//------------------------------// // Nine // Story: To My Uncle // by PaulAsaran //------------------------------// Today had not been a very good one for Keen. Her dear adopted mother was off in Canterlot undergoing some sort of medical procedure on her wing. Keen wasn’t very fond of Canterlot – too many ponies – so she’d been left at home with a foalsitter. She was supposed to spend the day outside playing with her friends, but then the Everfree decided it would rather rain on her parade. No, like, real rain. The kind that made the drops move sideways and sent nice pegasi like Miss Airheart in a tailspin. So now Keen was stuck indoors with a supply of things to do that had rapidly run out. The good news was that her foalsitter was none other than Uncle Fine. He very rarely foalsat, but he was always one of the more welcome ponies to do so. Uncle Fine could keep her safe, he always had fun ideas, and he let her do certain things that Mom frowned upon, like hot chocolate in the morning or staying up late. And since she was now out of things to do in her room, she decided to seek him out. Maybe they could play a game together! As long as it wasn’t hide and seek. She tried that with Uncle Fine once. He was very good at hiding. Too good. Which she should have seen coming. Hiding was his special talent, after all, and he made a point of never holding back. The search was short. There were only three rooms in the house, not counting the hallway and bathroom at the end of it. Two of those were bedrooms. One was a combination dining, kitchen, and living room. That last one was where she found him, which only made sense as he needed a table. Uncle Fine was engrossed in his work. Not his real work, that was scary stuff she preferred not to ask about. Seeing it once was more than enough. Instead, he had several sheaths of paper, his muzzle hovering over one as a quill in his dark red aura scribbled swiftly across the page. Most ponies might see the intense focus in his eyes and the thoughtful frown on his lips and think he was deeply engrossed in his writing. Most ponies didn’t know Uncle Fine. Tucking a lock of her long hair behind an ear, Keen asked, “What are you writing today?” She climbed into the chair opposite him, which was still too tall for her little frame. Without stopping or looking up, he politely replied, “A story about seaponies.” Keen’s ears perked at this. She’d never read about seaponies before. But this was Uncle Fine, so she had to ask, “Is it a happy story?” “Nope.” He glanced at her with an apologetic smile, brushing his fiery red mane aside. “Sorry, Little Miss.” Perked ears lowered forward. Some of Uncle Fine’s stories were nice and friendly and meant for fillies her age. Many of them weren’t. “Do ponies die in this one?” “No. This is one of those ‘life’ stories.” Meaning good and bad things happened in equal measure. That didn’t sound too bad, but she wasn’t in the mood for ‘life’ stories. She’d rather try something pleasant. But she also knew well enough that Uncle Fine wasn’t going to stop writing now. He was clearly in a mood, and it was better to let him work his way out of it. So much for playing a game. But Keen was hardly out of ideas. There were a couple extra inkpots on the table – one can never have too many spare inkpots, so sayeth both Uncle Fine and Miss Sparkle – and a couple extra quills too. “Can I write something?” That finally got the quill to pause in its scribbling. Uncle Fine gave her a funny look, as if not sure he’d heard her correctly. “Do you want to write something?” She nodded enthusiastically. “I want to try.” Anything that Uncle Fine liked so much had to be worth a go. Her uncle smiled and gestured to the paper. “No way I’ll use all this in one day. Go right ahead.” A moment of excitement ran through the filly as she used her magic to snatch up a couple sheets, a quill and an inkpot. As a five-year student and master essay writer under the hard tutelage of Miss Sparkle, she knew precisely how to dip the quill and apply exactly the right pressure. The paper was set so very neatly before her, ready to accept her words of… of… The quill hovered over the blank sheet. Keen stared at nothing, silently willing there to be words. Alas, the words proved uncooperative. She glanced at Uncle Fine’s page. It had so many words. Sentences within paragraphs upon pages of words. Yet when she looked at her own page, there were no words. The quill waggled in the air, as if doing so would conjure words out of her head and onto the paper. No such luck. Uncle Fine was watching her in that amused way adults get when a foal’s plan hits the hard boundaries of reality. Pouting, she finally asked, “What should I write?” He shrugged, clearly enjoying her annoyance. “What do you want to write?” She shrugged in turn, then gestured to his work. “I want to write a story like you. But I don’t have any ideas.” Uncle Fine hummed to himself, considering this dilemma. He no longer appeared to be making light of her, though he hadn’t lost an ounce of cheer. After a moment, he used his magic to sweep his story aside and set a new paper before himself. “How about we create a prompt? I’ll give one part, you give the other, and we see what we each write after… say, fifteen minutes?” So it was like a game? Keen rather liked that idea. “Okay!” With an idea of what to write, surely she’d be able to do something. Miss Sparkle gave her writing assignments all the time, and what were those if not prompts? “Then let me start us off with a subject: a stallion on a boat.” Uncle Fine nodded confidently, then asked, “And what is our stallion doing?” Ah, he wanted a verb. Keen glanced at his story and recalled what it was supposed to be about. Thinking herself oh-so very clever, she replied, “A stallion on a boat meets a seapony.” Smile broadening, Uncle Fine dipped his quill in his inkpot. “I think I might have an edge on you there, but very well. Fifteen minutes. Ready?” Keen scrunched her face, set quill over paper, and nodded. “Go.” And go Keen did. For all of one sentence. She had a sailor pony. On a boat. Seeing a seapony. And what happened next? How does a pony react to meeting a seapony? Are they supposed to be surprised? Scared? Happy? Does she know the seapony? What about the seapony’s side of things? What did it do? Keen had no answers. Worse, when she glanced at Uncle Fine’s page, he already had a whole paragraph written! And he wasn’t even writing at his usual speed. It would look dumb if she only had one sentence after fifteen minutes, so Keen forced herself to write something else. There. The sailor pony waved. Just… waved. Now what? The struggle went on for fourteen more minutes, and when Uncle Fine called time she had a paragraph. One measly little paragraph. Five sentences, and three of those were just describing what the seapony looked like. Meanwhile, Uncle Fine had more than a page's worth of words, all in his neat, small hornwriting. He clearly saw her frustration. She was making no attempt to hide it, what with her puffed up cheeks and pout. He offered his reassuring smile and reached out with his hoof to take her page— “No.” She pulled it out of hoof’s reach with her magic. “It’s not good.” His smile didn’t fade one bit. “You’ll pardon me for saying so, Little Miss, but I hardly think you’re qualified to say so.” “It’s mine,” she countered firmly. “And I say it’s bad. I only wrote one paragraph.” He cocked his head and replied, “You say that as if it’s slow.” “It is slow!” “Is it?” Propping his chin on a hoof, Fine took her glower with ease. “Some ponies just write slowly. There was one author named Milky Crankston. He wrote a story called Cube. It was three-hundred-eighty-five pages long. Do you know how long it took him?” Milky Crankston? Didn’t he write that story, Nightmaric Park? Yes, that was the one. She’d read a few of his works, but not Cube. Now really interested, she shook her head. Uncle Fine’s smile broadened. “Twenty years.” Keen could feel her eyeballs growing in her skull. “Twenty years?” “Twenty years. Apparently he had trouble figuring out what to write.” “Oh.” What more could she say? Twenty years was longer than she’d been alive. That was… She didn’t know what it was. Her eyes drifted back to Fine’s writing. There were so many words. “But you wrote so much.” He nodded, patting the sheets as he did. “Everypony writes differently. Some are slow, some are fast. I’m just one of the fast ones.” She scrunched her face up as she tried to imagine that. He must think fast too. It was the only explanation. “How do you know what to write?” To this he shrugged and gained a sheepish look. “It just comes to me. I know my characters, and if I don’t know them I let them tell me who they are.” Keen stared. First at him, then at his one-and-some-change pages, then at her measly one paragraph. “But…” Would this sound stupid? It sounded smart in her head, but a lot of stupid things sounded smart in her head until Mom or Uncle Fine or some other adult corrected her. Surely this would be one of those times. “But they’re just words. They aren’t ponies, or seaponies or… or people.” “That’s what imagination is for.” At her ongoing scrunchy face, he sighed and toyed with his ever-present knife necklace. “It’s hard to explain. It sounds silly. But I don’t view the characters as just words on paper. They’re my friends.” Keen cocked her head. “Even the bad guys?” There came a peculiar smile on Uncle Fine’s face. Keen had only seen it two or three times. There was no other way to describe it but ‘creepy’. Not that it bothered Keen – her Uncle Fine could be a scary pony, but only towards anypony who wasn’t her. Uncle Fine would never hurt her. “Especially the bad guys.” He shook it off quickly, smile returning to normal. “I let them exist as themselves in my head and let them do the talking. I am merely putting their words down on paper.” He was right, that did sound silly. She gestured to her lone, sad paragraph. “The sailor pony doesn’t speak to me.” “That just means you’re a different kind of writer from me,” he reassured her. “If you keep trying, I think you’ll be a more technically minded one. Which means that while you might be slow, how you write the story will probably be excellent. Versus me.” He nodded once more to his one-and-a-half pages. “I write fast. That doesn’t mean what I write is good. I can already tell I’d need to rework things on at least two thirds of that, and one third can probably be thrown away entirely.” And he would know what was good, wouldn’t he? After all, he had trophies. Many ponies and non-ponies too read and liked his stories. Which led to an entirely new problem, one that stirred fresh doubts in her mind. Taking her page and scanning the paragraph yet again, she pondered out loud, “How do I know if what I write is good?” He shrugged. “You don’t.” Her tail flicked at this odd answer. “What do you mean? Everypony likes your stories.” So he had to know what ‘good’ was, right? “Not everypony,” he gently corrected her. “Many. Maybe most. Depends on the story. But never everypony.” When she could only stare in bewilderment, he tapped his knife again, making it sway. A crack of lightning briefly lit the room but failed to break their eye contact. “Writing is an art. Like painting. Everypony has their own opinion on what makes a painting good or bad, and many will disagree about it. Some will even fight over it.” Keen frowned, eyes following the slow sway of his knife. Something was either good or it was bad, right? Uncle Fine’s writing was good, and hers was bad. She needed to learn the right way to write if she was going to be as good as him. Was this some sort of test? Mom liked to say that Uncle Fine was a compulsive liar. Which… was true, Keen had seen it herself, but she never thought he’d lied to her. At least, not about anything important. And this felt important. She didn’t want to believe he was lying now. Which left her with one conclusion: “I don’t understand.” Uncle Fine hummed, the sound uncertain but patient. He was always patient. It came with a talent for hiding, or so she believed. “Ah.” Raising his head high, Uncle Fine grinned. “I’ve got it! You remember To Kill a Phoenix, right?” Yes. Yes, she absolutely did. The very mention brought a frown to her face. “By Harp Leaves. I only read three chapters. It was boring.” Uncle Fine knew this. She’d told him about it, and Uncle Fine didn’t forget things. He nodded knowingly. “So you’d say the book was bad?” “It was bad,” she declared with confidence. Uncle Fine’s grin grew. “Did you know Harp Leaves won a Foalitzer for that book?” The sheer absurdity of what had passed through her ears and into her brain brought Keen’s every physical function to a jarring halt. The actual meaning of the words jolted them back into activity. “A Foalitzer? L-like the ones you won?” He only nodded, pride brimming in his expression. “But. But…” All her efforts to sum up her feelings on this revelation could scarcely be put into words. She was forced to settle for the embarrassingly childish rebuttal of “But it’s so boring.” “Hmm,” Uncle Fine hmm’d. “So you think it was bad. Does that mean the Coltlumbia University doesn’t know a good story from a bad story?” “No!” Keen knew that couldn’t be true, because “The Adventures of Kit and Kaboose is good!” “Why, thank you! Much appreciated.” Uncle Fine rubbed at his chest in an exaggeratedly self-aggrandizing manner. “So you didn’t like To Kill a Phoenix, but a lot of ponies liked it enough to think it deserved a grand award. What does that tell you?” That was the question, wasn’t it? Keen wasn’t sure what it meant, or how to properly process it. She needed a moment. She stared out the kitchen window, through the droplets beaded on the glass, into the rainy autumn afternoon. She stared and she pondered, pondered, pondered. There were many truths about Keen Arrow. She was a little pony, even for her age, and always had been. She was cute, and smart enough to know how to weaponize that against certain ponies with a weakness for cute things. But there was the rub: Keen was smart. Her mother, undeniably a jock despite the crippled wing holding her back, jokingly lamented Keen’s egg-headedness. The local librarian – Keen’s magic teacher –  often praised her for things like that. This wasn’t a book-smarts thing though, or magical theory, or even a matter of accuracy (which her cutie mark of an arrow poking through a book would have helped immensely with otherwise). No, this felt like something beyond hard facts. It dove into the realm of opinions, thought experiments, and theories. Keen wasn’t so good at those things. If there wasn’t a hard fact that proved the point, then she wasn’t sure what to do with herself. But eventually, somehow, she began to form conclusions. She wasn’t at all confident in them, but that was okay. She had Uncle Fine with her, and she could ask Twilight about it later. She trusted both of them to help. She might even ask her mother, although asking Lightning Dust about anything other than flying, sports, or weather work was always a questionable proposition likely to lead to inconclusive or outright incorrect results. Still, she would try her best if Keen asked. For now, she had Uncle Fine. Who, she now realized, had gone back to his regular writing work. That was enough to tell her she’d gone into thinking mode again. A glance at the clock told her little, but she guessed she’d probably just lost at least a half-hour. “Uncle Fine?” He neither looked up nor stopped writing. “Little Miss.” “If good writing is a matter of opinion and ponies don’t agree on what makes a story ‘good’, then I have to decide on my own what I like and don’t like.” The quill paused. Uncle Fine met her gaze with a warm smile. “Very good.” She nodded back, a smile of her own taking over her face. It was always a nice, warm, comfy feeling when Uncle Fine approved. “So I shouldn’t be asking ‘Am I good?’. I should be asking, ‘Am I happy?’.” Sitting up straight once more, Uncle Fine set the quill in the inkpot and set his paper aside. “I find absolutely nothing to criticize in that.” The way he said that made it sound like the discussion was concluded. It wasn’t. Keen had a whole new question. “But that means only I decide if I am getting better.” She cocked her head up at him, taking a moment to brush aside her long mane as it tried to dangle in her face. “How do I get better? I’m the one who decides what ‘better’ is, but I don’t know what ‘better’ is. I can’t figure that out.” “The challenge every writer faces,” he acknowledged sagely. “Well, you’re already at stage one of the process, which is to read.” Read? Keen did that all the time anyway. Her mother had even made a bookshelf for her so that she could start a collection, then another in the hall when that one had gotten full. The second one getting full was when Lightning established the rule of ‘no new books until you finish the ones you have, young lady’. “Why read?” He gestured to his own story. “Every pony writes differently, and every pony likes different things in writing. So read a lot. See what other ponies do, see their techniques, learn which ones you like and don’t like. Then you can learn to use them for yourself.” Then, as if by rote and with a wry smile, he declared, “Immature writers imitate. Mature writers steal.” Keen didn’t know what that quote meant – for she was sure he was quoting something – but she knew Uncle Fine well enough to know why he’d love it. She couldn’t help smirking in turn, accepting in her ignorance this once. Let Uncle Fine have his sneaky things. “I read lots already. What’s step two?” “Criticism,” he declared. “Having other ponies read your stories and tell you what they think.” The very idea made her feel cold. Let other ponies read her crummy words? She glanced at her tiny paragraph, still sitting where she’d left it. Uncle Fine hadn’t touched it, and that allowed her to relax… a little. “I don’t think I’m ready for that step.” To that Uncle Fine chuckled and patted her head. “Someday you will be, Little Miss. “If you ever decide you want to get better, someday you will be.”