Shouldering a Holiday Burden – Author's Notes · 4:38pm Dec 22nd, 2020
As these are extensive Author's Notes for this fanfiction, here's an adorable image of its two main characters to, alongside pushing all the behind-the-scenes info below the break, also brighten up your day!
Truth be told, I wasn't quite sure what to expect when I signed up for the Jinglemas 2020 writing contest at the last minute (by which I mean I had the FAQ page opened as a constant reminder for all of November to motivate me to actually commit - hey, it worked). On the one hand, I hadn't published a fanfiction since April 2016, a time when Friendship Is Magic hadn't even registered on my radar, let alone the notion of actively watching it or getting into the fandom.
On the other hand, while I hadn't published any fanfiction in that time, I'd still written some (seriously, I've got a solid half-dozen stories in semi-complete or complete status). Several more are in finished outline form. Like many writers here, I've been working on original fiction. And having a animation-discussing YouTube channel for over five years now, I've been constantly dissecting narratives, writing about them, and doing the usual prose polish to trim fat, make sentences flow better, the works.
Point being, with all that work keeping the writing muscles alive, I was simultaneously excited and terrified to see how it would fare, writing a fanfiction that had to be published with the evolution of 4+ years in writing experience behind me.
I was quite happy when I received the author I'd be writing for - Jack of a Few Trades is an writer whose work I'm actually quite familiar with and really admire (hopefully his Cheerilee story "Learning Curve" will wake from hibernation soon). Now I felt not only pressure to deliver upon my own expectations, but also to give something an author of their skill level deserves. Nothing like a challenge!
Unsurprisingly, they'd picked Gallus and Silverstream as their featured characters. Fair enough, makes sense. Other then my personal stipulations of not having romance and keeping it E-rated (which would have applied no matter the characters), I wasn't quite sure where to start, so I did what any good writer would do - research!
I hadn't yet begun reading Jack's magnum-opus fanfic Set Sail that features these two characters, and having got those two, I actually made the conscious decision NOT to read it before Jinglemas was done. Didn't want to be second-guessing myself with how Jack sees the two characters. No, I kept my research purely to Canon for this one. Expectedly, it was "The Hearth's Warming Club" and "What Lies Beneath" that provided the most rich and fertile ground, being the only real dives into the psyche of the Young 6.
Quite how the initial story idea here formed, I can't tell you, because it's often a mystery to even the author. But I actually came up with three story ideas, determined to make this a real writing exercise to produce a story that had the potential to be remembered as more then a light and jolly Christmas writing contest entry.
Of the unused ideas, one involved Silverstream giving Gallus a gift right before the holidays, so even if he was alone at home, he'd have something to remember them by. While it was a little light on content, I felt the bittersweet undercurrent had potential. But ultimately, I didn't feel comfy writing a story that downbeat, not as my first Pony fanfic. I very much wanted the characters to earn their happy ending, and for it to not be perfect, but I still wanted a happy ending.
The other idea centred around Gallus as a royal guard in training several years in the future, bumping into Silverstream after a long time apart, the hippogriff being a cadet in Wonderbolt academy. Didn't get much further then them reminiscing about the old times, what they had planned for the future and learning a little more about each other. Not only was there not much story content here, it would mean having to work with the future canon of "The Last Problem" too. Which, yeah, that wasn't happening.
[Plus, while Silverstream did have that dream in "Uprooted" about being the first non-pony Wonderbolt, she wasn't one in "The Last Problem" - even with Canon I can't stand, I just don't have it in me to contradict it.]
Thankfully, the idea I ended up going with had tons to work with - too much. The initial story had all the events in the final version as only the prelude (in a condensed, simplified form), with the focus instead being on what Gallus and Silverstream got up to at Mount Aris during the Three Days of Freedom Celebration. It involved Gallus still being a sad sack through it all, despite the jolly attitude of all the hippogriffs and sea ponies, culminating in him feeling crushed when he finds out that Silverstream did know what he'd been feeling. The story would have concluded with a tender-heart-to-heart between the two. Unable to decide to proceed with that version or a shorter version just concerting the events at the school, I decided to write outlines for both. Good thing I was fussing over the outline too - this angle for Gallus, following the events of "The Hearth's Warming Club" is not an unobvious angle to take, and while I hadn't personally seen it done, I was sure there had been fanfiction on what he did when the next holidays came around, down to wanting his friends to enjoy their traditions. [EDIT: turns out another Jinglemas entry did just that, though otherwise there is little similarity. Check out Why Me, Though? from Jake the Army Guy, if you're curious to see how different authors approach the same stating point.]
By the time I'd finished the outline of the 'shorter' version, it was obvious which way it was going to go. Any attempt to pare that down to a prelude would make it all seem like one big plot contrivance to get the pair to Mount Aris. Now I had a story to flesh out and write. We were getting somewhere. Even if it did mean most of the relevance from "What Lies Beneath" went unused.
Given that Gallus' problem was the core conflict of the story, I knew I wanted Silverstream to be the POV character. Both to avoid having the events coming from a sad-sack narrator, and because it felt more upbeat and right to have the story being from the viewpoint of the one giving, not the one receiving. Understandably, the thing that attracted me most was stretching the boundaries of friendship a little further then the show, while still feeling very much of a piece with it. What happens when friendship principles collide and seem mutually exclusive? I can't imagine Hasbro letting the show admit that one, in this case Generosity, matters more then another in a given situation. The second part was the point of always respecting the wishes and desires of a friend (the throwback to "A Friend In Deed" came as I was writing, when it hit me how I was basing the story around the characters very consciously NOT doing what Pinkie did there). It was both important to me, and made for a real conflict - otherwise, the story would just be Silverstream approaching Gallus, telling him she overheard, and to come with her for the holidays. Sketchy and kind of clichèd, and focusing too much on Gallus' determination to do this alone, rather then on how others react to that.
Once I had a strong setup, and all the pieces of Gallus' multi-part problem worked out, as well as how Silverstream would eventually get around them, it all came down to the thematic duality of Silverstream, having made a decision between two mutually exclusive problems, putting Gallus in a situation where he had to do the same. Nice that it gave her a chance to be cunning and devious for the right reasons (seeing characters stretch beyond their usual personality traits in a believable way is always a treat) too.
Despite that, the story's central conflict still didn't feel as strong as it needed to be. While the timeline for Season 8 is a headache, given it has two Hearth's Warmings and skips several months in the building of the school in the Premiere, it eventually became clear what was going on. The changelings had celebrated one holiday between "To Where and Back Again" and "The Hearth's Warming Club", given Ocellus' mention of how Twilight introduced it to them last year. Great, so that meant that the events of "Best Gift Ever" were the third holidays since the hippogriffs had come out of hiding. That gave me a decent foundation, of Silverstream having only had one Three Days of Freedom Celebration, having skipped the second. Wasn't as strong as I'd have liked, but it was something.
It wasn't until I's started writing the story, and was checking the research again, that everything changed. During her story in "The Hearth's Warming Club", Silverstream speaks not in the present tense, but in the future tense - meaning the tourism books were describing the hippogriff holiday's new itinerary that was about to happen. This meant the first Hearth's Warming the changeling had was during Season 7, before the events of the Movie.
This made Silverstream's conflict and character resolve so much stronger. Now she had already deliberately missed the very first revamped celebration to stay with Gallus, and rather then just not wanting to miss two years in a row like her other friends, she still had yet to experience the holiday at all. Previously the obvious question of "why doesn't she just stay behind with him again?" weakened the conflict.
It was made especially stronger by the fact that in "The Hearth's Warming Club", Silverstream was the first to vow to stay behind with Gallus. Coincidence, possibly, but even before "What Lies Beneath", we had evidence of a tighter friendship, or potential of one, between these two avians.
With the story now locked, the rest was just details. Keeping a third-person POV that wasn't too tight was intentional, as if everything in Silverstream's POV was constantly bubbly, there would be a tonal imbalance with the more somber aspects of the story. Thus, I tried to balance it with how she felt at any given point, doing my best to show and not tell. The way she notes complex emotions playing out on characters' faces, and has to take a moment to place them is probably the best and most obvious example of this, but there are plenty of others. Despite the story's length, keeping it concise and tight was important. I found writing Twilight, Rarity and Spike this way, as filtered through Silverstream, especially interesting, given how we as viewers perceive them. It did make the middle office scene the toughest to write by a wide margin, but it was worth it!
Having it full with details at the margins was doubly important for two reasons. It prevented the events of those days from feeling like they only took place while the story was happening - the written equivalent of mise en scène - and it allowed the story to be, while not enough of a Comedy to earn that genre tag, still funny enough along the way, with asides character details that are probably more amusing, wry and smile-inducing then they are actually funny. But many of them were a hoot to write.
As much as many of the choices feed directly into the story's thematic point alongside being fun to watch play out - the cross-cancelling equation scene is probably my favourite in the whole story - I took care to keep it all relevant expect where cutting those details made a scene feel bare. Most of the lengthy cutting took place at the outline stage - Applejack was originally part of the office sequence with Silverstream and the teachers, but it became clear the story was being bloated, and also in danger of pushing the Jinglemas hard word count limit of 8.5K words. Despite writing out Best Pony, it made the story stronger, as the angle of all involved deciding Generosity wins out over Honesty, in the short term, would have not flown with Applejack present. Even so, the middle office scene was originally half of the story as written. Apart from being overlong, it was wrong for Gallus to be absent, even if he was being discussed, for that much of the story. So most of the prose cutting took place there too, reducing it to only 35% of the story instead.
You can bet I was stunned when the story's final word count, even after trimming away a lot of fat and tightening up the scenes (and removing some information that made Silverstream's solution far less predictable), clocked in at 8.4K words (my outline had it estimated at about 6.5K). I seriously considered cutting both the opening 700-odd words in Twilight's office and the 500-word Epilogue, but when I reread this edited version, the story suffered. Without the Prologue, the inciting incident of Silverstream leaving her report card behind felt forced, and the story lost much of the gentle scene-establishing details that made it pleasurable even when the characters were tackling a heavy problem. The ending almost remained cut - finishing on Silverstream musing that Gallus had no idea was a funny way to end the story - but I felt it was integral to have it stated that she wouldn't remain dishonest about her devious solution. Plus, it's a Jinglemas entry, I wanted to end on thoughts that, while acknowledging there had been some difficulties and there would be more to come, were warm and glowing. Comfy and unsurprising as a pair of well-worn slippers, yes. Besides, Silverstream's wry thoughts still ends that scene, if not the whole story, so it still has impact.
Perhaps some readers would feel it would be stronger still with those two scenes cut, who knows. But even apart from their purpose, I couldn't bear to see them go unseen.
Gosh, I could go on about every detail I loved to add - Rarity's "do as I preach, not as I do" moment with Spike still gets me - and I really got the feels from the final version of every moment where Silverstream is adorable and best bird. Far more then just a Pinkie clone, as if her consciously not doing what Pinkie did with Cranky didn't already prove. And I really dig when a word's usage throughout a story proves thematically significant, as it did with "burden", so much that it ascended to the title. But this Author's Note is overlong as it is, and I think most of those details will speak for themselves. Hopefully you enjoyed my ramblings!
And hopefully Jack of a Few Trades really liked the story, especially getting such a large one. Wasn't by intent, of course. But hopefully he found it a welcome side effect all the same!
Any other questions about the story, just post a comment, either here or on the story page. I've already corrected a few spelling mistakes that slipped through, and swapped out some words for suitable synonyms to reduce word choice repetition, and I have no problem continuing to edit it minutely before the year is out. You might guess the story's quality matters a lot to me.
Now I just have to not take so long again to publish my next MLP fanfiction. Whether that be another writing contest or a one-shot volition is a decision best left for the future.
