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Aegis Shield


Also known as "TtheWriter" on youtube, if you're into Dungeons and Dragons stuff. :3

More Blog Posts223

Apr
17th
2014

Getting Your Story Read 102 · 2:09am Apr 17th, 2014

Hello All, time for another round of "Getting Your Story Read". Last time we covered tropes, OCs, formatting, and proper story summaries. If you missed the first one, please head over to my profile and click the link for "Getting Your Story Read 101". It's over on the right somewhere. Anyhoo, today I thought we'd address some things I've been seeing more and more lately. The first, I call "Grocery Listing".

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"Grocery Listing" happens when the story jolts to a halt to describe an object, event or character in mind-boggling detail-- to the story's detriment. This means that the flow of the story stops, the dialogue stops, and the character's freeze in place while said thing is being brought to the reader's attention. It's just detail after detail, adjective after adjective, color after form after shape. It could be a run-on sentence, or a whole paragraph devoted to said thing. Either way, it interrupts your story's flow and is bad for the reader's general state of mind. Its sometimes okay to open a CHAPTER with this, but once you have even mentioned a character or event it needs to stop. Let's do an example:

GROCERY LISTING: Princess Celestia stepped out of her room. She was brushed to a sheen and wearing her usual royal trappings. The usual royal smile graced her lips, and her ever-flowing mane whipped around in the unseen solar winds of the universe. Her golden horse-shoes were shining like the sun, and she could see her face in the vase across from the double doors of her room.

BETTER: Princess Celestia stepped out of her royal chambers once she'd groomed her fur to a sheen. The guards smiled at her in all her royal trappings as she took in her morning 'cleansing breath'. She always did that when she started a new day, once she'd donned her golden horseshoes. Then it was off to royal business. The guards on either side of the doorway followed as they always did.

Discussion: We the readers know what Celestia looks like. There's no need to stop and describe her. She must remain ever-in-motion, even as your describing her royal beauty and grooming. Also, we don't particularly care about the shiny vase across from her room, unless it comes into play later in the story. This extra information is called "Dead Wood."
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"Dead Wood" is when a writer includes things in the text that are neither relevant to the story, nor of particular interest to the reader. It can make a concise and interesting story long and drawling, without enough relevant content to keep it interesting ("Slice of Life" being the exception to this, most times). This can range from events that happen before the "inciting incident" (that is, the event that jolts the story into motion), or things that happen directly after the falling action (that is, events that happen after all interesting things are over). Dead Wood can be hard to spot sometimes, but let's do some obvious examples to show what I mean:

DEAD WOOD:
1. Rainbow Dash gets out of bed, brushes her mane and teeth.
2. Rainbow Dash contemplates what to do with her day over breakfast.
3. Deciding to go see Applejack, she makes her way out only to find a stormy sky.
4. Calling her weather team buddies, she helps them push it to the edge of town over the apple orchards.
5. Rainbow Dash is almost hit with a bolt of lightning, and crash lands not only through the barn, but straight into Mac.
6. With both the barn and Big Mac wrecked, Applejack is furious with Rainbow Dash and yells at her.
7. To avoid losing her job and her public name, Rainbow Dash agrees to work off her debt via farm labor.
8. Rainbow Dash works off her debt for Big Mac's medical bills and the monies to rebuild the barn.
9. Rainbow Dash starts to fall for the slow and easy mentality of farm life, and gets a stronger body for her trouble.
10. Rainbow Dash leaves the farm debt free, with Applejack's respect for truly following through on her word.

BETTER:
5. Rainbow Dash is almost hit with a bolt of lightning, and crash lands not only through the barn, but straight into Mac.
6. With both the barn and Big Mac wrecked, Applejack is furious with Rainbow Dash and yells at her.
7. To avoid losing her job and her public name, Rainbow Dash agrees to work off her debt via farm labor.
8. Rainbow Dash works off her debt for Big Mac's medical bills and the monies to rebuild the barn.
9. Rainbow Dash starts to fall for the slow and easy mentality of farm life, and gets a stronger body for her trouble.
10. Rainbow Dash leaves the farm debt free, with Applejack's respect for truly following through on her word.

Discussion: This sounds like the plot of a fairly standard "debt repaying" fiction, which can take place between any characters for any circumstances. But, you'll notice that items #1, #2, #3, and arguably even #4 are not relevant to the story's main idea! No one CARES what Rainbow does when she gets out of bed in the morning, nor what she has for breakfast, nor what she decides to do with her day. That could be 3,000 words of I-the-reader-do-not-care, which will seriously drain the credibility of the author in the reader's eyes. You must start your story at the first interesting bit. If you need to say what happened earlier, do so in a tight and orderly fashion, but unless you really need that detail-- leave it out! If you started a story where Rainbow Dash drops out of the sky, destroys the barn and throws Big Mac's back right out of whack, then you've got everyone's attention. Concise, tight-knit storytelling not only moves more quickly, but is less work for you, the author!

Finding Dead Wood is a sort of nip-and-tuck for a story. Its only instinct to start a story at the beginning, but in terms of reader interest and personal headaches, sometimes it's better just to start at the "first good part." Go through your own manuscripts and see, "does this really need to be here?" It doesn't have to be the beginning either. It could also be in the middle. Ever wonder why some epic adventurers never stop to use the bathroom, sleep, eat or other basic things? Because we the readers assume they do, it doesn't mean it needs to be in the story unless something relevant happens during said meal, nap, etc. Dead Wood also applies to characters sharing information. This is a big one. If a character has to relay a lot of information to other characters to bring them up to speed, don't bore the reader saying the same things over and over. Shorten it down, like so:

Example 1: Twilight spent the next hour or so giving the others a history of the sightings of the headless pony.
Example 2: It took Fluttershy six tries to truly get all the details out about the human she'd seen in the woods, she was so frightened!
Example 3: It took Celestia ages to make Luna finally insist on her eggs being made a certain way, the poor thing was so timid since she'd returned.

It saves time, effort, words, and headaches. If the reader knows it, only say it once and leave it at that. He or she is smart and can keep up with you, I promise!

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And that is all the wisdom I can think to share this time around. I hope you guys enjoyed and put some thought into the topics at hand. Laters! :)

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Comments ( 12 )

Never use two words, where one will do.

If you can omit it with out disrupting the story, do so.

I claim that it's important and hard to clearly see what's such dead wood and what's world building. While a vase doesn't have to take its role in the plot or a sub-plot, a rough description of the vase can give insight into the (fictional) culture of either its owner or origin. Hence, I wouldn't always agree that things have to be of a certain importance to be contained in a story. Of course, reasonable length is important to keep for what we want to tell as writers.

That is, to get some FimFic pop-stories out, I can fully second your advices. I always enjoy to read such blogs.

Comment posted by Chaodiurn deleted Apr 17th, 2014

Most of this can be intuited, but it's nice to have it put forwards in a cohesive, concise manner.

If I could be so bold as to suggest another such thing?

Tone Skipping.

You'd probably put this in more apt terms, but I'll to explain. It'd be like dropping a sudden sex joke in an E fic, or something noticeably lighter, darker, more sombre, more funny, whatever, than the established moment should allow for.

Not that a story can't have jarring moments of mood shift, no that's great. What makes it a flop is that the sudden shift goes by unacknowledged by the characters, who instantly return to the initial tone (having not really left at all) essentially making them all ignorant and/or OOC. Very toxic to disbelief, is yer avarage tone-skip.

I don't write, but I do read, and this was interesting. Should help me in critiques I guess. One more thing to try to look for.

Love ya Aegis. (I've listened to Seeing The Pattern 1 & 2, and The Return of Princess Nightmare Moon on youtube, read aloud by DeepReader313, and enjoyed them all quite thoroughly) (and I think I recall reading the first chapter or two of Seeing The Pattern 3, back in the day, before you discontinued it)

Honestly, I’m always glad when you put these up. I have serious doubts that I actually follow the advice all that much when I write, but there’s a sort of comfort in that if I’m doing it wrong, it’s not because I don’t know any better.

I've got a too much/too little problem with dead wood in my stories. Sometimes it's a good idea to wax poetic about the fine lines on the Pegasopian urn that has survived for centuries in the castle hallway, through the Diarchy War and Discord's destructive rampage until a small colt dashing down the hallway in a game of tag runs into its plinth and... then dashes onward, leaving the vase wobble a few times until it settled back down for another few centuries of dust-collection. That's dead wood with a purpose, but sometimes my purpose seems a little too ill-defined to be understandable.

D48

While you do have a good point as a general rule of thumb, there are times you do want to include grocery listing and deadwood to break up or slow down the flow of a story so I really think there should be a line in there somewhere saying not to cut too much out.

Grocery listing is a great way to emphasize when a character is locking up for one reason or another. For example, if Twilight is freaking out about something and Celestia walks in on her, it would be a good idea to grocery list on Celestia's appearance to mirror Twilight as her mind locks up in response to her mentor's appearance.

What you term deadwood can also be an important part of pacing and tone control to keep the story from rushing ahead too fast which can kill a story just as easily as too much description, especially for people like me who enjoy reading world building and other creative aspects of writing that do not directly tie into the plot.

The vase example seems pretty perfect. It doesn't have to be a major plot point, though, to be justified. It just needs to have a reason for it's existence or being noteworthy besides being Celestia's general bedroom/hall furniture. Is it a new acquisition, a beloved heirloom of the distant past, an annoying piece of junk, or does it have some special significance (is it a prank?)? If you can give it life, then go for it. For example, the reaction of a character to breaking something or it being a general eyesore to them represents and opportunity to talk about the character a little bit, perhaps without direct exposition.

It might be better, if less efficient, to write the whole story with all the excess detail and then go back and either trim it out or tie to it to other things and give it a purpose. Depends on what works for you as the author. That way you have a lot of material to work with and can decide later if the things mentioned have significance. The former method only works with a somewhat detailed plan for the story or a lot of desired details.

Useful! Thank you:twilightsmile:

Can you do a 101 for OC's?

Hmm. You know, you're right. I'm going to cut the whole before hand out of my story. It will help the feel of the story anyways.

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