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I'm writing a number of blog posts for the Medium account about how the mechanics and story got to where they are for The Eighth Day. As I was writing them, I got to thinking about Everything is Fine, and how much of a disaster that turned into. I wrote the below post detailing my feelings about the story and why it came out the way it did but it really isn't a "business" blog post so I'll post it here for anyone who's interested.

Everything is Fine — The Disaster

From the simplest children’s tale to the grandest adventure series, every story needs structure. It’s what keeps us invested when twists come along and shake things up, or when characters go through their arc and change. If you have a good framework, if everything makes sense in the context of the world, and as long as you follow your own rules, than the story will work.

Hello, my name is Andre Hernandez, and I wrote a bunch of fanfiction that didn’t work. I wanted to address those who followed my largest and most popular fanfic: Everything is Fine. I hope to explain why Everything is Fine came out the way it did.

Everything is Fine is a character driven, post-apocalyptic story about one pony, Fluttershy, losing everything and trying to deal with it. The story slowly becomes more psychological as the pony tries to ignore all the ruin and death around her, pretending that everything is just fine.

To date, Everything is Fine is 139,209 words, has 63,197 total views, and 528 “likes”. At its height I would regularly get thousands of people reading new updates, which came out on an almost monthly basis. Even the later chapters that came out years later saw hundreds of views. It was pretty popular in its time and, had updates been more regular, I’m sure it would have been looked back upon like Fallout Equestria and other memorable stories.

Well, I really can’t say that. Everything is Fine had been going downhill since chapter two. In fact, the original plot that had more than a moment’s thought put into it consisted of the prologue and chapter one. The simple truth is that Everything is Fine was always destined to be a disaster.

The short description of the story I gave above encompasses the prologue and chapter one. If the story ended there, I think everyone would have been happy. We didn’t need to go into how Fluttershy survived, or what mental craziness develops, or some out of nowhere overarching plot about the elements of harmony and the fate of Equestria. We knew that Fluttershy went nuts, we knew how and why and saw the aftermath of that, and we knew she wasn’t going to get any better.

But, because we didn’t stop, I have to keep talking about it. By we I mean my co-writer, Books, and I. We worked on what I eventually called Part One: chapters one through six. Beyond that are my own story elements.

Let me quickly go into how I think up stories so we’re on the same page. I’ll think up an interesting idea, say: everyone in Ponyville dies to a disaster and only Fluttershy survives. Now I begin thinking about what kind of disaster it is, why it happened, when it happened, and then how Fluttershy survived it. Readers already know how the rules of the universe work, so I spend a lot of time trying to make the initial story work within the context of that universe so it isn’t too jarring to read. Readers need to be able to see these events as plausible, if not realistic. A meteor explosion was decided on to kill everyone, and Fluttershy was in the woods and just happened to survive by chance whereas no one else did because they were all in the town square watching. There, a basic beginning.

Now I think about how the story ends. Initially, I had ideas for Fluttershy eventually leaving Ponyville to find civilization limping along without the royal family. Books wanted Fluttershy to eventually die, ending the story on a somber note, but we split before anything was really decided on. I had this nebulous idea of a larger overarching plot and Fluttershy had to leave Ponyville to go become a part of it, and that’s what I began writing towards. More scenes and events slowly took shape along the way to build to that plot.

90% of the events of the story weren’t developed before I sat down to write them. I simply let Fluttershy do her thing and stumble forward in her attempts to survive. The other 10% were memorable scenes I thought of previously and tried to work the story towards. This is why the story imploded. Interesting and exciting things kept happening, but nothing was ever built up or foreshadowed so they came out of nowhere. I tried to fix this by adding backstory to some of the elements as they were introduced, but the damage was already done.

Let me quickly explain something before people start going crazy: I knew all of the major events of the story beforehand. Othershy’s larger role, the elements of harmony’s larger role, Celestia’s larger role, and how the elements and powers developed. I knew all those things were going to happen…after Books and I wrote part one. He and I never once went over the above events since we had very different ideas of where the story should go. None of these events were foreshadowed or work-shopped beforehand, I just started inserting them and the readers squinted their eyes in confusion.

This is why Everything is Fine is a disaster. It began small and personal and became this epic adventure so suddenly that everyone got whiplash. If I had spent any time at all foreshadowing the later events, THEN the story would have continued working. But because my ideas kept getting larger and larger as I kept writing, I never ended up incorporating the required elements and so we have the story we have. The original idea for Everything is Fine was never meant to go as far as it did.

So what did I learn from all of this? If you’re going to write a story, you better outline and edit the hell out of it before starting to write it. With The Eighth Day, my co-writer and I have spent years developing the universe, story, and characters to establish the necessary rules and elements. We’re still tweaking the story as we start to develop the scripts so everything flows together properly. I refuse to make the same mistakes I made with my previous work, and the story of The Eighth Day will not disappoint.

Thanks for reading! If you were or still are a fan of Everything is Fine, I will say officially I don’t think I am going to continue the story. With all the work I’m doing on The Eighth Day I just don’t have time to devote to it. If I were to go back to that fanfiction, I would probably start re-writing it to make it work better. Who knows, I may even incorporate some of the story elements in future games or stories.

Till next time!