New fic recommendation: Prismatic · 9:35pm Nov 14th, 2023
Shaslan's Prismatic won't show up on the front page, because she posted it in a blog post instead of as a story. It's only 791 words, which someone decided is too short to be a real story.
I respect an author who refuses to pad a story for publication. It happens more-often than you might suspect, not just on fimfiction, but in print. It's probably the only way to sell a novella today. Just one more reason we need e-publication to replace bookstores built on the stumps of a billion murdered trees.
You know how GhostOfHeraclitus' story "Twilight Sparkle Makes a Cup of Tea" is the story people point at to explain "show, don't tell"? "Prismatic" is going to be the story I point at to show people what good description can do. Description of images, of action, of inaction, of character, all added together to make a description of a feeling of--peace, contentment, Geborgenheit, interlude, the eye of the hurricane, the calm between storms, the blissful emptiness of lovers spooning after an hour of pouring themselves out into each other--there's probably a Sanskrit or Japanese word for it.
It's not a tutorial on description; there are no scents (it takes place on a cloud), and not much sense of touch. But it's a great example of description, and of how to pile it up to describe a seemingly ineffable feeling.
Rainbow lingered there, in that one rare moment of peace. Suspended above the world, where houses were reduced to specks and ponies to silence. Looking down on it all, knowing that not one bit of it had the power to touch her up here. The earth below was nothing more than a painting, laid out for her to view – a work of art.
The whole story is written on that level. That one paragraph stops time, gives a visual description, draws a logical deduction from it of distance, then deduces invulnerability from that distance, then uses a visual metaphor to clarify that sense of invulnerability as being the sense of disinterested superiority that 19th-century artists believed was necessary to experience the full aesthetic impact of a work of art. That's a lot for 4 sentences, and the final metaphor fits it all to Rainbow's character perfectly.
Also pay attention to the point of view. It's crucial for this lush description not to be from Rainbow Dash's point of view, because Rainbow would never talk like that. I can't say exactly how Shaslan prevents it from being RD's POV, but she does. It helps that there are so few spoken words, and those words contrast strongly with the narrator's text.
All that is great, and makes it a great educational story for writers, but doesn't make it a great story. What makes "Twilight Sparkle Makes a Cup of Tea" a great story isn't that it shows instead of telling, but what it shows of how Twilight feels about Celestia. What makes "Prismatic" a great story is that Shaslan uses this artistry to show us the flip side of Rainbow Dash, one I don't recall seeing in the show, but which Shaslan convinced me exists as necessarily as a coin's front side proves the existence of a backside.
Rating: Classic.
Score: Infinity minus 4, for saying the silence was shattered, having an echo in the sky, and two other nitpicks that my inner obsessive-compulsive professor cares about only as illustrations of minor points of theory.
Thank you for the review, which is almost the same length as the story and probably better written! Thank you also for teaching me the word Geborgenheit, which I'd never heard before.
5754940 Life is a learning process. Sometimes that lesson is "Don't do that again." The good ones are "Almost perfect. One more try."
I appreciate your continued commitment to finding our at least calling out diamonds here.
It is hella good short story, yes.
True, although if she has at least a 209-word short to go with it, it could be published as an anthology and at least be more visible than a blog post. I'm not saying she should, just that she could. I note that FOME makes this point in the blog post comments, though I haven't read further down yet as I haven't read the fic (also definitely a yet) and would prefer to avoid any spoilers.