Writing of: Three Tenses of Friendship · 6:21pm Nov 13th, 2020
Hello, SunlightRays here, and I'm back with another one of my "Writing of" series!
This time, it's a special occasion for me. Special in that I'll be talking about my most successful story to date (and yes, the previous record held by After the Day Breaks was absolutely shattered).
I present to you, Three Tenses of Friendship.
426 views, 40 likes (and 2 dislikes! :D), 101 bookshelves, and once again, featured. All happened during the first 14 hours this story has been up on Fimfiction. 
Thank you so much for liking this story, everyone. I never expected this to hit the popular stories list, much less get featured.
Once again, thanks to everyone who helped me perfect this story from its birth. I would have never made it to this point without your help.
So, without further ado, let's get right into it!
Warning: Spoilers ahead! If you haven't read the story yet, go read it. NOW.
And also, please add comments after you read it. Constructive criticism is always welcome.
Conception of the Idea
So I talked about Quills and Sofas Speedwriting Group several times in the past. We do speed writing contests, which usually take about an hour, and then we also do panic writes, which take about thirty minutes or less.
On October 10th, on the day of the 10th anniversary of the first episode of Friendship is Magic, KrazytheFox (Krazy for short) started a celebratory panic write. Of course, since it's a panic write, it was announced 20 minutes before the start without any warning whatsoever. Naturally, everyone in the Q&S discord server went absolutely bonkers, trying to come up with a story idea for the contest. The prompt was "Friendship is Magic", and in the midst of all the chaos where everything was on fire and everybody was screaming while running around like madmen, a quote from Carl Sagan's Cosmos came to my mind:
The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be.
So I took it, and twisted into this:
Friendship was, is, and ever will be, Magic.
And from that, the story idea involving a future Twilight Sparkle ruling over Equestria was born.
The Panic Write
Now, one thing to know about panic writes is that you have no time at all to draw out a plotline. You just let your fingers follow the flow of words or you fall behind. With that in mind, you can probably imagine what I was doing during the 30 minutes I had to write: just typing out words madly from the tip of my fingers.
Well, okay, that's not the entire truth. The truth is that I had a vague outline in mind: Twilight reflecting on how much the citizens of Equestria have grown under her rule, enough to protect the values of friendship on her own. Then it occurred to me that if Twilight had ruled for a long enough time for Equestria to reach that point, she would opt to step down from the throne. Her job's done, so there would be no reason for her to stay up there any longer than necessary. This is where Zontan's story, The Last Decree, comes in.
I'll be talking about this story in another blog. And then from there, I turned it into a final letter written by Twilight to Celestia since I know if there's one thing I'm good at, it's writing epistolary stories. I'm also a fan of those types of stories, so why not?
So I managed to put down 792 words during the 40 minutes given for writing and editing, the result of which can be found here.
Editing
After the submission of my entry, people commented on the google docs I wrote the entry on because that's how we run contests. And among the many people who commented—there were a total of eleven, I believe—three of them stood out the most to me: Krazy, The Red Parade, and Holtinater. These three all pointed out one thing: the overall concept was okay, but the format of Twilight writing to Celestia seemed off. Like, why should Twilight be informing all this to Celestia now? Holtinater also pointed out that my entry sounded more of a history lecture than a letter of abdication, which further pointed out the weaknesses of my entry.
So based on these critiques, I set out to fix my entry... by wiping the whole thing blank and rewriting from the start.
The Rewrite
It was hard, trying to restart the whole thing after wiping it blank. After some discussion with Holtinater, it was decided that the best course of action was to change the format of the story into a speech directed at the citizens of Equestria. And then came the whole "how far in the future should this story take place" shenanigans. Since the story starts with Spike consoling Twilight, I had to set the time period close enough to the end of the show so that Spike would be still around, but far enough that Twilight would have achieved all of her goals and would be stepping down.
All in all, the number 300 was set through that thought process and a lengthy discussion on how long dragons lived in the MLP universe.
And then it was me focusing on the characterization of Spike and Twilight, in which I spent days trying to figure out how to express Spike without messing it up. Overall, I'm satisfied with how Spike calming Twilight down turned out.
Now comes the part where it starts to get emotional: Twilight looking down upon her subjects.
During the three paragraphs I devoted to describing the crowd cheering up for Twilight, I made sure to capture the sheer scope of the emotions and thoughts that went through Twilight's mind in that moment. The love she had for them as a ruler, the relief brought to her by their cheering, and the sadness that this would be the last speech she would be delivering, the last time she'd be seeing them all at once.
About Celestia and Luna watching her from a distance, I'll talk about that later. For now, we'll move onto Twilight's speech.
So the basic gist of what is said in her speech is based on my contest entry, which can be found in my anthology collection. But even having that as a basis for my writing, expanding a letter into a formal speech was not an easy task. The flow, the diction, the tone; everything had to be changed while maintaining the overall contents. And I had to do that while making sure that the story wasn't just Twilight talking for 2.5k words. No, I had to come up with descriptors and action tags to make sure I could properly convey Twilight's emotions to the readers. I found out that using chunks of exposition between chunks of monologues helps a lot with this issue. I also added in bits of action tags, such as Twilight lowering her head and staying like that for a few moments or silently whispering while crying, to more lively express her emotions.
And now, for the post-speech scene.
Now here's the funny thing: the five silhouettes against the horizon wasn't a planned scene. While I was writing, I had a sudden epiphany about how to show how much each and every member of the Mane 6 meant to Twilight; through projections or visions shown through her perspective.
So I set to work and wrote that despite Twilight knowing those five figures were most likely just shadows playing tricks on her, she doesn't blink the images away. I wanted to show how much Twilight longs to see her friends again, and yet is also able of moving on from her losses. If I wanted her to mourn her friends' deaths I would've kept her standing there, while if I wanted to show the side of her moving on from her past only then I would've had Twilight blink the vision away. But I combined the two, and the result is something I am very satisfied with.
As for Luna and Celestia greeting Twilight after the speech, originally they weren't supposed to be expected. The original draft had Luna and Celestia surprise visiting Twilight after her speech was over, but then I thought that Celestia would want to let her former student know that she will be there for her rather than to surprise her at the end like that. Plus I thought it would make it for a more emotional story.
And now the group talk after Twilight is greeted by the sisters. I thought that, despite having seen things through her own eyes and having made every preparation she could have, Twilight would still have the smallest modicum of doubt lingering in her mind. And so I wanted to have her express those doubts and also her longing for her best friends. Naturally the role of assuring her and consoling her went to the three other characters, which gave me enough dialogue to work with for Celestia and Luna.
Through this conversation, Twilight is finally leaving all of her doubts behind, shown by the fact that she sees her friends once more on the western horizon, and this time, she smiles back at them before teleporting after the sisters.
All in all, this was a harassing yet fun experience as a writer! It gave me both pain and joy, which seems to be a common thing for authors' pet projects.
So that was it for the Writing of: Three Tenses of Friendship! Thank you for reading, and I'll see you around!
SunlightRays out.
