The Inspiration Behind the First Five Decaf Stories · 6:01am Feb 2nd, 2021
I promised a new story would be up last week, and I don't count the speedwriting anthology. A proper one-shot will be up soon, but it's taking longer that I expected. In the meantime, I figured I'd do something that I've wanted to for a while, now. Talk a bit about the thought process behind the stories I've published here. Feel free to read on if you would like some behind-the-scenes insight.
Just so you know, I'm not going to ruin the ambiguity that I've used in any of my stories so far, and I don't plan on ever doing that. If there was something I wanted the reader to know about a story, it is in the text of the story. I don't believe that a story that needs supplemental materials to be worth reading is a good story.
Instead, this is more the thought process that led me down the path to make each story their own. I'm only writing it because I think it's interesting in its own right, though that may be my egocentrism talking. Either way, I'll get to the good stuff.
Why-Hole
This story was inspired by and episode of Xavier: Renegade Angel, specifically Damnesia Vu, where he's trapped in a strange room with a bunch of doors that lead to ridiculous, dreamlike places. The show is a comedy, first and foremost, and a particularly incoherent one at that. (Xavier destroys the world at the end of like, five different episodes.) In keeping in step with the tone of the show, he doesn't escape his eternal prison at the end. Or maybe he does. I really don't know how to interpret the ending.
The door adventures don't really tie together or make any sense, but that's not a criticism. If you want something that makes sense, then you are watching the wrong show. I couldn't help but wonder, though, what a version of that story that actually cared about trying to tell a coherent narrative would look like. I was in a writing slump, bored in quarantine, and getting back into ponies, so...
I came up with the phrase why-hole a few months earlier, and had been looking for an opportunity to use it in a story. The problem was it sounded like such a silly way to talk about something so serious, which was easily solved by picking the right pony as the protagonist. I also wanted to see if I was capable of writing Pinkie, as she's a character a lot of people have trouble with. She was my favorite, back in the day, though now best pone is a question that I uselessly pontificate on, like a grand philosophical conundrum.
It's probably still Pinkie, though.
Afterword
I bought this nice set of every Kirk Vonnegut novel, as well as some selected stories thrown in at the end. In the table of contents, I saw the last story was called "Introduction to Bagombo Snuff Box." I thought it was pretty cool that he wrote a short story that was an introduction to a novel that didn't exist, and looked forward to it at the end of the book.
I failed to notice that, after the short stories, were a couple of nonfiction pieces. "Introduction to Bagombo Snuff Box" was not a story, but an actual introduction to a collection called Bagombo Snuff Box. I understand why the curator included it in the book. If you like it when authors talk about writing, it's definitely a piece you should check out. There's some great stuff there, as you can count on with Vonnegut.
But I was kind of annoyed that he hadn't written a short story disguised as an introduction to a nonexistent book. And, if that concept were to work, it should be an afterword, so you can shamelessly spoil said nonexistent book.
There was another author who I thought about a lot when writing that story. Franz Kafka.
I quite enjoyed The Trial, and after I read it I looked up some information about the author. Kafka, stricken with a deadly illness, took it upon himself to burn most of his unpublished work. As he grew too weak to hunt down every last scrap, he made a deathbed request to a close friend of his, Max Brod, that he should destroy all his unpublished writing, unread.
After Kafka's death, not only did Brod read the manuscripts, but he published them. These works include Kafka's most famous and critically acclaimed stories, which are The Metamorphosis, The Castle, and The Trial, among others.
With hindsight, it's easy to make excuses for Brod. After all, millions of people have read and enjoyed the stories Kafka wished to have destroyed. Kafka didn't write fiction for himself alone. He published plenty of work during his lifetime. At the moment he put pen to paper, he must have hoped that someone would read it one day, and then changed his mind later.
It's worth nothing that both The Trial and The Castle are unfinished. The Trial has a last chapter, but is missing its third act. The Castle doesn't have an ending at all. The story is left with no resolution. This has not stopped people from singing these book's praises anyway.
I am one of them. The Trial is one of my favorite books. And the only reason I got to read it is because a man betrayed the dying wish of his friend. It makes me feel dirty.
I didn't make a one-to-one allegory of this in my story. I embellished the hell out of it, and made the details my own.
Apparently, it is my goal to make all my literary idols roll over in their graves by incorporating their work into My Little Pony fanfiction.
Four Truths
This one is much more straightforward. There's a Shirley Jackson story called Six AM is the Hour about Norse gods playing poker with an unfortunate mortal to decide who will rule the Earth. I'm a sucker for stories about cosmic beings literally playing games with the universe, so I ate it up.
The game Celestia and Discord play is loosely based on Cockroach Poker, a card game I highly recommend. Here's what you need to know about it to decide if you want to play it. There is no winner, but there is a clearly defined loser.
Feeling the Cold
This is easily the most obvious story I've written. The only real interesting thing I can think to add involves the ending, which is something of a spoiler, so I'll put it under a tag.
Every year I watch the movie White Christmas in December. One of the songs in it, called Snow, has a lyric I've always thought strange.
Snow, I want to wash my hands, my face and hair with snow
It's a nice song, but that has always sounded so unpleasant to me. I couldn't help wondering why anyone would ever want to do that.
The Last Duel
This story is inspired by Crusader Kings. Specifically, a game where I played a character who was great at intrigue and terrible at diplomacy. I found it much easier to kill people who didn't like me than to try to sway them, so I did that a lot. Turns out, it didn't work. I misunderstood the game mechanics, and it wasn't even worth it to assassinate all those nobles. After the end of my long reign, I couldn't stop thinking about how I killed like a dozen people for basically no reason.
Shortly after this game I read an article about the history of Trial by Combat, and how some historians argue that people knew it was a system that didn't find the truth, and they just didn't care. It resolved disputes, and whether or not the victor was in the right was completely irrelevant. At some point, people just threw their hands up in the air and figured that they had to settle things somehow, and fighting to the death was the best they could come up with.
I don't want to make it sound like that was definitely how everyone thought of it. Another common belief was the God would divinely guide the hand of the righteous, so by definition winning meant justice had been done. There are a lot of perspectives on this, and reducing it to a single belief would be a mistake. I encourage you to do your own research if you're interested in the subject. Ridley Scott is making a movie called The Last Duel based on a nonfiction book of the same name, (I didn't know about either of these until after I finished this fanfiction,) which is about the actual last duel that happened in recorded history, so I expect we'll be seeing more people talk about this when it comes out. It's a fascinating subject for a number of reasons, and I hope I did it justice.
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And there you have it. I might make more blog posts in the future talking about my stories like this. I decided to focus on influences because I assume that, if you liked a story of mine, you might also like the things that inspired me along the way. If not, well, hopefully you still found this interesting.
There is definitely a new story on the way, but I cannot say for sure when it will be out. Thank you all for your patience, and thanks for reading!
"I don't believe that a story that needs supplemental materials to be worth reading is a good story."
Amen. Not that there's anything the matter with sharing these supplemental materials. I just wanted to emphasize my agreement with this point.