Bradel Writes Reviews #6 – Hearth's Warming Edition · 1:58am Dec 28th, 2014
This week:
"A Canterlot Carol" by GhostOfHeraclitus
"The Homesteading" by bookplayer
"Yes, Apple Bloom, there *is* a Santa Hooves" by Lucky Dreams
"Dictated, Not Read" by device heretic
"A Wish for the Ages" by Pascoite
Here's hoping you've all had an enjoyable week, and a belated Merry Christmas to those as celebrate it. I've spent a good chunk of this week grading tests and reading ponyfic, as I'm wont to do. You can find some of the results below!
"A Canterlot Carol" by GhostOfHeraclitus
[Comedy] [Slice of Life]
The business of government never stops, and paperwork never rests, even on Hearthwarming. But this particular Hearthwarming, Cabinet Secretary and tea enthusiast Dotted Line plans to do his level best to see it, at least, take a break. His ponies need to go home to their families, and he, well, he has plans this Hearthwarming.
Technical
So Ghost has been insisting that he's a bad writer again, and I figured I'd re-read his Hearth's Warming story and try to pick apart what he does and doesn't do right. For Posterity. And what really jumps out at me with this story is the writing. Ghost has one of the more recognizable styles in pony fiction, and it's easy to see why. His prose is solid. It doesn't sparkle the way things by Skywriter, Cold in Gardez, and Obselescence occasionaly do, but it makes up for this with narrative voice.
Looking at "A Canterlot Carol", I think narrative voice is the true secret to Ghost's success—and not a thing I would advise other authors to imitate. It's a particular talent of his, and it does in fact mask some weaknesses. Most notably, his civil service characters are all fairly alike, here. They have their individual stories and motivations, but they also suffer from some amount of Sorkinesque characterization through hyper-competence. It's easy to miss this under the detailed physical descriptions and the constantly entertaining narrative voice, but it's there. Also, the scene with Mkali—while entertaining—leaves Dotted Line flat-footed a couple times with no particularly good justification, and feels less dynamic than it should because of this.
At the end of the day, though, what Ghost does right handily dominates the weaknesses here, which is probably why I've heard so little mention ever of these weaknesses. I'm guessing they're slipping under almost everyone's radar, and I think that's reasonable. Ghost remains one of the most readable and enjoyable authors in pony fiction.
4/5
Creative
Ghost draws a lot of comparisons to Terry Pratchett or occasionally Douglas Adams—which is, I believe, a product of his aforementioned narrative voice. The parallels between Ghost and high fantasy authors like Tolkien and Jordan is more often overlooked. I'm not quite sure which is the more appropriate comparison. I know for a fact that Ghost has way too many ideas about the world of ponies, and that little details like his mention of Qilin painting styles are backed up by an unreasonable amount of detail he's got locked up somewhere in his head. But he has the good sense not to spend 3000 words expounding on that detail, which puts him more in the mode of Jordan and other successful fantasy authors who tease with detail, suggesting a wealth of unexplored ideas just below the surface.
Put more succinctly, GhostOfHeraclitus is a world-building machine.
The non-world-buildy stuff going on in this story is still generally good. Scene selection is entertaining, and doesn't fall into the trap of being predictable—less because of actual scene choices and more because the narrative doesn't lend itself to boring scenes. Dotted Line gets some nice characterization through his interactions with the zebra ambassador Mkali and with Celestia, as well as through his oft-repeated plans for Hearth's Warming Eve. And the bits of amusing physical description and detail that litter the story bespeak an impish imagination that's just plain fun to read.
And I haven't even mentioned the fact that Ghost created the whole Equestrian Civil Service thing. Damn. No wonder I like Ghost so much.
5/5
Satisfaction
Coming back to this a year or two after reading it for the first time, I think this may still be the best Hearth's Warming story I've read. It's fun, dense, and it doesn't overstay its welcome. Ghost makes a nice promise early on with Dotted's plans for Hearth's Warming, and the payoff is wonderfully bittersweet. There aren't a lot of stories in this fandom I'm happy to re-read, but this one is an exception. This was at least my third time through (I know because I did an audio version of this story at some point), and I still enjoyed it.
I do have a bit of a problem with the Mkali conversation, as I mentioned earlier. It feels too stage managed to me—but at the same time, it's one of the best "true meaning of Hearth's Warming" type scenes I've encountered. Aside from the two little moments that bother me there, though, it's hard for me to find much fault with this story.
4.5/5
Overall
An absolutely fantastic Hearth's Warming story. And if you missed it, there's a coda too!
Recommended for: just go read it, already.
"The Homesteading" by bookplayer
[Romance] [Mystery]
For their first home together, Twilight and Applejack wanted a house close to Applejack's farm and big enough for Twilight's books, with a little something special besides. They settled on the perfect place, one of the oldest barns on Sweet Apple Acres, and had it converted into a comfortable house for their little family. But when strange things start happening just after they move in, Twilight finds that she has a mystery to solve before she can really call her dream house "home."
Technical
This is the first time I've reviewed an author twice (though I'll do it again before I'm done today), and there aren't a lot of surprises here. Technically speaking, "The Homesteading" is a lot like "Maiden's Day"—it has some good higher-level story work, but the prose could be improved. In a lot of places, I feel like the prose is better than what "Maiden's Day" offers, but there are still a few niggly issues like perspective switches and saidisms that I find occasionally distracting.
On the other hand, bookplayer does her usual good work getting inside characters' heads, and the narrative makes good use of try-fail cycles. The eventual payoff is solid, if perhaps a bit undermined by a hint of Pinkie-ex-machina that's reminiscent of "Swarm of the Century" (S1E10). Still, this is a solid piece of work.
3/5
Creative
Bookplayer explores more ideas of earth pony magic here. At its heart, though, this is a single-concept story with a narrow worldbuilding focus. The magic being discussed is interesting and mysterious, but it doesn't have the same sort of punch as the rituals from "Maiden's Day". There's some nice holiday-themed work backing this up, too, with new ideas of Hearth's Warming traditions offered up throughout.
I like bookplayer's choice of narrative here, as well. At it's heart, "The Homesteading" is a TwiJack shipping story, and while I like the idea of TwiJack, it doesn't lend itself to compelling drama. That's very much on display here. Twilight and Applejack never face any serious romantic difficulties. The reason I like the narrative choice is because it allows for an interesting shipping story even in the absence of the usual romantic hurdles.
3.5/5
Satisfaction
Unfortunately, this story never hit me as hard as I was hoping it would. I definitely enjoyed it, but I was hoping to get pulled along like I'd been with the last major bookplayer story I read, and that didn't happen. I think this is largely a matter of stakes. As I said, I like how bookplayer found a nice way to tell a TwiJack story that got away from the standard shipping tropes, but the flip side of this is that the conflict never really hooked me. I'm trying to leave the story unspoiled for anyone who wants to read it, and it is a good story, but apologies for being a bit arcane here. Some of the conflict issues probably stem from the way bookplayer frequently downplays the negative ramifications of Twilight failing to resolve things. Downplaying keeps both Twilight and Applejack in character, but it also kills a lot of the story's tension.
This is a good story, and I'm happy to have read it, but it's not going to suck you in the way some stories do.
2.5/5
Overall
Good Heartwarming-for-Hearth's-Warming, with a little bit of world-building thrown in on the side.
Recommended for: TwiJack fans and readers who like mysteries.
"Yes, Apple Bloom, there *is* a Santa Hooves" by Lucky Dreams
[Slice of Life]
"Dear Santa Hooves. My name is Apple Bloom, and I don't want presents for Hearth's Warming this year. I just want my cutie mark..."
Technical
It's hard to judge technique on this story, because so much of it is about presentation format. For anyone who doesn't know, "Yes, Apple Bloom..." is presented as a series of letters exchanged between the Cutie Mark Crusaders, Applejack, and various parties at the North Pole (with a Twilight Sparkle chaser). Prose and spelling here are often intentionally bad, but in most places the errors incurred serve as characterization of the letter-writers. I found it easy to suspend disbelief through almost all of the prose, and was only thrown out a couple times when ponies (or ungulates) who should know better made unlikely mistakes.
So what can I say about technique? Well, Lucky Dreams does a great job capturing character personality through the writing and the formatting here. That's the highlight of this piece. The idea is interesting enough to suck you in and pull you along through the first two-thirds of the story. Unfortunately, things fall down a little with the last few letters, which resolve the plot (yes, there's a plot) in a way that feels unearned. Technically, this boils down to: excellent characterization, interesting prose, weak story-telling.
2.5/5
Creative
If you're going to read "Yes, Apple Bloom...", read the scanned version. The text version loses 80% of this story's charm and originality. So let's just assume I'm working from the scanned version.
Although this is a single-conceit story, and in some respects a weakly put together one, Lucky Dreams hits a home run with creativity. The individual letters all have their own hoofwriting and stationary, and occasionally drawings and other added features, and each is very true to the character it's meant to come from. This piece is half story, half typography art project. Around the middle of "Yes, Apple Bloom...", I realized that this was the most immersed a pony story had made me in a very long time.
The creativity here is all about the presentation, but the presentation is worth the price of admission, and at just over 2500 words, the price of admission is already low.
5/5
Satisfaction
I adored this story, right up to the first letter from Santa Hooves, which resulted in such a tonal shift that it left me wondering if the North Pole hadn't experienced some sort of week-long civil war. Similarly, the friendship lesson resolution with Twilight,while more sensible when this was written back in Season 2, still felt very out of place—almost like Lucky Dreams was resolving a different story than the one I read.
I think the easiest way to handle my satisfaction with this story is to think of it in terms of promises. "Yes, Apple Bloom..." makes two big promises: awesome character-driven letters, and a resolution to the "Apple Bloom deserves an apology" plot. The first promise gets paid off well; I adore all the letters here. The second promise falls flat, and is the one major criticism I have with this story.
3/5
Overall
Treat it as an awesome art project, not a mediocre story.
Recommended for: anyone who isn't too uptight about their pony lit.
"Dictated, Not Read" by device heretic
[Sad] [Slice of Life]
Twilight composes a letter to the Princess about a terrible Hearth's Warming gift.
Also, Bradel doesn't do his research and accidentally picks a non-Hearth's-Warming story on the basis of its description.
Technical
Structurally, I have some big problems with this story. There are timing issues to the narrative that should have been ironed out in the first editing pass. Twilight's letter has no paragraphing, which makes for some annoying reading. There are chunks of exposition. Saidisms and word chaff show up frequently. Characterization for both Twilight and Celestia feels off—though I don't know how strongly I want to criticise the story on that point, because characterization is still strong and compelling, even if it seems to swim against the currents of canon. This story could, and should, have been executed better.
And from a technical standpoint, I don't know how much more there is to say. It clocks in just over 3200 words, which doesn't give it much time for doing higher-level story tasks like establishing a narrative, using try-fail cycles, things like that. There's not much to go on here except prose and basic structure, and both could be improved. Still, as harsh as I'm being, I have to acknowledge that I found the story powerful and compelling, and fairly easy to read despite some basic technical faults. One reason for that is pacing, and pacing is good here. Another is that device heretic is a fairly good writer, once you dig past the prose here. He does a good job capturing Twilight's pain, and that makes this a much easier read.
2/5
Creative
This story falls squarely into a genre I don't like: reaction-to-sad-event stories. It always bothers me when authors go for the cheap impact of telling their reader something sad happened, and letting the reader bring most of the emotional impact to the story. Thankfully, "Dictated, Not Read" is a better-than-average exponent of this genre, and it ties itself to an initial idea (the compass Twilight received as a gift from her parents) that's loaded with enough layers of meaning to make me deeply uncomfortable reading this story. That's something I like, and it's a lot truer to the experience of grieving than a story that revels in sadness glurge. The ideas in this story feel unfinished and unrefined, in an organic and affecting way.
This is a small story, without a lot of room to work on the creative side, but it's also relatable in a way few stories in this fandom have been for me. If anything, "Dictated, Not Read" makes me happy device heretic stopped writing in this fandom. His strengths seem better fitted for telling original stories, and I've heard that this is what he's tried doing over the last few years. Good. I'd love to see what he can do when he doesn't try to tie himself down to someone else's world.
3.5/5
Satisfaction
Honestly, I'm not sure how I feel about this story. I'm rather put out by the technical issues, less because they hurt the story and more as a matter of professionalism. I enjoyed the story just fine, in spite of them, but there's no excuse for many of them to be here. I'm genuinely bothered by the characterization of both Twilight and Celestia, neither of whom seem very consistent with what canon has done with them—but they're each of them compelling within the story. And in the end, this story hit me hard. "Dictated, Not Read" stops being about Twilight in a hurry, and starts being about anyone who's ever felt like the people around them can't understand them.
My relationship with one of my grandmothers is very much like the relationship described here, and it results in some powerful feelings that can be difficult to navigate. She deals with the world in a very different way from me, wants and enjoys very different things from me, and tries to show her affection for me in ways that have a lot of value to her, but very little value to me (except through pure sentiment). It's hard for me to put into words how that sort of broken interpersonal connection makes me feel—and yet it's exactly what device heretic manages to capture in this story.
This story makes me tense and uncomortable, but it refuses to leave me alone, even well after I've read it. I think I can be pretty satisfied with that.
4/5
Overall
Rough and frustrating in places, but powerfully affecting despite its faults.
Recommended for: fans of Ender's Game, readers willing to tolerate some sloppiness.
"A Wish for the Ages" by Pascoite
[Sad] [Slice of Life]
A special moment between sisters happened that first Hearth's Warming Eve. Star Swirl the Bearded saw the significance, but too late. Another will happen this year, and with his guidance, maybe Twilight Sparkle can make this the best Hearth's Warming Rarity ever had.
Technical
Again, this is a mystery story, so I'm going to do my best to avoid spoilers. A lot of technical work here is being done with foreshadowing—lots of details that are easily skipped over prove to be very important toward the end of the story, and I recommend taking a second look at the first few sections once you've already read through to get the full effect. The story paralleling here, while both telegraphed and narratively important, is also nice to read.
The prose in "A Wish for the Ages" is solid, if a bit pedestrian. This is a good writer crafting a good story, but it doesn't strive for more than that. One point of particular note is Pascoite's use of detail and metaphor to concretize the writing. As far as imagery, though, nothing ever leaps off the page. The language engages, but never fascinates.
Unfortunately, I feel like there's also a major structural weakness with this story. While the foreshadowing is very nice, it's never given a whole lot of background to attach to. The reader knows something is going on, but not what, and the stakes involved here remain elusive. While this helps to preserve the mystery without playing it out too early, it also hurts my ability to engage with the story because I'm not given a concrete reason to care about what's happening. Because of this, the story never seems to fire on all cylinders until you've already read it once—at which point the mystery is no longer in effect and the reader can recognize both the foreshadowing and the stakes.
3/5
Creative
Pascoite crams quite a bit of interesting worldbuilding in 5500 words, including historical elaboration, new magic, and an element or two I won't mention. Some of this I've never seen used in pony fiction, and it's exciting to run across it here. I doubt there's a whole lot I can say on this front without running the risk of spoiling the mystery Pascoite sets up, though.
Characters feel natural, though not especially organic—the portrayals here are about what you'd expect from following canon. Scene selection isn't terribly interesting and results in a bit of talking-head syndrome. The strong points for creativity are really the ideas on display, and there are a fair number of them.
3.5/5
Satisfaction
Like "The Homesteading", this is a mystery story, and like "The Homesteading", it's good despite the fact that it falls down somewhat in execution. I spent the first half of "A Wish for the Ages" feeling a little bored because the story didn't seem to be going anywhere, but once I hit the reveal, it became a lot more interesting. It still leaves me with a mixed reaction, though—again, much like "The Homesteading"—because while I really enjoy the overall arc of the story, it's hard for me to overlook that there are stretches where I felt like I was reading something that didn't have a whole lot of direction.
3/5
Overall
Some cool ideas and interesting technical work, though not the most compelling delivery.
Recommended for: people who have the time to read it twice.
You know, I've heard a lot of people talk about how brilliant Device Heretic was, but most of the time, critics seem to find big, glaring flaws with his work--for example, here.
I'm considering listening to the audiobook of Eternal. Can anyone help me out here? Is it worth getting into?
2682829
Eternal drags horribly for the first 35,000 words or so. Which is kind of hard to take. That said, it paid off in spades for me, by the end. Though I did read it just as I was getting into the fandom, before I developed some of my current sensibilities.
It's a tough call. If you've got time, I think it's worth getting into. But it's not easy going. I'm hoping to re-read it at some point for another one of my long reviews, but that's still a ways off. DH could do some really good stuff, but he's also one of the fandom's worst offenders in terms of needing to pare down his writing.
2682843
Hrm, alright. Thx.
2682829
2682843
Eternal has always been this mountain to me, that I look at every once in a while, thinking "yeah... maybe some day".
I haven't really read much else by Device Heretic though, nothing besides the Romance Reports sequel he wrote, in which case I found the quality over time to be somewhat like an upsidedown checkmark. Then again, that is a single case, so who knows.
Still, for now I remain at "yeah... maybe some day"
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2682843
2682829
For what it is worth, I enjoyed Eternal greatly (it is one of the few long stories I've read twice) but it is probably true that it is too long and a bit overhyped. That isn't to say it isn't good - it is - but it isn't the most brilliant thing ever.
A lot of people recommend it, though, and I think that they do so for a reason.
2682829
Honestly, I suspect that the reason that people notice these flaws is precisely because he writes such interesting stories. The ideas he has are very good, and the stories he wrote were good, but they weren't perfect, and thus the flaws in his writing become much more obvious because the greatness of his work contrasts with the not-so-greatness of his writing.
It is, I suspect, the same reason that the poor writing in the Harry Potter books - particularly in the first and second books, along with the sixth book's pacing issues - sticks out to me so much. When someone writes something which is only okay, okay writing tends to go unnoticed. If you write something which is very good, then you're much more likely to notice the inconsistent qualities of the work when you look at it with a critical eye - it sticks out that much more by contrast.
I think that's why critics notice these issues in his stories. Though I think in terms of actual impact on me and my thoughts about the characters and their relationships (or the lack thereof), Just Words was the best of the lot. It, too, has issues, but I forgive them.
I think there is some sort of quality of goodness to stories which makes flaws more forgivable, and I think he's an example of a writer who you want to forgive. I do, at least, seeing as I have two of his stories on my recommended for others shelf.
2683184
Actually, as I put together a review on "Dictated, Not Read" I felt the opposite of this. My initial inclination was to just pan the thing, because of its technical issues. I really do find the timing confusion nearly unforgivable. I just can't conceive of any excuse for it. It's very confusing, very distracting, serves no positive function, and is easily fixed. I'm not usually a stickler for technique, but there are bits of this story that feel so amateurish it's hard for me to take it seriously.
The fact that the story was interesting—and the degree to which it affected me—were much later realizations for me, and managed to salvage what would otherwise be a wreck. So for me, this wasn't a matter of "DH's writing isn't up to the quality of his story," but instead "DH's story somehow managed to be a heck of a lot better than his writing". And if memory serves, that was my reaction to Eternal as well. If it hadn't come highly recommended, I would have abandoned ship a few chapters in. As it was, I stuck it out, and I felt very, very satisfied by the end. But it took a long time for him to suck me in far enough that I could enjoy the good things he was doing rather than being distracted by the weaknesses.
So for me, anyway, I don't think my criticism of DH's stories is a reaction to the disconnect. The criticism is actually the point I start from. What follows is a pronounced tendency toward pleasant surprise.
2683202
Timing confusion? Do you mean "when the story is taking place", as in, "When Twilight is dictating the letter to Celestia?" Or do you mean confusing pacing?
I do agree that the writing has problems. He does use a lot of saidisms, though most of them at least made sense; I'm not sure that "exclaimed" and "interrupted" were necessary, though, but that was part of a larger issue with him having general issues with telling.
This, for example, is far more offensive to me than the saidisms, because we already know this. We don't need to be told, the letter did this. However, I didn't even notice it until I went through to pick it apart, even though I obviously read the line, because it slid past me because I was taken up by the flow of the story. Going through with a critical eye, it is obvious that the latter portion of the story has a lot of low-level issues with telling, wordiness, and word choice.
The lack of white between the paragraphs in the letter is strange as well, and honestly, I suspect that flaw is probably what was so off-putting; screwing up the rest of the stuff wouldn't have been nearly as noticeable if that had been properly formatted. I didn't really notice the poor quality of much of the text because I was too involved in the story to care. If the incorrect paragraph formatting was offputting enough to pull you out of the story by the end of the story about the compass, you were probably in trouble for the rest of the story, because the quality of the prose isn't the best here.
That being said, liking something in spite of its flaws is oftentimes a sign that you have something really strong in there, at least in my eyes.
Looking over Just Words, he uses quite a lot of saidisms in there as well - but almost all of them come out of Twilight, with Celestia saying almost all of her lines while Twilight roars, rages, moans, and murmurs. She replies at one point, and she whispers at one point - which quite frankly, she shouldn't have. I think having her say all of her lines while Twilight acts very emotional sets up a nice contrast between the two halves of the conversation, where Celestia is cool, calm, and composed. It is an effective means of setting up the contrast between the two characters which I'm not sure is even intentional on his part, but it works.
Incidentally, a question:
Do you think that the letter should have been spaced out with blank lines between paragraphs, or should have used indentations to make it look more like a letter, in contrast to the rest of the story?
It would have made the letter inconsistent with the formatting of the rest of the story had he done so, but it also would have looked more like what I think of when I think of a letter.
Did you seriously imply that Robert Jordan is better than Terry Pratchett at something? From what I've read of their respective series I find this very hard to believe.
2682843
I had the exact opposite reaction to Eternal, where I was intrigued at the start but very much ready for it to end by the time I was in the final third of the story. It was a rare example of a character study where I felt like I was getting too much of a good thing.
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I implied that Robert Jordan is good at something distinct from what Pratchett is good at—which, to be fair, is supposition, because I was stupid and tried starting Discworld at the beginning, and The Color of Magic isn't really the kind of thing which encourages you to fall in love with the author. I'm pretty comfortable saying that Robert Jordan did a number of things better than Douglas Adams, though. And I expect I'd be pretty comfortable saying he did some things better than Pratchett, too, if I knew Pratchett better. Different writers have different strengths, and I think Jordan is pretty widely acknowledged as knowing how to write battle tactics/strategy better than most people, given his background.
What I'm talking about here, though, I can't say how well Terry Pratchett does, but it's always stood out to me as one of Jordan's great strengths as a writer. He has a talent for creating the illusion of depth in his world with careful placement of details. If I remember correctly, he had more pages of notes when he died than pages he'd written in his Wheel of Time series, so he probably did share in the same worldbuilder's disease Tolkien had. But Tolkien always seemed to go with a more "beat you over the head with the history of the dunedain" approach that wasn't conducive to good writing. Jordan knew when to drop cultural flavor into a scene, almost like using shadows to give a picture the illusion of depth. Whether the depth was really there remained immaterial; the skill was in the implication.
Maybe Pratchett does that as well. It's not my experience of him from The Color of Magic, though, which is more Tolkienesquely heavy-handed. And it's been a long time since I read Good Omens, but I don't particularly remember that book using the shaded world-building approach I loved in Jordan either. So my guess would be that yes, I do think Robert Jordan was better at that than Terry Pratchett is. I can't be sure, having barely scratched the surface with Pratchett, but it seems hard for me to believe that writers wouldn't all come with their own specialized toolboxes that left some better and certain skills and some better at others, though.
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Pratchett, to my mind, isn't really much of a worldbuilder, the same way writers like Tolkein or Jordan (at least as you are describing. I have never read any of Jordan's work, myself.) are. He is a character builder, and the world forms around these characters he builds. Ankh-Morpok was just a stock wretched hive in Colour of Magic, but the Vetinari, and Sam Vimes, and Carrot, and the like all began developing, and the other citizens of the city around them. This made Ankh-Morpok in a way that now amount of description and history could have done, but it does leave a lot of information about the city itself to the readers imagination. And this goes for the whole of the Discworld. We know it from the characters, not because of the lore. I actually did the same thing you did, and started with Colour of Magic, and I kept going largely because Discworld came so highly recommended, and because I loved Good Omens to pieces. But it's not a good place to start, no. And I think Ghost does much the same thing, though he is better at the actual background building than Pratchett. Or maybe he just speeds it up. Pratchett let his world grow over a long period of time, but Ghost doesn't necessarily have that luxury. Nonetheless, his Civil Service is largely defined by the strength of it's members, much like how Discworld is defined by the strength of it's inhabitants.
2683184 let's see if I can synthesize this with thoughts I've had in the past:
It seems to me there are four levels are areas of writing we can look at in the story:
1: Grammar and syntax and spelling: simplest, lowest level. Any writer who is worth their salt shouldn't be messing up here, unless it's intentionally.
2. Writing style: how you put words together on the page, basically. This is the level at which authors get or display their flavor. For example skywriter has an amazing vocabulary. GoH has the wonderful pratchett-esque prose Bradel discussed. The author's voice, basically. I'd say I'm fairly solid here, and in fact in all of the categories except the last one I'll introduce, where I stink.
3: Creative/Story idea: what the story is actually about. Big story with great ideas an interesting world building and compelling characters, etc. is going to be an interesting read. Titanium Dragon, it sounds like Harry Potter is a great example of being very solid in this category. A Pony example of a story with great creative strength would be StereoSub's The Eternal Song. Stories that excel in this and the previous catagories can be popular in spite of being weak in the last, hardest category:
4actually putting the story together. This is the hardest part that takes the most time, but has a large pay off if done well. This is things like knowing when to show versus tell, who's perspective to use and what tense to use, building effective scenes and knowing which information to present and which not to, scene choice and order, building cohesive themes, narrative arcs, etc. this is where I stink because I'm too lazy and my stories are too short. This is where skywriter thrives in stories like How to Pull a Unicorn Tooth
Anyway, to pull this altogether, I get the feeling that JK rolling and device heretic both struggle a little bit with this last category?
Thanks for reading this sloppily written and overly long comment I put together on my phone
2683717
Where would you put stuff like pacing, or making sure that foreshadowing is set up and pays off properly? Is that Category 4?
2684048 Definitely. For example, it sounds like people love the pay off of great powerful writing in Eternal, but are put off by the arduous pacing of it. Forshadowing is another thing that takes time, love, and skill to set up properly, so that it is neither too obvious nor too obscure, but rather teases the observant reader and makes them beg for more.
2683717
Holy crap, thank you for this. I've had "upgrading the HITEC rating scale" simmering on a back burner for a while. In a previous comment thread here Bradel and/or Present Perfect suggested changing the acronym to HORSE; and your idea of Style as a major component of writing might just be the missing piece I needed. Consistency wasn't turning out so useful in practice, and measuring the strength of the narrative voice/engagingness of the prose is a good thing.
(That would take it from (Hook, Idea, Technical, Execution, Consistency) to (Hook, Originality, R__, Style, Execution), with Technical turning into an R; Readability seems like an obvious choice but I'm not quite sure it's what I'm going for.)
2684086 Glad to be of assistance! ^_^
Now finish rererererereediting Cowled Changelings
2683403
I admit that I'm highly biased in this regard. I read half the Discworld catalog in high school, mostly picking the books at random from the library, and my memories of the series are very fond. I only just recently read The Eye of the World, a book with a boring, dull protagonist, terrible pacing, and too many details nicked from Lord of the Rings. I'll try and continue the series later, but not only did Jordan start off on a worse foot than Pratchett did, but The Wheel of Time's continuity means you have to read them all in order, so you can't really avoid the awful first installment.
I don't think it used to be like that but fimfiction often screws up paragraphing in italic text and Knighty has redone the site a few times since Device was around. I don't think you should penalise on that.
2683717
I personally use a scale a bit more abstractly defined[1], with a lot of leeway on how I actually rate it:
I cut my rating up in three parts, with a kind-of hierarchy.
1: Universe
This describes the characters and environments; how "correct" they feel, and how they relate to one another.
2: Arrangement
This describes the unfolding of the story itself. I.E. how the universe is used in this instance. Plot and story structure goes here.
3: Conveyance
Biggest and most important part, conveyance describes how well the above parts are actually getting across to the reader. Stuff like narrator voice, grammars and such go here.
It is important to notice that both Universe and Arrangement are limited by Conveyance. Since death of the author is a thing, a a character/plot point/etc. is always what the reader interprets it as.
And that's my simple silly idea on rating stories[2]. I haven't really thought through it that well though, so I'm not so sure how well it would actually work.
[1] And perhaps less useful.
[2] For now, at the very least.
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I've been thinking about writing a post about this sort of thing. I personally feel that there are three "major" levels:
1) Technical. This is grammar, spelling, the construction of your sentences, all the low-level stuff. The major defining factor of this level is that it is the sort of thing which is easiest to correct - you are, fundamentally, changing words, sentences, or even paragraphs, but it is the sort of low-level changes which are easy to implement.
2) Structural. This is a higher level, and relates to the flow, pacing, and construction of your story. Screwing this up oftentimes requires you to rewrite entire scenes, restructuring them to make them work better, rearranging and cutting and adding large chunks of content to make things work.
3) Concept. This is the highest level, what might be called the "ideas" behind your story: the characters, the central concept and theme, the overall shape of the story. Screwing this up often requires you to rewrite the entire story.
2683403
The biggest problem with The Wheel of Time comes about 2/3rds of the way into the series with Perrin's sidequest and the portion of the story that ends up dragging over several books, not just with Perrin but with the pacing of the work in general because he had put so many balls into the air it simply was no longer feasible to keep juggling them all and keep the story flowing at a reasonable pace.
Though Perrin himself was a problem simply because he was much less interesting than Rand and Mat, and his sidequest felt less significant and less interesting than the things Mat got up to. Rand himself is a somewhat lesser issue; he is very interesting at times, but he also kind of fades in and out as a character, and ends up feeling a bit obligatory sometimes. Rand being in one of his less-interesting phases while Perrin is being featured plus the pacing issues made me fairly unhappy with several books.
2684112
If you didn't like The Eye of the World, you're not going to like the rest of the series.
2684086
I honestly don't feel like the HITEC rating scale is very useful, as most of the information could be more simply represented by giving a numerical value to each of the letters instead of the present attempt at balancing things out of 100. A 20/20/20/20/20 story could be great or consistently bad, and the system would be incapable of distinguishing between them; likewise, a story which is, say, 25/0/25/25/25 isn't really saying much other than "the rest was fine, but the idea here sucked/was ripped off/whatever".
2685263
When is Rand interesting? The only thing that I noticed about him was his distress at and denial of the news that he was a foundling. Other than that, he is every other nascent chosen one ever written, ever. Nynaeve was by far the most interesting protagonist in the book and naturally she got much less focus than the three stooges.
2685318
Nynaeve gets a lot more focus as the series goes on; she's one of the oh... eight principle protagonists? Something like that.
Rand is mostly interesting for what happens to him and his reactions to events and suchlike, and for the reaction of other people to him, more so than he is as an actual person; he is a semi-generic chosen one in some respects ,which is probably why Mat is so much more interesting that he is; Mat ends up the most interesting of the three, oddly, while Perrin ends up the least, which isn't really what I would have expected at all from the first book but that's how it ends up going. That is really the main problem with Rand, to be honest; he is mostly interesting because of all that surrounds him, and while he does have some interesting attributes (his compunctions about violence against women, the Dragon speaking to him in his head, the way he fights) when something interesting isn't happening to him, he doesn't have a whole lot else to prop him up, I think. Reading about the Aes Sedai trying to figure out how to deal with him and what he is doing is very interesting, for instance, as are some of his interactions with the Aiel, but once things kind of get figured out, the whole thing ends up stagnating.
Which is probably why he ends up not being the central on-screen protagonist for a good chunk of the series, honestly; really, I think a lot of that is an example of the failure of the second kind, because Rand does a lot of interesting plot stuff and then kind of doesn't for a while, and only really becomes interesting again when he starts again. The entire third book, for instance, is written from other characters' points of view, with Rand only really showing up at the very start and very end, and while it worked there, it doesn't work nearly as well later on in the series when Rand isn't doing anything super-interesting (or causing super-interesting things to happen).
I should really respond to some of the other comments in this thread, but since I'm up early and there's a "Wheel of Time" discussion going on, I think I'll jump in there.
I definitely agree with 2685318 that Rand is uninteresting most of the time, but I often see this as a failure on Jordan's part to actually notice what made him a compelling character, because there are times he is one. They're just, unfortunately, few and far between. For me, the core of Rand being interesting was always his intelligence, which gets hinted at repeatedly and explored very rarely. He's best when he's putting pieces together and solving intractable problems, like what to do about the taint or how to root Graendal out of Natrin's Barrow. I get the feeling Jordan lumped his intelligence in with the rest of his abilities and became afraid to show any of it outside story climaxes for fear of making him unrelatably superhuman, and what we wound up with was 6-8 books of him moping around feeling sorry for himself when, frankly, I was happier to read almost everyone else's story.
And I agree with 2685263 that the stretch from book 8 to 10 (arguably including 7 and/or 11, too) mark a low point for the series. A lot of long-time fans stopped reading in there, and it's hard to blame them much. Rand is in the middle of his most boring phase, Perrin's plotline has ground to a halt, and at least for my own part, I never found Elayne's solo plotline toward the end of the series interesting. Add in the fact that Mat goes AWOL in book 8 and Egwene does the same in book 9, and it feels fair to say that the whole series nearly collapses around this time. I dearly love the series, but it's pretty obvious that Jordan started to lose the plot under the weight of all the threads he put into play, and I've frequently thought that having Brandon Sanderson come in to close up the end of the series may have been the best anyone could have hoped for. I could literally go on for hours about this stuff.
I tend to disagree with Perrin being the least interesting main character, though. He draws the short straw during the worst leg of the series, certainly, but I think he winds up being interesting far more often than Rand or Elayne over the long run. Everyone seems to agree that Mat is the high point of the series (and a fabulously unreliable narrator), and I tend to like Egwene about as much, though I think that may be a minority opinion. (Nynaeve... ought to count as a main character, but she never really gets a chance to pull an A-roll solo story. She spends a lot of time playing co-lead or guest star. It's hard for me to know how to classify her. I think I'd cap principal protagonists at six, though. Nobody else is ever in danger of really leading a storyline, though a lot of them take very prominent secondary roles.)
I think I agree with the sentiment that if you don't like The Eye of the World, you're not going to enjoy the series as a whole, though. In my opinion, it gets better from there for a while and peaks around books 4-6, then falls into a hole, and climbs back out to peak again in 12-14 and end on a high note. But the first one is a pretty good indication of median quality and Robert Jordan's talents and weaknesses. If you go in expecting lots of twists on the hero myth, you're going to be disappointed. It never tried to be that—it just wanted to be a deep retelling of that myth, and for my money it executes that better than any other piece of epic fantasy I know of. It's a core work of the genre, like the collected Tolkien. I got into it when I was still pretty young, which may be why it holds so much continuing appeal for me. It was my first exposure to a lot of standard tropes—or if not my first exposure, my first competent exposure after slogging through authors like Eddings, Goodkind, Brooks, and arguably Tolkien. Tolkien does surprisingly little Hero's Journey in my mind, though, which is why I think epic fantasy always had room for someone else to come along and do it well.
2685400
One interesting thing about the series from a meta perspective, though it is a bit of a spoiler, is the fact that the series actually explains that the Hero with a Thousand Faces is actually a result of the Pattern repeating things with various variations over time; things are never the same twice, but similar people are thrown into similar circumstances time and again. The whole wheel of reincarnation thing actually plays with the idea that the story is generic, because it has happened before, in-world, with different people and different variations, but they were, deep down inside, the same people. The figurine that one of the Forsaken plays with at one point, idly wondering if it was a vague memory of Rand's last incarnation, even before he was The Dragon, or whether it was an echo of this incarnation of Rand, was one of the more interesting moments in the series for me. I really liked that, and I liked the ideas he played with as far as that went.
I do agree that Rand's intelligence and problem-solving is what allows him to be interesting when he is interesting as himself and for himself, rather than as something which is made interesting via the reactions of others.
After Perrin's very long slog, that probably is the second-least interesting of the lot, and the timing on that was unfortunate as well. I think it sticks out less to people because it at least feels more like it is supposed to be important, whereas I think one of the flaws with Perrin's thing was that it felt like something of a lesser rehash of some of the things other characters had done, with lower stakes.
I do agree that Egwene's plot with the Aes Sedai was very interesting, and I suspect the fact that we kept getting pulled away from that to look at other, less interesting things also probably was another reason that those plot threads were so bothersome, because we wanted to get back to reading the threads which were actually entertaining and thus those seemed all the more dull by comparison.
2682829 2682843 Oh no! The Eternal War!
I've often heard people say Eternal starts slow, but I don't know why. What is it people object to: the Fluttermac wedding, or the variations-on-a-theme "Sweet herbal tea pooled in the cup" section? If you don't like the tea-party repetitions and variations, you're not the kind of person who will like Eternal*.
* or other literature
2685263
I think that's the purpose of the system: To avoid "rating" a story, only pointing out its relative strengths and weaknesses. Such a rating is more useful to a writer, but not useful to a reader.
2685627
I don't really want to dig back into it for the purposes of commenting, since like I said, I expect I'll come back to this well for a long review at some point and take my time picking these things apart in my head.
That said, my feeling was that it just dragged horribly. The writing was loose and ugly, and didn't really go anywhere for a long time. If anything, that probably falls into your "people who don't like Eternal or other literature" category, because my experiences with things that get called literary fiction tend to be pretty negative. Some of that is my own fault, I'm sure, and some of it is the fault of where that genre seems to have gone in the last 30-50 years. Or maybe just individual tolerance of some of what happens in that genre? Steinbeck, I can really get behind. Truly great books like "Pride and Prejudice" I'm all for (though I suspect Austen never meant for it to be high literature, however it's considered these days). Herman Melville, on the other hand, drives me up the wall, and I can't imagine why anyone ever thought he was worth reading. And from what little I've seen of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, things have gone downhill a lot since Melville.
So it could very well be that I just don't like literature. But so far, I'm continuing to suspect that what I really don't like is sloppy writing, and that too many people have managed to get away with sloppy writing by calling their work literature. Not all bugs are features.
2685263
What 2685632 said; it's designed as an author-driven review system rather than a reader-driven review system. If I were to rate stories with it beyond its Writeoff Association origins, I would pair it with an overall quality indicator (along the lines of Present Perfect's N/V/C/R/H); at that point, it does gain some reader value, because different readers might believe that, say, the good execution of a poor idea is right up their alley; or, say, if I give something a conditional recommendation and it's hugely lopsided toward Style, your tolerance of it is going to depend on how much you enjoy reading just for the joy of the language and the unique voice.
If something's at a lower recommendation level, you're probably not going to read it anyway, so the primary purpose of numbers is to give the author better feedback.
2685400
So you're telling me that Robert Jordan, despite all of the problems that everyone has with him, still wrote a better traditionalist fantasy writer than any of those other people?
I admit, part of my sour feelings for The Eye of the World came because of how I chose to read it. I chose to read a chapter a day and then blog about it like Mark Oshiro, and it turns out that this book was not meant to be prolonged this much, or meant to be held up to this much scrutiny, because the constant traveling really adds up over time. I had to abandon the blog project because I just wanted to finish the book already. I wasn't able to actually complete a similar project until I got around to reading denser books like Gravity's Rainbow and Foucault's Pendulum.
2685722
In the case of Melville, I really love it when people take a journey to the desolate ends of the world, going further and further away from civilization and enduring absolute solitude on the way to something dreaded. That's why I made it to the end of Moby Dick, why Voyage of the Dawn Treader is my favorite Narnia book, and part of why I didn't hate the ending to The Dark Tower series as much as everyone else did.
I can't speak for the quality of modernist fiction, since my only real exposure to it was the BAFFLING Mrs. Dalloway, but I take umbrage to the idea that literary fiction has gotten worse and worse since then. It's an idea that I can't really prove with facts as of yet but I still want to be false. I really enjoyed reading Gravity's Rainbow and Infinite Jest, but those books are really weird and have structures so esoteric that nobody really notices they exist. More recently I read Cloud Atlas, a book that's much more accessible, but which starts off with a 19th-century seafaring story written to emulate Melville's prose style (but without all of the whaling infodumps). I still recommend it, even if you have to skip the Ewing story and come back later. If you don't know, the book is comprised of six connected stories, each of different time periods, genres, and prose styles.
2686935 My sour feelings for Jordan's work came because a few weeks after reading the first 4 novels, I couldn't remember anything about them. The fantasy equivalent of Tom Clancy: "A great read", "hard to put down", but nothing to it but the plot.
Jordan and Clancy were key in convincing me to give up writing for many years; I thought they proved that exciting stories couldn't be interesting.
2687237
Maybe liveblogging that first book is the only reason I remember enough about it to get mad.
2687237
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2685412
I love—and seriously, I do not mean this in the least sarcastically—that the comments on this thing have turned into a bit of a bash-fest on one of my favorite authors. It's kind of awesome. And it's fun, from an analysis standpoint, too, to hear what other people think. Robert Jordan has been with me so long and was so formative to my own ideas of storytelling and style that seeing people pick him apart is pretty cool, and I think definitely useful to me. So thanks!
2687421
I think Robert Jordan ran into the same problem that George RR Martin ran into, which is to say he had thought he had planned out his whole series and then he got what he thought was more than halfway done and then realized that stuff that he thought would be quick and easy to work out wasn't and caused major pacing problems when he tried to get it done before the end of the series and couldn't. He was determined at the end to make sure that it was 12 books, but it really ended up 14 books, and I suspect it is not coincidental that there is probably two books worth of draggy material in the latter half of the series.
Glad I peaked in here :3
2682843 2683184 2682829 2685627
Eternal, I think, plays perfectly to fans of mlp whose care and investment in the relationship of Twilight and Celestia extends past a certain depth. It is, for me personally, one of the highest quality stories I have ever read, in nearly every regard, and it drew me in deeply from the very beginning. I would hardly change a thing in it, especially not its length or depth or pacing, for doing so would lessen its quality for me. Quite simply, Eternal gripped me.
But it didn't for so many others. We've all noticed the disparity in reactions while reading through the comments. My own mother once read the first page and a half and stopped because the prose annoyed her and she accused Device Heretic of being "obsessed with that princess pony character". Her analysis rather shocked me at first, and I thought it awful bold of her to state after barely a page of reading (let alone how she even came to that conclusion so quickly). Well, she is very perceptive, and after thinking it over for nearly a year, I think she was right. Device Heretic is obsessed with Celestia, and Twilight too. And if some part of you doesn't share in that obsession, then the story is most likely going to irritate you.
It's like fanfiction itself, which appeals explicitly to its fans. This is probably self-evident, but it doesn't make fanfiction bad. Though, I think, it does hide its quality and entertainment from those on the outside. Those who scorn fanfiction and have never read any of it are missing very strong, thought-provoking and powerful pieces (while consequently also missing a lot of garbage). Being on the inside, I think we all know this. Fanfiction isn't bad just because it appeals to a very limited spectrum of people.
The same for Eternal. The appeal of its elements--its prose, its structure, its pacing, its ideas--are tailored, however unintentionally, to a specific subsection of the fanbase. And just like how you cannot apply certain criticisms of fiction to fanfiction, because its decisions are being made to maximize the enjoyment of a singular audience (for example, not supplying certain world and character description info, because the readers already know it), so you cannot apply certain criticisms to Eternal, because, I would argue, it is busy with maximizing the enjoyment of a particular group of pony fans. If you're not in that group, its decisions may very well annoy and grate on you, and that's okay. But I would defend the supposition that this does not make it a poorly written/structured/paced story. The same in how someone who has little to no interest in martial arts films may not be suited to judge the quality or craftsmanship of a movie like The Raid. They may be able to deliberate on its cross-demographic appeal, and so could those unimpressed with Eternal, but I'm unsure of their ability to uncover the "true essence" of its quality.
This is quite a claim to make, I know, and it has a number of implications, so feel free to disagree with me.
Getting to your actual reviews Bradel, I only read two, "Dictated, Not Read" and "A Canterlot Carol", simply because I haven't read the other stories, and I hate spoilers :P Having probably said enough about DH's work, I'll just comment on your thoughts about Ghost's ^.^
This interested me. Are you saying this is factually bad, or just against your personal preferences? If it's the former, I'm curious as to why you feel that way.
I totally understand what you're getting at, I love this aspect of Ghost's writing. I've never read Robert Jordan, but I've dabbled in some Terry Pratchett, and unless I'm mistaken, Ghost may indeed be picking this up from him. Where Pratchett or Jordan or anyone else got it from I don't know, but where I know it from is nonfiction. It's a technique by writers of the New Yorker or Condé Nast Traveler or other dealers in the genre. It involves the use of specific details to produce the appearance of deep knowledge. In fiction this creates the affect of making the world feel more real, like the author really knows it and has fleshed out every piece of it in his/her mind. Notice how Ghost avoids using generalities, even when he's making things up. He names things, specifically, as opposed to vaguely referencing them. It's the difference between writing "Celestia worked away at a pile of paperwork" to "Celestia worked away at a pile of legislation, policies, and ordinances, involving a particularly meaty regulation for barely exchange". Or writing "Rarity bought a handful of fabrics" and "Rarity bought a few Duponi and Pongee silks and a handful of jutes."
Ghost employs this technique vigorously, in multiple ways (like including quick, little anecdotal stories about his characters) and it's why his world feels so vibrant and full.
Oh, also, I don't know how much of the Discworld series you've read, but before I jumped in, a fan advised me to skip the first seven or so books and start with "Guards! Guards!", since the earlier works weren't so hot. I'm glad I listened, and now I love Terry Pratchett, so I'd say the same thing. Try reading "Guards! Guards!", and see what it does for you. :3
Inasmuch as this is more a review of what you like or don't about stories, I can't argue enjoyment. But I will say that this isn't the kind of thing that can necessarily be counted a weakness in an overall sense, only as it applies to personal preference. There are times it could be, if the author is unaware of it or struggling with it, but I rather prefer writing in a minimalist style, where the narrator stays out of the way for the most part. Other writers like ntsts and GaPJaxie use the same style when not in an extremely subjective narration, and it produces the effect I want. Not that it's the only way of doing it, as some readers prefer the richer text of someone like Gardez. Different strokes for different folks.
However, I am a little put off by the mentioning of talking-heads syndrome here and telliness in your prior review of "Friendly Correspondence." Maybe you didn't mean them in this sense, and if not, please say so, but both comments were left without explanation, which gives them a flavor of "check box" reviewing, where someone is looking for violations of the letter of the law, if not the spirit. This is precisely why I haven't submitted one of my most successful stories to The Royal Guard: I've seen this type of reviewing from them on multiple authors, and I'm convinced it'd set off one of their check boxes without getting any consideration as to whether it does so for a reason.
Take the telly language in "Friendly Correspondence," which was noted chiefly in the last line of Celestia's first letter. I tried to goad you into thinking about this in that post, but you didn't really take the bait. Reviewers will agree that telling works in some places, and one of those would be a letter. Letters are meant to inform, not entertain, and while fiction must strike a middle note when using the letter as a medium, it still has to feel authentic. Celestia was hastily scrawling a letter out, so she's not going to devote attention to wording it just so, and again, the bottom line is for her to tell Twilight how she feels, not do it in a particularly mellifluous way. Show me a letter that's richly evocative of emotion through body language and facial expression, and I'll show you a letter that sounds contrived and fake. If a story is telly throughout, there's almost always a problem, but when it only is in spots, then the question must arise whether the author's merely inconsistent or whether he's doing so deliberately, and in the latter case, if it achieves some goal. And here, it was done very deliberately for the authenticity of the letter.
A similar thing comes up in the few places in "A Wish for the Ages" where things get a little talking heads. In fact, there are very few paragraphs that are naked dialogue or have only speaking actions attached to them, so I'm surprised that came up at all. But consider what's happening when it gets that way. The perspective character (Platinum or Rarity, depending on the scene) is huddled on the floor, wracked with pain, squeezing her eyes shut, in emotional turmoil... basically in a state where she's not going to be very perceptive of what's going on around her and often unable to see it. What information is presented mirrors what she's able to take in.
I'm not disputing the overall rating of either story; they seem to be in line with what others have said. And maybe you did take these things into account re: telling and talking heads, but it's not apparent, and they're points worth taking into account when reviewing.
2687652
I actually had to look up "talking heads" during the course of writing that review. I wasn't entirely sure how people use it, though it seemed an adequate description of my particular issue, and I'm fairly confident that I still didn't wind up particularly content with the phrase because it seems to carry connotations that weren't what I wanted. Conventionally, it seems like THS gets used to mean "this is a wall of dialogue and I can't figure out who is talking", and that's obviously not the case here. It's perfectly easy to tell who's talking; you're very good about using minimalistic dialogue tagging where needed.
So really, I'm using the phrase in a way that feels like what it should mean to me, which is a bad habit of mine, but I'm not really sure how else to describe my impression. And that impression is that Rarity and Twilight feel like talking heads, because there's very little I could latch onto in the writing except the dialogue. There are lots of little physical descriptions used to convey mood, but there isn't much variety in presentation, and that's the thing I was trying to describe (and probably could have worded better). The story feels like it's essentially: Pony A talks to Pony B, Pony A talks to Pony C, Pony A' talks to Pony B', Pony A' talks to Pony C', denouement.
Like you said, there are some readers that prefer certain styles of writing and some readers that prefer other styles. I could certainly believe that might be some of what's going on here. But generally speaking, I come to stories wanting to be engaged by them, and "A Wish for the Ages" feels very reactive and not all that active, the way it's constructed. It gets a lot more interesting when you can watch the pieces fit together, but the overall uniformity of the action makes it feel pretty dry to me on the first read.
I'm very open to acknowledging that I may be phrasing some of my comments in unhelpful ways, and looking for better phrases to use. Reappropriating phrases I've heard often and wanting to use them in a way that makes sense to me but doesn't necessarily match with the accepted meaning for those phrases is a bad habit I know I have—and one I'm particularly prone to in trying to write reviews at this stage, because it usually takes me at least 20-30 minutes and sometimes closer to an hour to crank out text for each story I read. And I can definitely see how tossing around stock reviewing phrases can make it sound more like I'm taking a rule-based, check-box approach—which I hope I'm not, and which is an impression I have an interest in avoiding anyway, whether it means changing my language or changing how I read and think about stories. In this case, the thing that felt weak to me was the uniform scene selection across the whole story, and the reference to talking heads was an attempt to describe how that left me feeling: like I was in a gallery of talking heads that weren't really doing anything. I wouldn't mind some advice on how to talk about situations like that, especially since I'm far more prone to think of that as "talking heads" than the textbook interpretation of THS which I'd be much more likely to describe long-hand as "dialogue that's confusing because the author hasn't used enough attribution and doesn't write with strong character voicing."
For what it's worth, my takeaway on both this story and friendly correspondence was about the same: that you did a very good job executing a story using a structure that felt fundamentally dubious. I tend to be of the opinion that, structurally speaking, some stories are just less worth telling than others, and I think that's how I've felt about both this one and "Friendly Correspondence". Which is a shame, because between "In Bloom" and your entry for the last Write-Off, I know you write some stuff I really enjoy, and I feel like I've just gotten unlucky with the two stories I've picked for my review blogs so far.
I don't know if this has been a particularly helpful response, but I do really appreciate the feedback you're giving, and I'm definitely interested in suggestions you might have about how I can improve what I'm doing. I'm always going to be subjective with these in terms of what I do and don't personally enjoy reading, but I'd really like to be able to tune them as a decent analytic view on what's going on within stories. I don't know if I'm doing a particularly good job with that right now, but I think that's kind of my end-goal for what I'd like to be able to offer.
ETA: Going back and thinking about your initial comments on the "pedestrian prose" statement. I do checkbox a bit with the technical and creative sections, but it's more a matter of things like, "how is characterization handled", "what is the overall feeling of the prose", "how many new ideas are being presented in this story", "what's the overall quality of those ideas", etc. I think my approach on both the technical and creative sides is that I have certain things I notice in stories, and I want stories to not fall down on any of them and make me happy on at least a couple. Prose tends to be something I don't expect most stories to strive to deliver on, and I think that's sort of the idea I was trying to get across. The prose in this story isn't a reason to come read the story, in my opinion, but it's not being set up as one. It's perfectly good for what it's trying to be. In technical terms, I think the reasons to come read this story are the foreshadowing and the paralleling, and everything else feels like it's falling in the "this is fine, and not really trying for more" category. I don't know if that's helpful, but I think that's a pretty good summary of my approach.
2687741 I'd actually like to see you unpack some of your review phrases and such not just to make more helpful reviews, but also because it seems like you're using them to refer to tropes or patterns you recognize. (The example from this review that I'd like to hear more about is "try-fail cycles" -- what is that, exactly? Is it a good thing or a bad thing? Universally or only when used well/mishandled? A write-up on the topic won't actually answer those questions better than many examples, but it would help to contextualize them.) I often find that I'm interested in a reviewer's perspective on such things, both because it cuts across the borders of individual stories and because it shows what sorts of things a reviewer finds interesting or noteworthy.
You've already noticed that I use shelves to organize stories by such commonalities; I'd refer you to esteemed internet reviewer Adam Cadre's personal narrative pattern language as another example, but it actually doesn't make much sense on its own (hence my remark about needing examples as well) -- but see for a specific example his quick review of Take Shelter, which says little about the movie but which he uses to illustrate a broader point about other "what-is-real" stories.
(Oh, and I for one got your intended meaning from "talking heads", but that's because I was transferring its use in regards to comics. You might just be a Calvin and Hobbes fan, if you're not sure where you got the connotations of it that you have.)
ETA for your ETA: Part of what I mean by the whole "patterns" thing is making explicit and analyzing your personal checkboxes -- among the uses of which is preventing the ossification of them that you seem to dislike.
2687421
Seeing my father (or was it my grandfather's?) collection of Wheel of Time books on the mantle was a very frequent memory for me during my childhood. It captured my imagination without me even reading it, but when I tried the prologue I think I just decided to wait until I was older and read more kids' stuff. If not for that I could easily be on your side for this whole thing, or else admitting that nostalgia made the series seem better than it actually was. To put it another way, you're the first person I've ever heard say a bad thing about The Belgariad, whereas I've grown used to people snarking about The Wheel of Time wherever fantasy fans are found. How do I know that nostalgia isn't why you prefer Jordan?
2687471 I think Robert Jordan ran into the same problem that George RR Martin ran into, which is to say he thought fantasy is about having a bunch of characters fight each other with swords and magic.
2687757 Adam Cadre writes reviews? He's one of the founding fathers of interactive fiction. Or, er, he will be, once it gets properly founded.
... after I sit on his head long enough.
2687492
Are you learning the art of non-communicative smileys from PresentPerfect?
2688707
Pffft, they're totally communicative Bad Horse, you just have to learn how to listen ^.^
2687741
This just gets back to intent and fits with the narrative viewpoint. Platinum and Rarity aren't really paying attention to anything else, and they're in such a stressful situation that they're not letting their attention wander to such details as the surroundings, which are very familiar to them anyway. It's supposed to be a very auditory experience, because that's all they're focused on. You may not like this style, but I still haven't seen you say that it's objectively wrong and why. It's a very difficult thing for a reviewer to separate "this didn't work for me" from "this didn't work," and I haven't seen you make that distinction.
I honestly have no idea what this is supposed to mean. "A Wish for the Ages" is new enough that it's still percolating in my mind, but I'm comfortable that "Friendly Correspondence" is a good story. I haven't had anyone cite structural issues with it at all, and I don't even know what you're talking about. On a sentence level, scene, perspective, overall premise? There's nothing unusual about the first three, and the last one isn't an issue, insofar as the axiom "a good writer can write any premise," and your criticism doesn't get at the writing itself. In fact, your "less worth telling" comment doesn't seem defensible in that light, and it's also inconsistent with the overall rating of that story.