Why Does It Work #1 – A Lot to Think About versus Too Far Gone to be Saved · 2:37am Dec 20th, 2014
First off, if you didn’t notice, I published a new story earlier today: Through Glass. If you haven’t read it yet, it is 2000 word story about Rarity helping a beautiful mare pick out the perfect hat in her boutique. It was my entry in the last write-off competition, and I think it got a fair bit better as a result of the feedback that I received.
Something a bit different tonight in terms of my review – I’m going to discuss two stories which have fairly similar ideas behind them, and talk about why one worked and one did not, and how the idea behind the story that didn’t work could be made to work much better.
The two stories in question are:
A Lot to Think About
by chronicLurker
Sad, Alternative UniverseIn the aftermath of the ruined wedding of Shining Armor and Princess Cadance, Celestia and several others maintain a vigil at Canterlot General Hospital.
Too Far Gone to be Saved
by 2006midnight
Sad, Slice of LifeCelestia is feeling down one evening and, noticing this, Luna tries to get her sister to open up to her. The resulting conversation breaks her heart. Both sisters wish they were able to help the other, but will they allow themselves to be helped?
Both are short stories just north of 1,000 words long wherein Celestia expresses her regret over some past decision – in the case of A Lot to Think About, regarding her lack of trust in Twilight in A Canterlot Wedding, and in Too Far Gone to be Saved, about Luna’s banishment.
I consider A Lot to Think About among the best very short stories I’ve read on the site, while I didn’t end up enjoying Too Far Gone to be Saved very much at all.
But why? What made one of them work so well for me while the other did not?
The first point is, I think, efficiency. In a story that is a mere thousand words long, you don’t want to waste time, and yet, Too Far Gone to be Saved starts out with a long paragraph – 151 words – of Luna waking up and getting dressed. This has no bearing on anything else in the story, and indeed, it takes us until 200 words into the story before Celestia even gets to speak, and the story is over halfway done by the time we find out that Celestia is even feeling bad.
Conversely, A Lot to Think About starts off with the source of Celestia’s guilt: ”You have a lot to think about. These seven words are repeated over and over again throughout the story like a mantra, and they are the crux of Celestia’s guilt; she feels guilty because she spoke down to Twilight, told her off like a child, and did not trust her when she tried to warn Celestia about Chrysalis. The entire story is focusing on the central point of the story, and thus, even though it has a slightly smaller word count, A Lot to Think About feels much longer because the core of the story has more weight given to it, with twice as many words being devoted to it.
The second major difference lies in the choice of the point of view character: Too Far Gone to Be Saved follows Luna, while A Lot to Think About follows around Celestia. The former, by detaching us from the character we are supposed to be connecting with, makes us more passive in our observations of her emotions, while A Lot to Think About puts us directly into Celestia’s head the whole time, allowing us to see how her guilt is warping her perception of the world around her. While not strictly necessary, I do feel like it lent much more power to A Lot to Think About.
However, I think the most important difference between the two stories, and what makes or breaks them, lies in showing versus telling - and not just the ordinary type of showing versus telling, either. Too Far Gone to be Saved doesn't tell us "Celestia is sad". Instead, it communicates via dialogue and body language. However, its weakness likes in that it entirely dependent on the characters themselves for their emotions – we are told by Luna and Celestia how guilty Celestia is feeling. We see Celestia cry, and hear Luna’s voice tremble.
But we are not shown why Celestia feels guilty – we are, ultimately, shown that she feels bad, and we are told via dialogue why she feels bad, but we aren’t shown what it is that lead to her guilt. While the story does not directly tell us “Celestia was sad”, it still feels as if we are being told because her sorrow ultimately feels a bit arbitrary – we were not shown what happened, nor are we really shown the consequences which are troubling her conscience. Thus, in the end, the story fails to evoke in us the same feeling of guilt that Celestia must be feeling.
A Lot to Think About shows us why Celestia is feeling guilty – we’re not only told about Celestia’s distress via her conversation with Luna, we aren't only told that Celestia's expression is haunted, but we hear Celestia repeating the fatal seven words over and over again in her head. We see the impact that Celestia's poor decision had on the world around her. We see all of Twilight’s friends and family at the hospital, exhausted, scared, waiting for Twilight Sparkle to wake up. We get allusions to the invasion of Canterlot being much worse than it was in canon, and that Luna feels guilty for failing to find Twilight Sparkle sooner, even though her intervention was apparently key to their victory in this reality. We see how things have become twisted from the original world to the new one we’ve been brought into, because Twilight, in this world, couldn’t escape from the caves on her own. And at the end, we find out that Cadance did not survive in this reality, as a final gut punch. Celestia’s guilt is justified by the world around her, and, thus, when we see her feeling guilty, when she talks about her guilt, we experience considerable empathy for a person who doesn’t even exist.
I think these differences point towards how the idea behind Too Far Gone to be Saved – the idea that even with Luna’s return, Celestia still feels guilty – could be made into a much stronger story. The first and second issues – tightening up the story by cutting out stuff which doesn’t contribute directly to the central idea of the story, and switching the point of view – are both fairly easy to understand, even if they take some doing to execute. The second may not even be necessary - showing us a character's guilt from outside can work well, and showing Luna's helplessness in helping Celestia might work, though it might also make it harder to express why Celestia is feeling guilty.
But the final issue is more complicated, and is frequently something that people struggle with. We frequently talk about showing versus telling, but it isn't always very clearly explained. Being shown the impact on Luna would reinforce the guilt we see expressed in body language and dialogue – Luna’s lack of familiarity with modern technology which is taken for granted, like newspapers or some simple bit of everyday technology like an oven, could easily inspire sorrow in Celestia. Guards being wary of Luna, the citizens of Equestria being even more prone to thinking of them as Celestia and Luna than they were in the past... if they even think of Luna at all. A newspaper could easily be used not only as an avenue for guilt because of Luna's lack of familiarity with it, but it could easily refer to “the Princess” as if Luna doesn’t even exist. These are the sorts of things which can inspire guilt and show us that things are wrong, that Celestia's decisions had a real negative impact on her sister, and that Celestia has a reason to be sad. Dialogue is a good thing, as are character emotes, but showing the impact of our decisions on the world around us can really help drive these things home and invoke the same sort of feelings in us as it is invoking in the characters – and in so doing, make the story much more effective.
Telling the audience that a character is sad is the bottom tier of telling. Showing us that a charater is sad via dialogue and body language is more effective, but we are still ultimately disconnected from them, and can feel a bit robotic. After all, the characters in our stories are only saying and doing what we, the writer, are making they say and do. It is all too easy to end up with characters feeling like puppets on strings, miming actions for us rather than actually feeling like people.
Showing us what it was that inspired the feeling in the character is a very effective way to reinforce the showing via dialogue and body language, and indeed, can often substitute for them – if you have ever read about some horrible event and got a terrible feeling in the pit of your stomach, you know this feeling. By showing the audience the cause of their emotion, it gives the audience a taste of the character’s life which helps them empathize with them, and in so doing, allows the story to have a much greater impact on the audience and evoke much more emotion from them.
I hope that this was interesting to you, and maybe helped some of you understand what it is about these stories which differentiates their impact on the audience, as well as granting an additional glimpse into the multilayered realm of showing versus telling. If you think I got anything wrong - or have an idea for something else that would be worth examining in this fashion - feel free to let me know in the comments below
Very interesting, TD. Thank you for doing this analysis.
Very interesting observations.
As someone who often has a hard time doing showing vs telling, this is a very important blog post to me. When writing, it's so easy to just plainly state what the characters are feeling, or showing a little bit of what they look like when feeling said thing, but to really capture an emotion as powerful as grief or regret, you really need more than that to portray it correctly.
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I'm glad you found it interesting! I feel like a lot of the time, people saying to show and not to tell know exactly what they're saying, but it is pretty maddeningly vague in many ways.
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Yeah, creating emotional resonance in the audience is really important if you want people to invest in your stories. It isn't easy to do, though, and it isn't an easy problem to fix because it oftentimes goes down to the very core of what you're doing.
I appreciate you breaking fomr. This sort of analysis is really worthwhile.