Slice of Life, Romance

Commentary + Review:

This story starts off with Bon-Bon, and starts off very telly and with strange formatting. Sometimes there's a space between paragraphs, sometimes not. There is almost no showing, and each paragraph starts almost the same way.

I found it very hard to stay engaged with the story and stopped myself from skimming many times. The telling does a lot to detract from the story and makes it hard to build any investment in the characters.

The characters are all somewhat wooden. There are long stretches of dialogue without any action that make it really hard to tell who's saying what. Almost all of chapter 2, for example, is dialogue without attribution tags. Skimming through the rest of the chapters, this becomes less of a problem, but it devolves into X said, Y said without much emotional connection.

I wasn't able to really get involved with the plot or the conflict.

Tips:

There were three major problems with this story:

1. Telling.
As I've stated quite a lot in the past, I am not against telling in a story. It has its place. However, this story had too much.

In order to resolve this problem, try thinking about what it is the character wants, what the character is experiencing, and then try to express that in terms of what the character is thinking, doing, saying. The narrative - the bits of the story that are descriptive of action, setting and sometimes character feelings - should be used for those things and word choices should be used to express the characters mood. Also, having the character do something that would be normal for a character in that situation to do, or for that character to do. Example below.

Bon-Bon wasn't a big fan of writing essays but the class was required.

Taking this and expanding it out into a little scene, or a bit of the scene would make this more showy, for example.

Another essay? Bon-Bon tapped her hoof against the desk and stared at the blank piece of paper with the question printed at the top. "Describe the history of the Centaur myth in no less than five hundred words."

Why didn't I listen more to Lyra? She knows more about centaurs than I do! Her attention wandered away from the question, and over to linger on Lyra's aquamarine mane.

"Eyes forward, Bon-Bon!" the instructor said sharply as he walked down the aisle.

This shows us that Bon-Bon both hates essays, and that she probably is attracted or interested in Lyra.

2. Dialogue.
The dialogue is not bad, but the way it's written feels wooden. A character should be doing something while talking, otherwise the reader is left with the impression that the character is just standing there spouting dialogue. Look up, look around, pause, sit, stand, trot back and forth while talking to show agitation and impatience. Tap a hoof. Something. This excerpt below is from chapter 2. Adding actions the dialogue that match the spoken lines would make this less of a stumbling block.

"Bonbonbobnbonbonbon!!!!"

That had to be Lyra and it was.

"Hey there, Lyra." The two nuzzled each other.

"I can't believe our first semester of college is almost over. Times flies fast, doesn't it?"

"Sure does. Right now though, I got to study for my math final."

"You need to study? But Bon-Bon, you are a genius. If I was as smart as you, I wouldn't study."

3. Characterization
There's not much more to Bon-Bon than "I like Lyra." And for Lyra, there's not a lot more than "I like humans. Oh, and Bon-Bon too."

This was hard to connect with the characters. Lyra's parents are a little better. They have motivation. They want to see their daughter happy.

What does Bon-Bon like other than Lyra? What kinds of things does she do while Lyra's not around? Does she like to do things?

This is not something that I can really point to a specific passage within the story and say "this is an example of flat characterization." It's something that should be planned out.

Actually... this story somewhat reminds me of an outline. It's very outliney. It could be used to rebuild the story into something that, while not the same, and not exactly 10,000 words long with chapter lengths that end with 0s, it would be something that would be more compelling and interesting to read.

Verdict:

Needs work.

There could be an interesting story here, but it's obscured by telling, dialogue problems, characterization issues, and was generally not very interesting.