The Origin Of A Story · 9:41pm Oct 4th, 2022
[Found this sticky note at my departure gate at SeaTac, leaving EFNW. I do not believe in coincidences. 😌]
Dear Readers (including and especially all those enjoying the Autumn and the Autumn):
After much delay, my 1st place Iron Author story from EFNW 2022, "The Origin of A Species," is up. It's a story about kirin, and it's a story about love, and all the rest is commentary.
Stick around for the commentary. Partly for me, partly to see my creative process, partly to give some ideas to any and all speedwriters and fanfic writers out there.
As anyone who follows me on other small equine places knows, I'm a big fan of MLP's kirin. For a species that only got one episode in G4, they are utterly adorable. But of course, the writers were not just being creative. Kirin - or Qilin (麒麟) in Chinese, Girin (기린) in Korean, and Kỳ lân in Vietnamese, are IRL mythological beings, known throughout Asian cultures. (Very early on, so the mythological part of Wikipedia [That would be most of it - In. Ed.] says, the Chinese qilin became associated with Western unicorns.) But more than that:
A gentle animal, the kirin never eats the flesh of other beings, and takes great care never to tread on any living thing, even insects. When it walks, it does so without trampling a single blade of grass. Its beauty is only surpassed by its rarity; the unicorn-like kirin only appears during periods of world peace. They are seen only in lands owned by wise and benevolent people and during the reigns of noble and enlightened rulers, where they herald a golden age. Although kirin never harm good and pure souls, they are swift and fierce to attack if threatened, breathing holy fire from their mouths.
... Because kirin are beasts of purity and goodness, they have been used in carvings and paintings as symbols of these virtues since early times. They are also seen as symbols of justice and wisdom. Because of their holiness, images of kirin frequently adorn temples and shrines. Omens of great luck and fortune, the appearance of a kirin is believed to be a sign of the arrival of a great leader or a wise man.
[source]
Beings that would never harm a pure soul but go proto-super-saiyan on anything impure that threatens them is a nice duality. And a very good lesson for the Y7 and up set about the importance of being able to deal with feelings. ("It's not about not having them, it's what you do with them." - some adorable kirin) This lesson, of course, would have gained nods of sagely approval from both Confucius and Plato.
And because I'm both a compulsive worldbuilder and head canon artillerist, I figured the myth of how these majestic fiery floofers came to be in MLP had to be told.
Well, eventually.
I can't remember where I heard this--might have been a writing panel, might have been a Quills N'Sofas Discord discussion, might have been mid-con writing commiseration--but it's good advice. Keep some story plots in your head to be filled in later, just a skeleton: beginning, middle, end, the characters, a story beat. Keep it simple. Have more than one of these, actually. They are the ammunition for your head canon. (I promise that is the last of these puns I will make [It'd better be. - In. Ed.].)
This is because being creative on cue is hard. But writers will give you the same advice as lawyers: it ain't against the rules if it's all in your head. Hence, I walked into Iron Author 2022 without about three or four ideas, knowing that not every story will be good for every prompt.
I had it in my head for a while that MLP's kirin are the offspring of unicorns and dragons, true to their IRL mythology which reflects the characteristics of both. Which, naturally, included the most prominent of potential crack ships in Rarity and Spike. Over time, the story idea was refined from "Spike and Rarity have a kid and whaaaaaat" to the idea that the first kirin who didn't come from other kirin is going to have a lot of questions about "where do I come from and why?" This led to the idea that someone left a record behind, something between an origin story and a creation myth. The emotional heart of it should be this kirin finding it out for themselves.
Within five minutes of the prompt announcement--write a story involving a guru, a guerilla, and a gaffe--I had the entirety of the plot figured out, came up with the story hook--the character was a linguist-- and had cut it down to scope so I could write a complete story in the short time allotted (I'm usually quite bad with this), and I was off.
Another trick up the creative sleeve: you don't have to write the story in order. Here, I did the part with the unnamed kirin linguist first, setting up the frame part of the frame story. (I gave her a name in my original version, but I think it works better unnamed. And yes, there may have been a subtle sci-fi influence from The Expanse here.) From there, I turned to the mythological heart of the story. The three prompts almost worked like story beats. A guerilla war between dragons. A gaffe of someone confessing their true feelings (and yes, the quote in the story is something I heard many times before.) And a guru--literally, "dispeller of ignorance"--a spiritual leader who would serve as oral historian and moral compass, a title passed down among the generations. (Also, it's a much cooler title than "Prince" or "Princess." Too many of those in canon already. 
)
[Spiritual Power = Tol]
I would say that "write what you know" almost covers the last part, but... more than that. Write what makes you feel things. Joy, anger, surprise, fear, sadness, hope.
And if you're writing what is essentially fanfic scripture, you can't go wrong with borrowing from IRL. That's what I did with Kilin's song, which owes more than a bit to the Song of Solomon from the Old Testament. The beginning and end of the frame story, with Tian leaving a teaching for his descendents to follow, is an homage to similar passages in the Gospels of Luke and John. And while it wasn't in the original draft, during editing I remembered the Heart Sutra, a foundational text of Mahāyāna Buddhism, which seemed fitting for a guru of Asian-influenced divine ungulates, the children of parents who are gone and yet are still present.
By the end of writing time, I was getting a bit emotional myself. But, I got everything done, told a nice, clean story.
I'd never won anything at Iron Author ever, so I figured this wouldn't either.
So like I said, it's a story about kirin, and a story about love. The stuff about kirin is the frame story. The stuff about love is the important part.
The rest is indeed commentary.
gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi
kai hina pisteuontes zōēn echēte
Various and Sundry: Thanks for sticking with my fanfic dissertation. I don't quite know what came over me. And yes, you will learn this kind of stuff over at Quills N' Sofas. Trust me, it's worth it. You'll have fuf fun, I promise.
Also, my other smol horse fandom bit is still alpha-testing Lords of Ponykeep. I've mentioned it before, but that was two years ago, and since then Azimooth, the developer, has been steadily improving it. What may be the last round of Alpha testing is about to go live on October 16th, so if Paper Mario-esque pony adventure is your thing, check it out on Twitter and Discord, and consider backing on Patreon. Azimooth also does the best pony avatars, including one of a certain wall-climbing rogue OC that you can scroll back up to see. 
[time to get spooky]
I love kirins! It was a pleasure to read your fanfic