Just something I wanted to share · 2:12pm Dec 18th, 2015
For the last... apparently 3+ months, I've been submitting my (good) fics to The Royal Guard, ever since they did their reorganization thing. It wasn't any dislike of the original that kept me from doing it sooner, I just sort of forgot. :B But now they're a good bit more consistent about their output, so it'd be a nice mark to have one or more stories get accepted. :)
Anyway, yesterday I got feedback on Dance 'Til We're High. (It takes them a solid month to get to new submissions, which is pretty reasonable, in my estimate.) I wanted to share it because I was highly bemused.
–Unnecessary sideplot. The whole Hoity-Toity/Rarity sideplot, and how it might force Rarity to move out of town, doesn't add anything much to the main plot. Moreover, it's smoothed over well in advance of the main plot's conflicts, so it feels like a weird digression on the way, not at all unified with the storyline.
–I couldn't buy Twilight's need for a romantic partner. For all that she talks about wanting to have a coltfriend—and perhaps because of all that talking—it doesn't feel like Twilight is particularly feeling a void in her life. All we have to go on are her verbal protestations, rather than hard evidence—thus, it ends up being a case of telling rather than showing, to the story's detriment.
And I am not bemused because this is bad feedback -- it's rather the contrary, if I'm being honest -- but because I'm getting feedback like this at all. No one's ever said these things about this story before, and it's been around how long? Why did no one ever say this to me before? Thanks, TRG. Tharg.
Anyway, this is just part of my long-standing campaign to disabuse people of the notion that my most-viewed story is anything but horribly flawed, don't mind me. :V
In all fairness, I approved the story and got overruled
Though, that said, they aren't really wrong that the story is a bit of a mess. But they aren't as forgiving as I am.
It actually varies by genre. If we've approved an excess of a genre, it becomes less of a priority. For example, since we have a backlog of Slice of Life stories scheduled for future posts, we don't focus on them as much, so the wait tends to be longer. On the other hand, if we desperately need a genre filled, we might look at it within a couple days.
I wouldn't worry about it too much, PP. After my last experience with them, I don't have much respect for TRG's submission guidelines or critical judgement.
3626246
i.imgur.com/MdJgU.png
It does bring up an important topic: How to handle criticism. Most first-time authors take any criticism as if somebody had broken into their house and scrawled graffiti on the walls. (I know I did) There's a balancing act between two points on most critical comments: (This of course leaves out the "Oops, let me fix that" criticisms)
1) I wrote it that way intentionally because that's the way I wanted it to go
2) Somebody didn't like the way I did it
Case A: They're right - Picking on my own Tutor story (because I hate picking on others), I had a critic throw rocks at the structure on my first chapter. I whined, I complained... I looked at it. I sighed, and I re-wrote the poor hookless thing into something with a barb on it.
Case B: They're wrong - Same critic unloaded on Green Grass because he was... green. And he didn't like the name. That was intentional, and I kept it because GG was as ordinary as I could possibly make him, just as plain as green grass. It allowed me to contrast him with the rest of the insane Mane 6 in a positive way through 300k words or so.
(goes back and re-reads the story)
Yeah, I upthumbed this one some time ago. The sideplot comment is fairly applicable, because I got confused about just who Rarity was enamored with (but then again, it's Rarity). The "Twilight does't seem to want romance in her life" comment is off-base, though. Twilight angsting about her romantic life is the whole theme of the story, after all. If you crank it up too high, she's whining, and if you downplay it too much, it sucks all of the life out of the tension. This one seemed to strike a good balance.
Is this the part where I get to say I hated on it before it was cool? :P
"No one's ever said these things about this story before, and it's been around how long? Why did no one ever say this to me before?"
Do not look for consistency in humans. I imagine no one thought much about those points before. Most people I assume do not read stories with the mindset: " Let us review the construction of this." Rather spoils the fun I would posit. But when tasked with reviewing something, oh then the mindset becomes: " Let us make no omissions, that we would be spared the criticism we might ourselves receive."
3626284
Fun fact: I have the second highest approval rate of any active member of the Royal Guard. Only CV approves a higher percentage of stories than I do.
Well, getting new criticism even years after the story was published does happen. I've had people read stories of mine that a ton of people love and just tear them apart with (often correct) things that no one pointed out before.
3626375 So... 2% vs 3%? I only ask because your track record for liking things is, by your own admission, low. Unless you accept stories you wouldn't personally recommend?
3626436
The Royal Guard's overall acceptance rate is 20%. My rate is 36%.
This isn't actually all that surprising; my overall rate for stories in my Read It Now reviews is about 40% (30.3% Worth Reading, 8.4% Recommended, 1.7% Highly Recommended), while my Read It Later reviews feature a 50% Not Recommended rate.
That said, my Royal Guard acceptance rate might be misleading; I review a lot of stories independent of the Royal Guard, which results in me reviewing a number of stories which get submitted to the Royal Guard for my regular reviews. I also am likely to prioritize stories which are already on my reading lists which get submitted to the Guard, and I've also directly encouraged people to submit stories to the guard on occasion, all of which biases my approval rate upwards. Also, I think some people submit stories to the Royal Guard because I reviewed them and said I liked them, on the basis of "well, he'll probably approve them". When I pick out stories at random from the queue to read, my approval rate drops significantly, though that's colloquial.
I don't accept stories I wouldn't personally give at least a Worth Reading to; in fact, not everything I give a Worth Reading to gets approved by me for the Guard.
3626455 Hmmm, so when picking out stories for yourself to read you're basically a coin flip or a d3. I suppose I just see a lot of your reviews and it looks like 80% NR, but then you have had a few where you hit a streak and had all recommended or higher. Very well, I will no longer refer to you in my head as Mikey. I will still read your reviews in the voice of Eeyore, however.
3626270
>mfw PP appreciated the criticism
3626594
Um, good for him? That's what he said in the main post, isn't it? I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to get at here, perhaps you should try real sentences rather than 4chan greentext blather.
3626687
PP said he appreciated the feedback and thought it was of high quality.
Why in the world would you then tell him not to worry about it? He just said it was good feedback, after all. You went on to talk about how little respect you have for TRG submission guidelines or critical judgement. He just said it was good feedback. To me, it seemed like you missed the point and instead just chose to rag on TRG indiscriminately. Kinda like people like to rag on EqD indiscriminately.
The whole point of this post was that PP was grateful, not that he was worrying about it.
The best way to deal with this is with cake.
cdn-image.foodandwine.com/sites/default/files/2012-r-xl-ginger-and-pear-upside-down-cake.jpg
Cake makes everything better.
Despite identifying what might be considered flaws in your story, there still an enormous degree of personal taste involved in such feedback. People are much more forgiving of structural "flaws" in a story that they enjoy, and will go out of their way to find things to criticize in a work that didn't speak to them on some level.
A scene that someone considers a pointless digression may be a nice bit of "breathing room" or character exploration to someone else. The showing vs. telling "rule" has a vast, muddy middle ground that can be ignored or expounded upon at the whim of the reviewer.
After making a point of reading anything that was featured by the RCL and the Guard for quite some time, I've come to realize that the RG stories mainly leave me cold. While arguably well-written, they are mostly stories about subjects/themes that don't interest me, or are handled in a ways that don't appeal to me. The RCL is slanted in the opposite direction, which is why I still closely follow it's features.
So, that's a rather long-winded way of saying that underneath a critique that supposedly focuses purely on structure, there is a huge amount of personal taste involved. Take that however you will.
T
TRG is almost too hard to get approved by. I submitted The Princess and the Pupil like three times, always did my best to do any changes they recommended, and it still never got in. Eventually I just gave up because it was becoming too much work.
I guess this is what it feels like from the other side of the EQD fence.
I think 3626371 hit the mark here. I rarely read fics with the mind set of trying to find flaws and things that might be convoluted or complicate the plot or detract from it, unless I've been requested to do so for pre-reading/editing purposes. (Which is why, when I see them during a normal reading it's usually a big deal.)
In a way it's an issue with TRG and not... I mean, they are severely critical and nitpicky, to the point that I've never felt inclined to send anything their way... not because I don't have confidence in my stories or feel that they'll judge them unjustly, but rather because my objective here has never been to be unquestionable quality, I love doing things I know they won't appreciate for starters.
But, it is their stated purpose to be that meticulous, and when they give you feedback like that when no one else has bothered to point it out... is a good thing. Although, like all feedback it's still subjective—I submitted a story a while ago to Strange Horizons and Asimov and got good feedback with two completely different outcomes.
So, as valid as their criticism is, it's still up to you to decide whether its value would take your story in a direction you didn't want or actually benefit from it. I haven't re-read Dance 'Til We're High since you originally published it, so I don't recall the nuances of it to the extent of agreeing or disagreeing with them, but... the advice/criticism is given, so you can decide to take it or leave it.
I dunno, I'm rambling.
3626768
I found it pretty amusing. EqD's never given me trouble, but I got two wildly different reviews from TRG, followed by some other actions by the reviewer that made me swear off submitting anything else to them. It was clear at the time that their selection criteria was far more on the level of the personal preferences of the reviewer than I was comfortable with. Hopefully that has changed, but I have my doubts.
3626768
Are the turn around times for resumbission a month long though?
That's the main thing that bugs me about EqD's process. I have used EqD for several stories (all but 1 or 2 of my stories are on there) and on my most recent fic I ran into some questionable rejection where I submitted with a note saying to look at chapter 1 and 2 since chapter 3 and beyond were yet to be edited. I almost quite literally got the response, "I was ready to approve your fic by the end of chapter 2, but chapter 3..." The story got rejected because the PR read an unedited chapter.
And that meant another 4-6 weeks of waiting. From what I hear, a vast majority of people who submit to EqD don't resubmit. I can't blame them with the current system, but I guess it's more that most of them don't care to put in the effort of fixing up their story. It would be nice if the fics which have already waited once, and who have put in the extra effort, somehow get expedited through the queue. It would make EqD a lot more worthwhile if you guys sped up the resubmission process.
3626960
Probably the same problem Eqd has always had. It eats prereaders alive on sheer volume, and they bow out regularly. A couple of my favorites don't write horsewords anymore because of that burnout.
3626816
Hear Hear. There is NO, I repeat NO consensus of literary opinion. There are rules of grammar and style but beyond that it is a crap shoot when you reach a certain level. re: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3935561.stm "Juvenile Trash" it was called... before it sold 150 million copies. I know this is an extreme example and one should never stop learning, but if you do not please yourself first then your work will never be anything but pretension.
3626960
Wait, why did you not edit it before submitting? And/or while it was waiting to be looked at (assuming it wasn't looked at immediately)? Even if you tell the PRs not to consider anything past a certain point, why on earth would they follow that instruction if the fic could be going up on the blog in that state?
3627063 One should not discount "Juvenile Trash" when considering an author's long-term skills. Robert Heinlein produced a whole set of Juvies that I grew up on and still have copies in my library. (which is less of an accomplishment than it might seem, as I'm a horrible packrat) Asimov started with pulp fiction and eventually went on to... well, everything. The author of Twilight went on to... Well, I suppose that's an exception to the exceptional.
3627116
For the same reason they put up unfinished fics on the site at all... I hardly think "but you might throw up those chapters unedited!" is anything of an argument when I could also literally write anything as my next chapter.
I made the mistake of submitting the story page of my unpublished fic on fimfiction. It had 8 chapters and 30,000~ words already written because I had a friend who was reading through the later chapters on there (to give feedback/opinions on it). I also thought they might appreciate being able to see a bit of where the story was going down the road. But I don't think I'll be doing it ever again. I'll just submit the first two chapters, even if there's more.
Goddamn, it seems like everyone has an opinion on TRG and suddenly this became an EQD thread note to self: never do this again D:
3626246
Wow, sucker. :B I can't complain, though, I'm getting you to review my fics! :D
3626256
Will you review my submissions too? :V
3626270
I'm not worried at all. :B
3626289
Actually, the whole point of the story is Twilight learning to love herself without needing someone else to first, but I kinda fucked that up. :B I dunno if that makes it a valid crit or not, honestly. D:
3626293
No, because I've always hated it. :V
3626723
no, don't poke Whiteout, he's made of cacti D:
3626731
This is cruelty, sir. D:
3626768
It's probably somewhat disingenuous of me, but I'm not worrying too hard about the rejections. :B I mean, these are stories that have been around for three-four years at this point; if they're not good enough to get in on the first go, oh well, whatever, I've since written better stuff. But if they're like "Hey, fix this one thing" then I'd probs do it. :B I'm actually glad now that I decided not to troll them with all my shitfics. (Just the good ones.)
3626816
Oh, that makes sense, then. :B
3627668
But I like poking cacti!
3627708
Admittedly, so do I. :B It's a lot of fun, so long as they're the ones with the really thick spines. The hairy ones just get stuck everywhere. D:
That reminds me. I'm actually in the Royal Guard. Have never reviewed anything for them.
I'd say their false negative rate is high, but their false positive rate is low. (Getting approved by them is meaningful; getting rejected, less so. My rejections have been of the general form "I would've written a different story.")
3627893
Wow, slacker. D: Look at this guy.
3626738
This is true, but also a bit misleading.
I don't know if you're familiar with the Nostalgia Critic, but he made a video a while ago about nitpicking.
In that video, he floats an interesting hypothesis which I think is true from my own experience with game design; that is to say, nitpicking tends to occur when you are unengaged.
Nitpicks are not what is wrong with a work, though; they are flaws, but they are comparatively minor ones. What triggers nitpicking is rationalization - basically, we don't like something, and we want to come up with a reason why. Nitpicking allows us to pick something apart and feel like our dislike for something is rational in nature.
The problem with this, from a critical standpoint, is that you're often missing what it is that is truly bad about a work. People are much better at noticing that a work is flawed than they are at figuring out exactly what is wrong with a work. Some flaws - primarily technical ones - are easy to notice, but a lot of systemic flaws are hard to pin down. Answering the core question of "Why wasn't I engaged by this piece?" is often an important one, as it is from there that a lot of problems flow.
In game design, a similar problem frequently occurs in playtesting; something is not right in a game, but the playtester will often assign it to the wrong thing. It may be something which is wrong, or it may simply be something obvious that they can latch onto, but it is often deeper and more subtle than it appears to be at first glance, and sometimes can reveal a major flaw in the underlying structure of the game. It is easy to chase after a bunch of surface details without digging in and addressing deeper problems, and this is often a cause of people chasing their tails in game design, as they keep trying to play whack-a-mole with surface issues without realizing that the rot goes deeper.
When we talk about something being structurally or systemically flawed, we're talking about stuff that is often not located at any one point in a piece, but which is broadly distributed over the piece. Moreover, such feedback often is much less direct and tangible; suggesting that someone fix various technical issues and awkward sentences is easy, but suggesting that a character's characterization is off requires a broad look across the entire piece. On top of that, such top-level issues often sound very harsh, and a lot of people are loath to tell someone that their story is fundamentally flawed in a major way. There have been a few times when I have looked at a collaborative rejection PM and asked myself the question, "If they fixed all this, would we accept the story?" If the answer is no, then it means we've been dancing around the issue (or at least, a major issue) and need to focus in and concentrate on what is wrong.
Unfortunately, trying to give feedback often intrinsically results in rationalization; it is often easy to latch onto an incorrect but easy to explain reason why something is flawed, and the desire to at least say SOMETHING constructive is strong (and indeed, in the Royal Guard, required). The problem is that if you as a reader cannot figure out what it was that was bothering you, you may well give them bad advice or say something is wrong when it isn't, and the problem lies elsewhere. And frankly, if you get weird feedback that doesn't make much sense, oftentimes that's what really happened - the person who is giving you feedback is struggling to articulate what it is exactly which is wrong with a piece.
Rationalization is a hard thing to fight back against, as it isn't always clear to you when you're doing it. You have to be on guard and, frankly, people aren't always on guard against it, and even if you are, you're still going to screw up sometimes. And I can tell you that top-level issues rather than mechanical issues are the hardest ones to write rejection notices about.
Showing vs telling is a simplification of a deeper aspect of writing which is much more complicated, and thus more difficult to communicate. For instance, you could go into the four don'ts of telling:
And then you can go into further detail about that, and so on, and so on.
The reality is that writing is nuanced, and a lot of single-sentence pieces of advice are the general starter-level advice.
FYI, a lot of this also has to do with the personal tastes of the people involved, as well as the criteria used. The RCL, TRG, and EqD all have their own specific standards for the stories that they feature, and as a result making a post by one is no guarantee you'll make the other two - we have accepted stories Equestria Daily has rejected, and rejected stories they have accepted. Same goes for the RCL. And of course, there are stories which aren't eligible for Equestria Daily at all - for example, The Collected Poems of Maud Pie will never be accepted there because it is a poetry collection, while it has been featured by both the Royal Guard and the Royal Canterlot Library. Short story collections aren't accepted by any of the three major groups, but there are some really amazing stories in some of those collections.
The RCL is biased pretty heavily against internal mane 6 shipping, for instance, which is why Bookplayer's RCL feature is one of the very few non-shipfics she's written - it is a decent story, to be sure, but it isn't her very best piece. TRG struggles with comedy - not to say we don't have a sense of humor, but a story has to hit at least 2 of the 3 people who read a story. Some very funny pieces have been rejected because two people who didn't get it reviewed it - The 18th Brewmare of Bluey Napoleon was rejected, for instance, because a couple of reviewers fundamentally weren't amused, despite the fact that it is one of the funniest stories on the site in my personal obviously correct opinion. This is not to say that we don't approve comedy stories - we do, every site post - but it can be a struggle to find one that people agree on, and I would say that we've rejected more quality comedy pieces than pieces from any other genre (ironically - and somewhat bizarrely - the genre which has the highest approval rate is human of all things, though this is I suspect mostly an artifact of how we acquire human fics to begin with - it is also by far our least submitted category of story, which results in frequent begging of authors who have written good human fics). Equestria Daily, as noted before, straight up won't accept certain types of stories at all, and I'm sure they have their own institutional biases as well.
3626768
Unfortunately, the Royal Guard generally doesn't say "We will never accept your story unless it is fundamentally changed into a different story," but the reality is that this is probably the case in a fair number of rejections. I think that we should be a lot clearer about this, but people don't want to come off as jerks or sound discouraging.
I have actually noted such in a few rejection notices of my own, though, because I don't want people to waste their time doing something which isn't going to help them. We've had a few stories that were submitted that were actually more like scenes, and they were decently well-written but weren't complete stories, just sort of... things which existed. And the only way to fix that would be to fundamentally change the nature of the piece from a scene into a story.
It is easy to come up with a lot of nitpicky things, again, but it is harder to address broader issues.
In all fairness, from our point of view, as long as we're getting six stories per site post every two weeks, we're doing just fine. As long as we're capable of achieving that, there's no real reason for us to change our standards.
3626816
While we may chew into stories, the last five stories in our rejection queue all had a rejection mention slow/poor pacing, lack of engagement, and/or general disappointment in the story. In my experience, finding a story unappealing is basically the #1 reason for rejection from the Royal Guard. Not to say that we don't reject stories with bad mechanics, but we don't actually end up with that many stories that get mechanical rejections because most people have the sense not to submit them to us.
3626937
A story needs to be more than mechanically adequate for us to want to put it in a site post; we need to actually feel like this is something that other people should go out of their way to read. This is one of the primary causes of divergence in our evaluation of stories from Equestria Daily. All reviews of literary materials are inherently a combination of objective and subjective judgement; this is true of any value judgement.
That's not to say that we don't reject good stories - there are a few stories which have been rejected which I feel are quite a bit better than some stories we accepted - but the reality is that there is general agreement on the overwhelming majority of stories, with either two accepts or two rejects. I have the highest rate of disagreement with my fellow reviewers, and even then, I'm only the odd man out 7% of the time.
3627893
I agree with this statement.
Incidentally, this is not a bad thing from a consumer standpoint; it is more important to consistently get good stories than it is for all good stories to be passed. It is generally better to err away from false positives on reviews, because you're telling people to spend their time on something, and they're likely to feel like their time was wasted if you made a bad recommendation.
3628015
This is the point where I find my distaste for the RG. Because it is, in fact, an official arm of the site. One that claims to be, in its own words :
As such, a few of the reviewers having an open distaste for entire genres of fanfic is a pretty fierce blow to any claim of seeking quality over all. Your own (rather pretentious) "Prereader's Constitution" calls out bias as a reason to remove a pre-reader, even, but here you advocate it as business as usual. EqD has fics they won't post, but at least they are up front about it, rather than it being a matter of hoping that a shipfic isn't assigned a pre-reader who doesn't like the pairing, and proceeds to pick the story to death because his waifu is shipped with Trixie.
3628054
The RCL is the Royal Canterlot Library.
TRG is the Royal Guard.
I wouldn't say that the Royal Guard has any strong genre biases, and I haven't really noticed any bias against any particular sort of story.
I would say that it is more likely for us to reject good comedy stories than it is of stories of other genres because humor is so subjective, which makes it easier for a funny story to be rejected. That said, I think our approved comedy stories have been quite strong on the whole - we aren't approving a bunch of unfunny junk, we just reject funny stuff.
Moreover, you're operating under a misconception of what the purpose of the RCL and the Royal Guard is. We're supposed to highlight good stories. That doesn't mean that we're going to highlight every good story on the site. The Royal Canterlot Library tries to highlight a new author every week. The Royal Guard highlights stories from a number of popular genres - Slice of Life, Drama, Comedy, Romance, Action/Adventure, and Human.
The fact that the Royal Canterlot Library is unlikely to highlight an internal mane six shipfic kind of sucks, but it isn't the end of the world, and there are plenty of stories outside of that category which are good - it isn't like they're likely to run out of good stories to highlight as a result of their bias against such stories. The Royal Guard tries to capture a number of popular genres, but we aren't going to capture every good story on the site.
The following sorts of things are unlikely to make site posts at all in the present system:
Short story collections
Any mature-rated story
Any story heavy on sexual content, even if it isn't mature-rated
That's just the nature of the beast.
Incidentally, a lot of those documents on the Royal Guard's front page are outdated or don't reflect how things ever worked (for instance, one of them claims that the Royal Guard was going to make daily(!) site posts, which has never been the case) and need to be revised/rewritten. I think the person who originally wrote those is no longer active in the Royal Guard, so I'm not even sure if I can edit them; they may need to just be remade from scratch. I'll see about that on Skype. The present process is mostly documented on the forums, for example, in this post.
3628054 Just to dispel this illusion:
That is not true, and they'll be told to rephrase that to avoid misleading people into thinking that they were in the future. They are not official in any way, and the only reason it appears to be so is because we help them promote story reviews, when in fact they have no real official status for the site just like we assist Seattle's Angels by site posting their highlights.
3628168
Fair enough. It's still the boilerplate on the front of the group, so I'm sure you can understand my confusion.
3628126
Sorry, bit of an oversight there, it's been a long day. That said, I'm still not a fan, but it's your group to do what you will with. D's cleared up my main reservation in any case.
3628015
That's interesting, and may explain why TRG's "tastes" and mine don't match up very often. I like humor even in Adventure or Dark tagged stories to leaven the seriousness. Unrelentingly grim just isn't for me.
3628168
That's good to know. I was laboring under the same misunderstanding that Whiteout was.
3628015
This is really good advice that I am going to try to keep in mind when gatekeeping. :B
Also, you are totally right about The 18th Brewmare. :V
cough hrk run out of stories NO never of course we won't run out of stories why would you say that D: