Basic rules for meeting the criteria of the challenge:

These have been figured out using science and numbers that I made a whole thread on TWG about. I'll repeat them later. If you want to go Hap's Original Recipe you could also limit your word count range to 4400-6000 words as well, if you want to hurt yourself.

Slap a story in the submission box if it fits. It'll go through to accepted if it works. It'll go nowhere if it doesn't fit these criteria. Basic as that.

6865578

Rated E, consistent with the show's tone, rough continuity, and localisation.

Does the episode we're writing have to take place during season 9? I haven't watched the show past season 5.

6868455
To be truthful I've not watched the show past season 6 myself, so I'm frankly not one to really judge.

I think so long as there's a level of rough consistency with the show's canon, then it should be fine. It's not like MLP is a particular paragon of consistency anyway, character aside. If you want to include stuff that appears in later episodes, though, they should obviously be as consistent as is possible with the show. No reimaginings here! Imagination is for losers.

It'd be great if the stuff didn't conflict with later eps though, and I will be doing research to make sure that my stuff doesn't on my end as best I can.

6868908
In that case it's probably best if we all included what season our episodes will take place in our story descriptions.

Just MLP, no equestria girls?

Final destination

6897127 I've not actually considered EqG to be honest! It's a bit trickier to consider since they only have movies and shorts, not regular episodes.

I suppose that for the purposes of consistency it'd be best to keep things 'vanilla' mlp for the main challenge, but I'll see about making an EqG folder once I figure out the dialogue-density to word conversion for movie-length and short-film length stuff.

6897541
I see, got it!

6897622 Ultimately, the point is in trying to better understand the limitations that an episode show-writer might need to consider that as fanfic writers, we don't. It's very easy for critics to say 'the pacing here is awful' and frankly, it often can be, but understanding the pressures that writers working for specific products are under is something that I don't feel is very well appreciated amongst fanfic writers.

Whether it's writing to make a story emulate the pacing and tone of an EqG movie or an episode, frankly I feel they both get the same point across, although it's worth appreciating that the pressures are not the same for both the movie and an individual episode.

6897645
I see, well, guess I better take up the challenge then.

Okay, a few more questions:

1) Must the Mane 6 or CMC be main characters?

2) ... Actually that's it XD

Also, I noticed that the 6000-8000 word limit, when I tried it a long time ago, was more akin to an 11 minute episode.

Is that the intention, or is it just me?

Finally, what's the deadline?

6897651 No deadline. We tried running a sort of informal contest where I'd provide a prize if we got 5 or more entries, but since we didn't have enough interest, the contest came and went.

You can still submit stuff, of course; the challenge isn't going anywhere. But it's not a proper contest so to speak any more.

The word limits were developed using dialogue density ratios that a fellow named Jefferson Smith researched. He found that on average roughly a third of a story was dialogue. Since we can find out how many words of dialogue exist in an episode of mlp using episode transcripts, we could determine that an average 'story' version of an MLP episode would be approximately three times times the length of the amount of words spoken in an episode.

That's the theory, at least. Part of the fun of the challenge will be seeing how well that theory stacks up in real life. (Fun for me at least; I'm a science-boi irl and like this kind of thing).

6897683
I see.

Thanks for answering.

6897703 Anytime.

All this is quite informal and mostly for fun and to, well, challenge yourself, so chatting about how it works is always good! : )