For A New Dawn - Status and call for your input. · 6:34pm Jun 4th, 2013
Okay I'll try to be nice and brief with this so I can get the ball rolling ASAP. There have been multiple trusted sources that have criticized major core facets of For A New Dawn and the reasoning that's been provided is very justified. It's been a little disappointing to say the least. I won't get into it. Basically my first success in writing really and I get a lot of bad reviews behind the scene.
...Excellent
I'd rather be told then be disillusioned and give you guys something half baked. As a result, I will be taking a chainsaw and violently tearing to pieces the first chapter to make sure I get it right this time.
This is where I need you awesome guys. The main issues that have been consistently beaten into me are as follows.
Bad pacing - I see it too. Will be working to trim it. Any feedback will really help me.
Synopsis - I can't write an accurate and interesting synopsis for the life of me. What was there definitely mislead a lot of people. That and I dropped a big and inaccurate spoiler about Celestia. I'll be removing it, but I assure you, it's not what you think it is.
Dusk - He came off as static, boring, gary-stu, and worst of all badass (one guy even called him mewtwo. That's weird). That's probably the biggest failure here. Dusk was never intended to come off as an over powered badass but that was definitely the message I put forth. My mistake. He's suppose to be, as one of the writers I work with put it "A child with a shotgun." I'll be working to limit him a bit more and showcasing more of his flaws, because he does have a huge list of them to counter his combat prowess he has to have.
As a second issue, I really want to ask: What was your favorite aspect to the story and what was your least favorite? This will really help me refine things and also understand how I came across. Common answers have been that people liked the idea of Twilight vs. her evil self, and didn't like the drag of the story or how Dusk came off as a character.
Any feedback on these will help me in getting the chapter to be what I had intended and I simply ask for your help with this. Thank you.
—Plague
Only one chapter in, and you've already got people complaining about this stuff? That has got to be some kind of record. Anyway, I'll see if I can't comment on this in a way that might help you.
I'm taking they think it's too slow? It's true that it reads a bit like that, but (just like Abcron said) the first chapter really reads more like a prologue, so the slow pacing isn't much of an issue to me personally. The story might benefit from a bit of trimming, especially surrounding the 'ritual', but it's not bad as it is.
I'm with you there, brother. Prologues and synopses have never been my strong suit, as you probably know already. Do whatever you feel is right with this one
Honestly, it's way too early to say ANYTHING about Dusk. His personality is quite robotic, but that's the point after all. He was more or less born to be a machine. Using this unique personality in interesting ways, and having him evolve from it, is likely the best way to go. As for the Gary Stu comment, I'll once again agree with Abcron in that he hasn't actually *done* anything yet. Being very powerful ISN'T what a Gary Stu is, as a lot of people believe. Being able to surpass every challenge without problem, or overcoming every character flaw easily, is what a Gary Stu is. We haven't seen nearly enough of Dusk to make a judgement about this.
Hello! I was going to post this on the story itself but I saw the blog and here I am killing two birds with one stone.
Overall, I don’t see a problem with the first chapter that demands rewriting, nitpicky readers are gonna nitpick. The fact that you got as much attention as you did means you did something right. I mean it did land in the feature box. So congrats on that!
But since you seem a bit set upon rewriting it I’ll offer a bit of constructive feedback. So here goes... just take whatever I say with a grain of salt. I’m not perfect and these are after all just opinions.
There is a lot of implied knowledge that the reader has to piece together. This mostly pertains to how this interacts with the canon timeline. It’d be nice to know exactly where we are starting relative to either the royal wedding / invasion or Twilight’s coronation. This will clear up the mugginess of how time passes, where we are, and if Twilight is an alicorn or not.
Also, was there a time passing between when he was created and his adventures with Blackout and Slipstream? If there was a significant one, you should probably mention it. I don’t see the Changelings risking their last hope by sending him out as soon as he’s born they would probably make sure he is ready before sending him out.. Perhaps show a learning session with D2? It would get more personality into it and explore their relationship better and satisfy those who want to see more character development. Just a thought.
As for Dusk, I would’ve liked to see him express more curiosity that should give him enough personality that people can cling to, maybe even a bit of childishness. Other than that he’s fine, all this gary-stu talk is nonsense. I think you set up something that is different than what most expect and can lead to some interesting and dare I say unique development.
As for the pacing, the description was extremely heavy and slow while the dialogue was fast and light in a lot of places. This made the story a bit unbalanced. Dialogue is an extremely hard thing to balance with description, and you must approach it differently than how you would in real life or in movies. In those there is no need to describe what is going on around them because the person can actively see it. In fiction there is no picture to see so all we have is our imagination. Break up the dialogue with a paragraph devoted singularly to description without anyone speaking. It allows a good change of pace and helps balance show and tell quite nicely. It also allows the reader to better imagine the scene as it happens, to see the characters saying the dialogue rather than just hearing the dialogue.
I wish I could go into more specifics here, but I digress.
The biggest pacing problem I saw was you fell into the "try to explain magic" trap that many fanfiction writers (myself included) have struggled with. This because the show doesn't explain it at all, and leads it completely open to speculation. The action of explaining it isn't bad, it's just whenever it's done, it always sounds clunky and really heavy on the, (as I like to put it), the Watson-Holmes effect: i.e. one character lays down rapid fire questions while the other would just answer with their near-infinite knowledge on the subject. The problem is that the reader has to wade through a whole bunch of magic-babble for a while and can come out lost and often more confused than before. Then later in the story said knowledge is often recalled later.
My suggestion would be to really cut down this section here to something smaller and more about the Arcana if needed, but perhaps it’s too soon for this. If at all possible, try to space the magic-babble out a bit over the course of a few different sections.
Personally, I found that if you start your story with a shorter first chapter, more people will get around to reading it and thus have more views likes and faves in the beginning. If the first part is good then they would want to see more longer chapters. I’ve seen a well designed story get significantly less views and likes solely because the story is a single 60,000+ word chapter.Again this is more the fault of the majority of the reading base expecting something short and quick and not a novel. This is more of a stylistic thing that is completely subjective and I could be dead wrong.
Again, just my opinion—a nitpicky one at that. Honestly, the only blatant problem I saw was pacing really, and that was only at certain places. Don’t get so bogged down by what everyone else thinks, that only leads to angry thoughts and turning writing into work. Just don’t let everyone tell you how to write your story, it has great potential.
Wow that was longer than expected. Good luck, and write on!
An honest critique,
~Midway Bridge
P.S. if you need a pre-reader I’d be more than happy to oblige.
1125691>>1125364>>1125494
Thank you guys a ton for the help on this. I've been a little tied down with school recently, but made quite a bit of progress. I've restructured and trimmed it all the way from 8.8K to something like 6K and I like it a lot and started on the scene characterizing Dusk. Fortunately, it's not so much that I need to rebuild him, so much as re-communicate him as what he was really supposed to be. This has been requiring a bit more research and time to get right but I think I can do it.
I'll put up a post when I update things. There won't be too much to catch up on.