Hello, hello, hello, this is Myshiroyuki with another attempt to let me get to know you and for you to get to know me!

Anyways, I'd like to hear what everyone's goals are/were with their fanfiction, particularly their FO:E fics. Completed or on-going. Do you just want write a story with a setting in kkat's awesome universe? Improve your writing? Really, there's just a lot of reasons but I'm sure some of my reasons are the same as yours.

My goals? I want to finish a story that's awesome, funny, heartwarming, and sad. I've never really finished a story before but I am extremely determined to prove to myself that I'm a good writer after two years of writing almost nothing and yet, telling everyone who meets me that I'm a writer. Since I love Fallout and MLP and kkat's story, I think the perfect way to prove I can finish writing a story is by writing my own Fallout Equestria side story.

My second goal is to finish this whole thing within a year, a single chapter a week. I believe I heard kkat wrote the whole story in less than a year? I can't remember the exact time but if she write something that long in less than a year than so can I. My personal record for writing is about 20,000 words in eight hours but that really exhausted me to the point I took a day off from writing. To give myself some breathing room, I'm planning on writing five chapters of my upcoming fo:e fic "Relics of the Past" before I publish anything. All the advice I've seen on writing fanfiction is to make sure I keep to a schedule so readers don't lose interest.

My third goal is to simply improve as a writer. With the help of some very nice people, I've been improving my writing drastically. I actually edit my chapters now instead of publishing them hot off the press. Thanks to that, I've been able to make my writing so much better than before by catching plots I don't like and such.

Lastly, I just want to entertain people with a cast of characters and setting they fall in love with and a story where they can't wait to see what happens next. While I do value and want to hear the rare critic telling me how to get better, I actually want to hear people liking my story more. Although I'd like to see comments with more words than "this is great!" "Please update" "I love this!" and etc. I want to hear what people liked instead of a generalized comment. But I still like those comments. The praise my story gets feeds me.

I've talked long enough, now I want to hear your goals and visions and whatever concerning your own FO:E stories. Complete or on-going. I'm sure they're interesting.

5445680
I'm not writing an FO:E fic, but I have similar goals to yours. Improve my writing, finish it within the year, creative lovable characters, and so on. I also would like to feel the warmness from praise, but I admit that criticism in any form would also make my happy. As long as it's criticism and not blind hate.

I've written before, but I feel as though this time will be different. I was younger back then, and I admit I'm still considered that, but now I understand a little bit more about writing to give it another shot. Such as making plans out before rushing into it. As in, knowing what you want out of the story. First time I wrote, I blindly blundered into throwing up a bunch of text on the screen with no real purpose or move. I lacked some basic grammatical skills, too.

So, yeah, that's pretty much where I sit. Not exactly FO:E stuff, but these are still my current goals.

5445697

Yeah, I'm still considered young (25 years old) too but I feel the same about this project I'm starting. I feel like I can actually finish it and feel that euphoria of finally completing a story. It feels like if I finish this, I can seriously begin working on my dream of writing and finishing original novels.

5445680 I got a FoE fic in mind and its in the works. But I wont release it until i'm sure its perfect and when I got space on my roster for it. I got too many unfinished fics out as it is.

My goal is to just write a good FoE fic. I have no aspirations for the story other than that. I mean, sure, improve as a writer. But I believe the more you write, the more you improve. Even if you don't realize it.

I got soooo many ideas but I can't get them all down it time.

5445711
Yes, this is definitely the right direction to start doing original novels. Especially if you write your own characters in this setting. Then, you just gotta start making your own settings. Which, in reality, isn't too difficult.

Also, I'm a bit younger than you. And by a bit, I mean by 9 years.

Still, I wish you luck on your goals!

5445680
I am working on my FOE story with a friend, much like you actually I want to finish a novel length story; to be quite honest I kind of aspire to write a multi book story like Kkat and Somber have done. I want to become better, and eventually my goal in life is to actually become a fiction writer.

My primary goal however for writng is to entertain, enlighten or simply offer my own view to others. But Primarily its to entertain and hopefully make other people smile as a result of that. I love hearing from people that what I wrote brought a smile to them Or just made a shitty day even marginally better for the,

My Secondary goal for writing though is a bit more personal in a way. Its my therapy, I've actually been meaning to do a blog about this. Writing gives me peace of mind and makes me relax in a world where I work a job that is essentially creatively bankrupt. I thought that working in web design would involve creativity but in the end its mostly a copy pasting job of what's popular. In the end I turned to my biggest hobby of writing and I still do it with a great amount of passion. To sum it up my goal second goal is perhaps a little selfish? But it is to improve my own happiness, and keep my sanity.

Thirdly I write to get more experience before I start working on my real first novel(la). I want to improve and learn from my mistakes and the feed back I ca get in a community that isn't as... dare i say toxic in how critique is outed. My experience her on fimfiction has possibly been the most helpful in my growth as a writer. (I can even see it looking back at the unpublished Draft of my first story compared to how the Fallout Equestria one is looking at the moment. And I have to admit, it is thanks to people like Kkat, Somber The Abyss that I find my drive to keep trying... and of course everyone that thinks I am good enough to follow is a massive drive to continue.

And then I realised that I went on a bit of a ramble at the end oops!

5445680 I want to give people an entertaining story and have fun at the same time.

5445743
I have but one chapter to my story, and it takes place in a world where Twilight was never born. I plan to make a series based off the story's timeline.

5445680
I just want to tell a story that people enjoy. I guess I sorta hope that I can write something that someone will pick up on a whim and be completely unable to put down. That's how FO:E was for me. Once I started reading it, it was all I wanted to read.

I guess that's my ultimate goal.

5445716

It sucks having so much ideas and so little time (and motivation) to work on them! Sometimes, I just want to give my ideas to other people and have them do all the hard work. Also, writing a good story is a good enough goal.

5445719

I'm an old man compared to you! Still thanks for wishing me luck.

5445743

I'm planning on a story as long kkat's but nowhere near as long as Sombers. After finishing a story that long, writing a 80,000-100,000 word novel should be a piece of cake!

I understand wanting to make other people's day better with your stories. I'm the same. I also write to release my inner insanity. If I don't let out that insanity, I tend to become... insane. I talk to myself and do things that later I have no way of explaining why I did it.

As for a job with no creativity... I understand the pain all too much. I used to work at a cheese shop where I had to sample cheeses and sell it. I hate cheese! And I'm so honest that out of the Elements of Harmony, the Element of Honesty fits me best. I just can't tell customers that the cheese I'm demoing is good when I hate it with all my soul. I think the customers pitied me cause my boss noticed people bought a lot more cheese whenever I was demoing.

Anyways, glad you rambled on cause now I got to know you all the more. Good luck on your future endeavors.

5445784
Hah, 25 is still a prime number when it comes to age.

Now 30... then you'll be on old man.

That comment is so going to come back and haunt me.

5445780

Yeah, I love that feeling of going into something blind and falling in love with it like Fallout Equestria. It was like when I discovered MLP FIM. Some people I talked to really loved the show while I thought it was just some show for little girls. I learned to never judge a show or book until I've watched or read it after watching MLP and falling in love with it.

5445680
So about a year and a half ago I developed some ideas for a realistic sci-fi space combat series while also thinking about how much being a teenager sucked. These ideas sat in my head going no where until I read the original FO:E and thought MLP + FO worked so why not combine these two ideas in my head. My first attempt at a full novel, Among Stars, was born.

Among Stars was supposed to be a Fallout-esk tale about a teenaged child soldier (Alexis "Deadshot" Luck) living in the impoverished remains of the US/Canada striving to improve her life in a post apocalyptic earth. I had a dominant feature of realistic futuristic weapons and stellar combat. Mix in some racial themes (I started working on this during the Furgison incident), a tainted coming of age story, and a well built world (I think) and I was ready to go. The problem was I'm not a sufficiently skilled writer to go and write a novel nor known enough to have anyone pick that novel up.

The solution I settled on was writing a Fallout: Equestria side story to hone my skills before starting on my actual project. I also had a lot of ideas from My Little Portal, Project Horizons, Night Mares, the show, Fallout 4, and a whole bunch of other stuff that I wanted to explore and develop myself. Specifically life as a cyberpony, the Crystal Empire, development of megaspells, effects of magical radiation, the historical context of the Great War (what caused it beyond natural resources disputes and influenced how it was fought), the rapid expansion of technology, political tensions inside of Equestria, effects of/on other nations, warfare in different regions, and the big one was the actual fighting of the Great War.

Hence, Fallout Equestria: Sunny Skies was born.

I'm hoping to write a story that embodies the spirit of the original with equal parts: funny, heart warming, tragic, f*cked up, and brutal. I wanted to have a proper 'War is hell' narrative for Shadow's past and service while keeping a pretty generic 'wondering the wasteland' plot for the actual story. Work in a fair bit of world building from both plot lines. I wanted to show what a post-Littlepip Wasteland would look like in my eyes as well as what late war Equestria looked like from a soldier in the folds but I was really after some Epic Pony War.

I've told myself that I was going to shoot for a story under three hundred thousand words that was going to be done in a year but I've only got a little over fifty thousand after two months so I don't know if I'm going to reach my time goal. I might also go over my word limit too.

I also have an idea for a sequel that takes place a thousand years after the Wasteland is saved but I doubt I'm ever going to get to that. Plus, there's some prime prequel bait with Stable 13 and it's history before my story started.

I've got a few ideas for shorter, non-FO:E stories that I want too work on along side Sunny Skies but I really just want to finish SS on time and move on to my novels. I want to have the "Among Stars" trilogy finished by the time I graduate.

Thanks for asking and good luck

5445809
Exactly the same here. "This is ridiculous! How can guys like this!" was me before I watched the show.

5445840 Same

For the most part, I just like to write stories. I usually tend to think up and daydream about various stories or scenarios that I haven't seen happen before, so I eventually decided to start trying to those plans to life.

5445680 Not get AIDS and die

5446153
Good plan, man

5445680
My main goal with writing is just to have fun. I've always enjoyed creating stories. It's fun to see an idea slowly transform into a story, often evolving in ways I hadn't imagined when I started out. It's a lot like reading a story, only the story is one that's custom-tailored exactly to my liking. And you know, if other people get some fun out of it, too, all the better!

A secondary goal of this is to continue improving my skills. I'd love to one day be able to produce stories I can sell, but I want to make sure that I'm doing the best I can when doing so.

As for goals with fan fiction specifically, the goal was really just to see an idea that I had become fully realized. MLP prompted many questions and many ideas for things that might happen, and I wanted to explore those. The same goes for Fallout: Equestria. For example, with The Chrysalis, I really wanted to see how a changeling might do in the Equestrian Wasteland. There were a few other changeling-in-FOE stories, but most either updated very slowly, had been inactive for a long time, or portrayed changelings that didn't match up very well with my own ideas for changelings. So I decided I'd give my own take on it. So far, I've been having a lot of fun with it!

5445680

Lastly, I just want to entertain people with a cast of characters and setting they fall in love with and a story where they can't wait to see what happens next. While I do value and want to hear the rare critic telling me how to get better, I actually want to hear people liking my story more. Although I'd like to see comments with more words than "this is great!" "Please update" "I love this!" and etc. I want to hear what people liked instead of a generalized comment. But I still like those comments. The praise my story gets feeds me.

Not a bad mindset to be writing with

Yes, sadly, good commenters are sparse. I tried reading pony fics on my e-reader as an experiment (I made a nifty tool for making epubs out of fimfiction stories) but I found I really didn't like it, since it meant I was reading without commenting, and I really just don't consider a chapter "done with" until I commented on it. Not to mention, I don't comment after reading a chapter; I do running commentary, copying out small quotes to comment on during my read.

Anyway. On to the writing. I am one of those happy few with a completed Fallout: Equestria story! My reasons for writing it were actually twofold... on one side, I was looking for stories centered on ghouls, and didn't really find much interesting (this was back in 2012, when I started, mind you), and it seemed like an interesting perspective to explore. And on the other side, I had been seeing an influx of bland "pony leaves Stable" stories, and wrote my first little thing (which became the prologue chapter) as a parody of that, with a scene describing a Courageous Stable Dweller(TM) leaving his Stable to go out and explore the Wastelands, only to then reveal it was a Canterlot ghoul leaving Stable One

Now, I was never actually planning to turn this into a story. I just wrote that little intro as a stand-alone joke, more or less, and showed it around to some people in the then pretty tiny FO:E side stories community (which was mostly the chat in the now incredibly bloated FO:E Side Stories Google document). One of the people who picked it up there and loved it was Mimezinga, who practically everyone knows from FO:E Pink Eyes. So, when Puppysmiles tells you to 'write moar'... who am I to question it?

Anyway. Fallout Equestria: The Daily Unlife, as a story, it's not very typical, neither from a reading nor writing perspective. From its inception, it was just me writing a character I thought would be interesting to follow, and I honestly had no idea where he would take me. The whole thing was completely character driven, and I just made everything up as I went along on Lemon Frisk's journey. It was an amazingly interesting experiment, and from the storywriting side, it more or less gave me a "safe haven" to return to when not working on other, more serious stuff. Writing on TDU became a relaxing thing to do as a hobby; something to blow off some steam. Just, y'know, sitting down and wondering... "what are these ponies up to now? Let's take a look." This also means that TDU specifically had no writing schedule or pressure, at all. I've published chapters within the same week, and others with practically a year in between. It was already a ghoul fic anyway, y'know; not like it could really die

One of the more interesting experiences I've had while writing TDU was the concept of a dynamic and growing plot. I never, ever planned any kind of plot in the story. I did, however, have the tendency to add sneaky unexplained mysteries here and there, which were always presented as stuff they would probably never find out more about, and which were generally not worth the characters' time to look into. Now, my muse is a sneaky creature, since, at the time I added those throwaway mysteries, I honestly never had an overarching plot in mind. And then, somehow... things started connecting. Everything just started making sense, and I got confronted with deeper elements that I thought would be really interesting to explore for my characters.

And then, the other interesting experience reared its ugly head: the fully character-driven writing. Well. To be fair, it's been a blast all along, though this aspect is really challenging to deal with. Characters, basically, are a combination of their innate nature, and their experiences. Every one of them, to me, is, to say it in computer terminology, a little "virtual machine" running inside my mind. I give them a situation, and, from that nature/nurture combination, they will react on it a certain way. And the more you write of a character, the more defined they become by the experiences you've established they went through, either in the story itself or in backstory that might be completely unmentioned in the story itself.

The result of this is that characters start having a mind of their own. They start doing what they want, rather than what you, the author, wants. And that's a really big challenge to deal with. There's literally one scene where I had planned for a character to do something, they started doing it, stopped, and said "No, screw this," leaving me as baffled as his co-protagonist at that moment. The trick, in such situations, is to be subtle. Do not force it; it'll make your own characters act out of character. You being writer does not make that in any way okay. You can't force it. Instead, you need to tweak circumstances, get your characters in a situation where they'll either be compelled to go the way you want, or simply don't have a choice. The real trick is to make this look natural, and not as obvious "railroading", as they call it in role playing games (the 'group of people' kind, not the computer game kind). Add new elements, subtly guide your characters, get them to where you want thinking it was their own idea all along.

One of the hardest things I had to deal with in character-driven writing was story structure. Specifically, the climax. A story ending without a climax is generally not going to be very memorable, and that is doubly so for a character-driven story that just chronicles whatever the characters go through; you need a reason to end the story, or it'll just end up looking like "yup, I'm just out of things to write, sorry". It needs to build up to something, get some tough part the characters have to get through, so they can emerge victoriously at the end, having dealt with what the world threw at them. This ended up not even coming from the accidental plot; the resolution of the thing they started chasing was a complete anticlimax, and, actually, intentionally so; that final revelation had no real way of being dramatic. Luckily, I had some other throwaway elements in the story by then, and managed to end the story by continuing one of those.

5445680
Wow, look at me derping into a whole essay on my experiences in character-based writing

I've had different experiences with other stories. One, which started as one-shot but was extended by popular request (Soooo much popular request. Sigh. And now they're still asking for sequels ), was written (well, continued) completely in advance before posting any of it, simply because I wasn't sure my usual character-driven style would actually get me a climax, and as I said, character-driven stories especially need that. And for the rest, I've simply had interesting ideas and written them out as one-shots. Which, incidentally, was also how that one started

As for my reasons, I have one principal reason throughout all that. And, oddly, it's not a reason to write. It's a reason to publish my writings. I've written a lot of crap. The stuff that is released, however, is done so for one double and always-linked reason: I want to write it, and I think other people would find it interesting to read. If something I wrote fails that last part, it'll rot on my hard disk (or various usb flash drives) forever.

Though, most of my unpublished writings aren't those that fail that. I generally don't write much if I don't think it'd be interesting to read. No... most of the unpublished stuff falls under "pretty neat premise, but no freaking clue how to actually write a story from it". It happens far too often. Character-driven writing is not enough for premises that you just know need a grand plot to be resolved, and if you have no clue how to get one, welp, that's it

My first goal is to actually start writing my fic, as I've never published any fanfiction before, and I've been stuck in pre-planning hell for two years now. I have bad habit of being such a perfectionist that I never get things started due to the fear of not getting it just right.

Second goal is to write something that at least some others will enjoy reading as much as I enjoy writing that is engaging enough for people to take it seriously, without the terrible jokes/references I plan on planting along the way being too disruptive (or too obscure).

I've been wanting to get my butt back into writing for years, always hoping to kick myself in the butt with something like NaNoWriMo, but the trouble with NaNo is that it takes place in the same month as (US) Thanksgiving, and I work in the bakery of a grocery store so I'm constantly feeling too drained to be productive in my spare time in November. So this is the thing I hope gets me writing more again.

5445680 To craft an anthro-Ponyhammer 40K crossover involving the Deathwatch coming into contact and cooperating with both Littlepip and Blackjack.

What? Why are you looking at me like that?

5446398

Uh... To be honest, I kind of don't like that war hammer stuff so my expression is more one of confusion but if you love it, go ahead and do it! Don't let my or anyone's opinions stop ya.

5445680

I just wanted to write something that was dark, but not unbelievably edgy.

Admittedly, I didn't actually have any goals when I started writing mine. I basically brainstormed a bunch of ideas with a friend, wrote something out on a whim; no real plan, or goals in mind, then submitted it (after failing two times and then getting an actual editor to fix the horrendous pacing of the first chapter). it did better than I expected, so I got the second chapter going with double the first chapter's wordcount. And that went even better, especially after I submitted it here :3

Amusingly enough, it's not my first attempt at wrting a fallout based fic, but the first one, loosely inspired by my playthrough of Fallout New Vegas with the My Little Anthro Pony mod, was total rubbish. But that was like a year ago.

In short, my goals are to actually finish this thing, and hopefully do it well while i'm at it. :3

5445680
I don't think I had any lofty goals when I started writing Trigger to Tomorrow, other than whether or not to see if I could write at all. I hadn't really done much of any writing prior to it, so it was basically one big experiment to test myself. Beyond that I was also curious to see if I could manage to blend in an entire other setting into Fallout Equestria, basically creating a three-way crossover, which wasn't something I'd often seen done back then.

Since then my goal has mostly just grown into the simple desire to finish the story, which has grown a lot larger than I originally anticipated that it would.

5445680 , I wrote my FO:E fic simultaneously as a joke and a serious venture. The idea was to make something so bad that people that hate the genre in general would dislike it to FiMFic Limbo and leave the better-written FO:E fics alone. I'm somewhat glad that more than fifteen people decided they actually liked it instead.

As for why I write my other fics? I guess you could call it an outlet for my bursts of inspiration. I don't always have time to write. Even when I do, the ideas don't always flow across my keyboard as well as they did in my head. My better fics that both my audience and I appreciate... they feel like happy accidents.

I've always been a stickler for spelling and grammar. So, for the past several submissions, I've waited at least a day or two before publishing drafts. I occasionally slip up on a chapter when I'm dead tired, but hey. I hope others can learn from the mistakes that I make so that they can prevent them to themselves.

Most of the things I've dabbled onto the screen never make it to the submission stage. I don't like showing off work that's incomplete. The stories that I've intended to be longer and have submitted before completing are another form of times where my judgement slipped. There has been more than one time where I had to switch a story's status to "Cancelled" because I just couldn't figure out a way to keep it going. I'm sure I've made other mistakes too. It's only natural.

My first goal in writing fics is to relieve my emotional bursts into a story I believe is worth telling. The second is to entertain others. If both of those goals are met at once? All the better!

I was inspired by the fact that FoE told us how the reclamation of the world started, but ended long before all the gritty details of governments, politics, social issues, the place of the old heroes in a new world and the reintegration of what are pretty damaged individuals into a civilized society were addressed. That kinda stuff fascinates me, so I really started writing my story to explore those issues.

It's of course also a chance to refine my writing. The last story I wrote was praised for it's complex world, well developed side characters and dizzying array of sub plots, but the story frequently ended up getting lost and side tracked due to my lack of restraint and need to explore every rabbit hole. Black and White was designed as a retread of some of the things that I thought worked about my previous work, to see if I could do them better this time.

...I... sort of succeeded?

It's also for fun of course, I love writing, and I love sharing my writing