Hello, friends! I'm back, and still alive after last week's… not so stellar review of one of Azure's stories Today's story is one that I probably shouldn't be reviewing, but it's been sitting in my folder for a pretty long time. 

EMy Wings Will Keep You Safe

• MLP: FiM
• Drama
• Slice of Life

A little filly lays terrified in a library through a raging storm with only an Alicorn princess to comfort her.

• Twilight
• Applejack
• Apple Bloom
• Dinky Hooves
• CMCs

Astral Phoenix · 9.7k words  ·  274  10 · 17k views

Why would I say that? Well, this story has seven reviews on Fimfiction that I saw:
Titanium Dragon’s Review
PaulAsaran’s Review
Blankscape’s Review on Spike’s First Glance
Milo_Chalks’ Review on Reviewers Cafe
SwordTune’s Review on Reviewers Cafe
Schatten’s Review on this group
AP’s Review on this group

With that in mind, today's review won't be in my normal format of review — if you want to read an actual review of this story you can click on one of the links above. Instead, I'll be doing a summary of points brought up in the reviews already done for the story, then I'll talk about a little something that might be helpful for writing stories.

So let's get started!

A summary of past reviews

This story is, at its core, about Twilight and Apple Bloom exploring and deepening their bond together, with some heavy mother-daughter overtones. The story has Apple Bloom taking shelter in Twilight’s home during a severe thunderstorm, and Twilight reassuring her through a variety of little interactions throughout the story.

The most immediately noticeable similarity between all the reviews is that all of them bring up the mischaracterisation of Twilight and Apple Bloom in the story. General sentiments are that AB is unrealistically scared, while Twi is unrealistically good at calming her down and caring for her. Indeed, it does feel like the two are acting like this just because the story requires it, as AB is not a scaredy-cat, nor Twi a perfect mother. She’d probably just start going neurotic when something inevitably starts going wrong

Five of the seven reviews mention in some way or another that this fic is pure fluff, or that the story events have not much substance. My definition of a fluff fic here is a fic that has no story but a lot of cuteness. This is something I’ll address later on, but yeah. It’s more or less a total fluff fic.

Three of the reviews mention that the story took too long to set up its main plot. Before the story gets to the point, there's a pair of long scenes that are more or less unrelated to the meat of the story as a whole. 

On the mechanical side, three reviews cite excessive telling and general non-descriptive narration as issues. PaulAsaran's review does a pretty good job of explaining this, so go read it to get the full picture. Generally, though, the reviews all say that the writing is mostly sound and free of basic grammar errors.

The reviews also mostly concur that Astral Phoenix has done a pretty good job of writing an extremely cute interaction, and most of the reviewers enjoyed or at least were tolerant of this aspect. I also found the two fricking adorable. Maybe a little too adorable, even >.<

As for me, I don't have much to add to this discussion. I agree with the points all the previous reviews have brought up. Let's pretend I've done a normal review and get right to the scores, yea? 

Grammar and Use of Language
Good grammar, but very tell-y narration style. Most of the time we’re just told directly what the character is feeling rather than it being implied through action. There are also repetitions of specific descriptions, like the rain hitting like ‘miniature meteors’.

7/10

Characters and Characterisation
Mischaracterised show characters, but otherwise pretty cute. I’d make a point about the characters not having much depth, but I’ll go easy on that seeing as it’s a short story.

5/10

Story Structure and Plot
There is very little story in the fic. Through a lot of the scenes nothing really happens or changes, and things get very repetitive after a while. 

3/10

Overall: 5/10 - Enjoyable story, but it's more or less pure fluff with no actual substance and very noticeable mischaracterisations. All in all, it’s pretty bland after a while, but it’s short enough that it doesn’t grate as much as it could.

A quick(ish) tip

 
So, now that that's over with, we can get to the more interesting part: how can you ensure that your story has substance? Or in other words, how do you make sure that things actually happen in your story?

Here’s a quick, simple method. When reading through your story again, first write a short summary of each scene. Just for example, here’s one I threw together for your story.

WINGS SCENE LIST

The CMC and Dinky head to Sugarcube Corner to look for food before learning that there’s no space. They then head to the Library instead.

The fillies arrive at the library and start their meeting, while Apple Bloom is too tired to join them. Twilight questions her about it and offers her guest room, where AB heads off to sleep.

Twilight realises Apple Bloom is still in bed after everyone else has gone off. She starts showing her motherly side: treating AB like her child while she’s sleeping, comforting AB. Apple Bloom is startled by the lightning, and Twilight comforts her. Twilight lets AB stay for the night.

Apple Bloom is startled by the lightning, and Twilight comforts her. Multiple repetitions.

The two head to sleep, and Apple Bloom shows her appreciation of Twilight’s motherly actions.

Apple Bloom is startled by the lightning, and Twilight comforts her. Also Twilight sets up the forcefield around the library, solving the problem.

Twilight shows her (motherly) love for Apple Bloom in her thoughts.

Twilight makes pancakes for Apple Bloom in another gesture of love

Final Scene. Applejack comes to pick up Apple Bloom, and makes Twilight an honorary Apple family member, affirming her relationship with Apple Bloom.

Now, this is much easier to deal with than the whole story! So, with that done, identify the moments or actions that are in some way or another important to the central story. In this case, it’s exploring the relationship between Twilight and Apple Bloom; I’ve bolded the relevant points in each scene here.

What you’ll notice immediately is that there are several scenes with no important moments: the first two scenes, in fact. These are unnecessary scenes.

Next, we can start looking for repetitious points. “Apple Bloom is startled by the lightning, and Twilight comforts her” repeats in scenes 3, 4 and 6, multiple times. Additionally, “Twilight shows her love” in general repeats in scenes 3, 7 and 8. Having similar important moments is not an issue, but having almost identical ones in quick succession are. For this you’ll have to look at each moment in more detail to see if they’re actually repetitions of each other. A helpful question to ask is, is there anything new revealed in succeeding instances of the moments? Or does it show character development?

These moments definitely feel like copies of each other, though. Each instance of “Apple Bloom is startled by the lightning, and Twilight comforts her” feels almost identical to the last, and each moment of Twilight showing her love has Twilight demonstrating the same level of unconditional love with not much of a difference between the different scenes.

What we’re left with having eliminated those things that I pointed out is very few story events, but also a much ‘denser’ story; there’s more substance per word of story. It’s a pretty simple method, but it can also be used to check your story structure, or just whether you’re hitting the right notes with your story.

Hopefully my explanation makes sense, and this is actually helpful. As always, hope you guys have a good week ahead, and I’ll see you next time!

7012057
Good work here mate.