column focus on the swords, on the guns, on the movements of whole divisions and fleets? I made the choice to write first-person private first class to avert all of those tropes. The story is about one mare, and a mare who didn't really give a shit about whether a sword was a cutlass or a claymore, but rather about what it did to her patient.
Ultimately, in my mind, if you say "This story is about (some event, like war)," you are doomed to fail. All good fics — all good stories, pony or otherwise, and I will die on this hill — can be summarized as "This story is about a character who (some thing)."
That, in a nutshell, is my philosophy on writing: Stories are about characters. If you can't summarize it in terms of a character, it's not a story, and it's not going to be something I want to read. Therefore, it's not something I want to write.
So, this story was my experiment to see if I could give the new column something that it seldom saw: a war story about a character, not a war story about a war.
What else do I have to say? Quite a lot, really, but it's boring, so I'll save you from it.
Let me again, deeply and with all my heart, thank everyone who read, voted, commented, and added to bookshelves. It means a lot to me that people enjoyed spending time with Redheart.
What's next?
For Redheart, Dusky, and the crew of Twilight's Own, I don't know. This was a six-month ordeal, and it took a lot out of me. I'm currently writing E-rated fluff, specifically a sequel to "Destroyed in a Flurry" where Shining Armor takes 8-year-old Flurry Heart to Earth and she catastrophizes Walt Disney World. I'm flipping through my vacation snaps and mentally replacing my kiddo with Flurry Heart and imagining what terrible mess Shining will have to clean up. "Destroyed in a Flurry" was perhaps my most enjoyable writing experience, since it was 95% real life, just add alicorn.
After Flurry, I will either return to the world of "Luna's Daughters" and write about Gale Glider and the founding of the Her Equestrian Majesty's Coast Guard, or I will write a ponies-on-Earth about an older Bramble (the crown prince of the Everfree Deer from the comics) and White Lightning working as rangers in Great Smoky Mountains National Park during the 2016 firestorms. Both of these ideas fit my theme of "writing about the worst day of a character's life, to see the mettle inside."
Thanks! As always, comments are welcome.
Fucking thank you.
This was definitely my biggest takeaway, and something I have personal gripes. Say, if a character doesn't express much about what's going on, in that no fucks given kind of way... why should we, the readers, give a shit?
Eight Deadly Words. And I think the reception Redheart's War shows it's anything but that. Thanks for this insight
I'll be sure to keep it in mind.
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Hahahahaha yup! Rule 13: Pixar's rules for writing
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And I shall keep that handy
Thanks!
Indeed.
SockPuppet already knows of and likes him, but if anyone doesn't know of him but would like more similar to this, I highly recommend Antiquarian.
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+1.
This is my vote for best pony war fic:
- MLP: FiM
- Dark
- Comedy
- Slice of Life
Years after the end of the Great War, a journalist interviews some of its greatest heroes. Veterans Day Tribute.Sadly my Seattle's Angels rec for that fic fell flat.
I thoroughly enjoyed this story. I can not stress this enough. I quickly decided to read it as you published insted of waiting for it to be marked "complete". This was the right choice, until the climax of chapter 8, when I made a noise hitherto unknown to science, when I couldn't go to the next chapter. I was so caught up in the narrative that I forgot we knew the destination and were only being filled in on the journey.
Yes.
I entirely admit I was antsy waiting for this one - when you first mentioned you were considering a Redheart follow-up to The Ponies In The Caves I was already eager. And hearing bits and pieces as you slowly crafted this tale together was just too enticing. The end result was worth the wait.
Over the past year (give or take) I've been working with an author named Firesight who is working on a wonderful set of stories about the character Firefly who he has portrayed as Rainbow Dash's fifteen times Great-Grandmother and her experiences during a war against the Gryphon Empire.
You might also check out the story Flower Mare by flammenwerffer which is a retired soldier's memories of a ponified spin on WWI.
I suggest these stories because I feel that, like you, these authors recognize the importance of having a character to care about amid the horrors of war lest they fall down the path of Darkness induced Audience Apathy like in works such as Fallout Equestria and its myriad spinoffs (moreso the spinoffs in my opinion).
Feel free to pm me if you wanted to chat more as I don't want to clog up your comments section on this blog post.
Cheers.
Oh my god yes exactly this, that's my main issue with, well, anything on this site. I have grown to feel entitled to a certain quality in fics (I specifically used the word entitled, because well... that's pretty much what it is) from reading from mainly one author on here for years now, and so already even decent fics are almost ehhh to me. (sometimes I read things I know don't have great writing... but I still love them lmao)
this however is one of the best stories in this genre I've read on this site, pretty much ever. it had literally everything to be next-level quality rather than "hey that's pretty good" Only issue is that it leaves people with that "i want stories like this from you forever or else >:(" but, I don't care, i just hope you write things similar to this since you have a world setup etc. but if not, I'll still read what you release.
Altogether, thanks for all this effort on horse story website
I'm sure everyone here agrees with that statement, but wanting a story about a character and writing a story about a character are two very different things. My own stories (don't read them, they're terrible) were all attempts to build characters, but it's no easy thing to do.
Definitely a good call. Redheart's role as a wholesome person in an unwholesome situation made all of her suffering seem that much more unfair, and made her appear more heroic as a result.
The darkness-induced apathy hits a lot in modern stories. I think you were closer to too-dark than you were to not-dark-enough, but still landed within the range where I cared, and fretted for all the fragile lives in the balance.
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Big thanks all! Appreciated.
The 30 drafts make sense. There was a lot of polish, and every little detail of the encounters made sense. Even at the end when I realized that and started to look for things to nitpick about, there wasn't much. You didn't replay the same mental anguish, the same "o no i ran out of supplies" emergency, etc. The one thing that bothered me is when Redheart is rescuing the prisoners on the schooner, there' no reason the unicorns can't just levitate them like they threaten to. There should have been a reason not to, like they were holding a knife and were afraid to startle them, or the iron was anti magic or something. That's it, and it's so small I felt uncomfortable typing it out in a comment to the story itself.
You can always post the deleted scenes somewhere, unless they're gone for real.
That's for the best, I guess.
On the first thought it seemed interesting, but then I realised that, coupled with the previous paragraph, it'd make Redheart seem like Blackjack from Project Horizon and I cringed (I kinda like Blackjack's design, but that's about it. Talk about being damned by faint praise).
I had the same opinion on warfics when I started to write A Kingdom Divided, but since I started it in 2013, it's its own brand of terrible. But then, I did something similar with EqG fics since my idea behind It's the End of the World as We Know It was "don't be like Seven Days in Sunny June". I guess spite is just this powerful.
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Thanks! Appreciate the words!
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Other than "Luna's Daughters," most of my fics have been middle fingers to the New Column and Sturgeon's Law.
Interesting insights, but sad there's nothing on the pipeline for a sequel. Although it has been over a year...
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Sequel is second in the queue, after a "Luna's Daughters" sequel.