Behind the Story: A Broken Crown

I’ve been meaning to make this for a while, but I haven’t gotten around to it until now. But, now I’m prepared to do this and I have pulled myself away from Little Inferno (I’m playing it for… research. For a story.) for long enough to hopefully bang this out and finally get it done, just several days late.

A lot of you reading this are bound to know about Bicyclette’s Thousand Word Contest. It’s a contest where the entire goal is to write a story that's exactly a thousand words long. One of the categories was ‘experimental’ which feels like it was meant for me. It’s a category for stories that follow some experimental idea or layouting, and I love experimental ideas and layouting.

So, using my FiMFiction coding knowledge, I decided that I wanted to write a story that had no named ponies talking. One would be talking on the right using the [ right][ /right] code, and there’d be one talking on the left. There would be some ambient descriptions using the [ center][ /center] code.

I came up with the forest pretty quickly, and came up with the idea that they murdered Twilight slightly after. However, I couldn’t pad it out come up with how to utilize this relatively simple concept for a thousand words, as it was a very novel concept and needed to have some substance because of that. So, I just gave up.

I tried to do other experimental stories for the contest, all of which were originally going to be done in a journal/blog style. I had one covering a victim of abuse and how she dealt with it, but despite the myriad of ideas I had for that one, I also realized that it isn’t my place to write stories like that. Then, I decided that whatever I was going to do with this abused mare, it would read too much like an online blog post, so then I came up with the idea of a normal day in G5, but then saw that the contest banned G5 stories. Finally, I had an idea for a collection of journals done by a transmare about her transition, but that was too long and didn’t feel experimental enough.

So, I was back to square 1, A Broken Crown.

Trying to parse out how to make this novel concept have substance, I eventually found myself questioning why two ponies would kill Twilight Sparkle. Then, I came up with an idea that they were hitponies, they were ordered to kill her, and that this was a result of whatever happened between G4 and G5, which, in classic Dashie04 fashion, I came up with on the fly.

That easily lended itself to two distinct nameless characters, one who accepted the deal and gleefully killed Twilight, and one who had no moral reservations with killing but wondered greatly about the reparations of killing the current ruler of Equestria.

However, it still wasn’t long enough. So, I came up with a simple 4-step plot progression, with around 250 words dedicated to each stage of the Twilight assassination and rule, which was enough words to give a broad idea of the events, but not enough to answer every question.

The end result was that I tricked y’all into reading 750 words of exposition. However, it seemed to be very well-written and interesting exposition considering how long it lounged in sandbox.

To stop it from reading like the prologue of a story (though it being a prologue to G5 was kinda the point), I tried to give the exposition to the characters in a way that still made them feel like characters. Which is probably basic writing practice. Still.

The final sentence was originally conceived halfway through writing, and I decided that the entire story had to lead up to that final sentence because of the sudden dead stop it seemed to have. These two ponies have been spending this entire story trying to discuss why Twilight Sparkle was killed, but at the end of the day when one finally gives a straight answer, it’s a rumination about just how much Twilight Sparkle managed to screw up with no ill will while at the same time stating that the ends don’t justify the means.

Also, it served as a “get 25 words for free” card.

I went through effort to make it so that the text on the right didn’t look too long, because once it hits two lines of text, the formatting looks ridiculous. So, I made sure every line of that text was just that: slightly less than a line and nothing more.

I didn’t really have any bigger influences on this story that I can recall, but it was really fun to write, and weird formatting certainly isn’t going anywhere. I’m glad the story garnered a following though, and I’m happy my recent stories I’ve put effort into are getting more popular as well.

That’s really everything important about A Broken Crown.

So, until next time; be awesome!
-Dashie