Things I Could've Done Better · 9:12am Oct 25th, 2022
I could've done Wish Fulfillment so much better. There was a path to make this story so good, but instead of taking the right path, I let the story fall flat on it's face, and it's frustrating me greatly. No, I'm not cancelling it. I've only ever outright cancelled one story (and then deleted it because I truly felt like it was not the quality of work I wanted on my profile). Wish Fulfillment will be completed, and I already know how it's gonna end. But .man, do I feel frustrated with how I handled this.
1: It should've been in 3rd person. The biggest issue with it is that it's told in first person. Third person would cut down on how much story there is and vastly improve most of the first 15 chapters. Either that, or it should've been told from Shorey's perspective, and the first nine chapters should have been cut out completely.
2: And this leads into the first problem. Rally tells too much about how her relationships with ponies are, but hardly ever actually shows it. We don't have the necessary context to say that when our MCs fight, they actually are friends and not just people who know each other. The context would've been and could've been provided had the story been written in 3rd person.
3: And once again, this plays into problem one: Rally is too whiney, especially in the beginning. A third person perspective were we don't hear everything she's thinking would play into this better, and better build sympathy instead of frustration for her.
4: Wouldn't you know it, this is another issue that stems from 1st person perspective: the story is too on the nose with dysphoria and the like. Subtlety would do it good and vastly improve the narrative, which the beginning of this story does not do. 3rd person would help bring subtlety to it.
I've been thinking about every single one of these things since around the writing of chapter 25, but once I got to that point, it was way too late to significantly change the story, so right now, what I'm thinking about doing (or rather, what I'm going to do), is this: I'm gonna put the story on hiatus, go back through and revise it, and then take it off hiatus. And make it all in one single story, not two. I'd keep the teen version up until the mature version is completely revised, and then once it is, unpublish the teen version. Mind you, it's not a good plan, but a story that was put on hiatus and revised to be better would be better than to keep posting chapters of a story that I'm frustrated by and don't think is turning out to be as good as it can be.
I want to be a better writer, and I'm pretty sure what a good writer would do is revise a story that they believe is failing and make it better.
I'll definitely try again at reading it if that's the case.
It's a tough thing to do, to admit you're unhappy with something and start over rather than pretend everything's fine.
You got this girl.
It's Reboot Time!
Mayhaps leave up a "legacy" version and post the rewrite seperate?
I will admit I did stop reading that one myself around chapter 21 or so. It very much felt like the main character was just in a constant state of negative emotion, brought about via their own thoughts and the words of others, with hardly any respite. It sorta became too much for me after a while. :X
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Yes, I do agree, and I can tell you that, with 4 chapters revised on the mature version so far, the narrative flows a lot better in third person where I can cut out "I feel" stuff and remove a lot of fluff. It also gives room to be able to switch to other ponies perspectives, which helps build up sympathy a lot better than it would just hearing Rally complain in 1st person. Most of the story doesn't have nearly enough characters to make 1st person really work, something I should have figured out before I even published the first chapter, since I'd already written ten.
It didn't help though that by the time I was releasing chapter 7 or so, I had written ten chapters ahead in the story. For some people, it might make it easier to revise, but for me it makes it harder.
But anyway, 4 chapters have revisions down, 36 to go, cause I have up to chapter 40 written. Probably less than that actually, because a lot more fluff is getting cut.