Bradel Brainstorming – I Can't Do This Anymore · 2:36am Jan 9th, 2014
It's too hard, and I no longer have the desire or the willpower to continue.
Wait, what? You didn't think I was talking about writing pony stories, did you? No, of course I'm going to keep doing that. I love pony stories. Writing them is one of the things that keeps me sane. Reading them can be a real highlight of my week.
Not blogging about writing either. I know I haven't done that in a while, but I'll be doing it again in a couple hundred words here. That, too, is wonderful.
What I'm talking about is... No, it's not Equestria Daily, either. I'm going to jump on the chat with them later tonight, do some apologizing, and see if they'll let me read a couple new stories for them. Jesus, people. Will you let me finish?
No, the thing I have neither the desire nor the willpower to continue doing, that's calling this man my nemesis:
Skywriter.
Jeffrey C. Wells.
Author of Skin Horse, bearer of the Element of Love, and all around wonderful human being.
I mean "pegasus pony". Yeah.
Okay, so what's up with this blog post? Well, I was shooting my mouth off over on one of Bad Horse's blogs, and he told me I ought to write a post about why Skywriter is such a good writer. His comment to this effect got, shall we say, a few upvotes. So here I am, declaring an end to hostilities.
And also to delve into why—at least in my opinion—Skywriter is one of the best authors on this site, perhaps the best.
But if I'm going to talk about Skywriter's writing, I need an example to discuss. So what do I pick?
Contraptionology, probably my single favorite long-form story on this site?
Heretical Fictions, which hit me so hard that... oh, just go read the comments.
Martial Bliss, possibly the best 1500-word piece I've read and the one that started all this nemesis nonsense?
No, that's not a fair way to do this. If I'm going to tell you why Skywriter is fantastic—and why you should absolutely be following him, if you aren't already—I need to come at him fresh. And that means reading one of his stories I haven't actually sunk my teeth into yet.
So let's go with "Beloved", his follow-up to "Heretical Fictions". Solitair has provided his own critique of this story in the comments below. I'll do my best to remain fair and impartial, and not at all fanboyish.
I'm sure that's going to go real well.
One hour later
Okay, if you're going to insist on reading my blog and not going off to read Skywriter, I'm going to throw some of his words at you. Here are the first five paragraphs of "Beloved".
In the end, the cloud cover hadn't lasted that long after all.
Beneath the chilly light of a waxing gibbous moon, three little ponies – a pearl-gray, silver-maned earth pony, a little violet unicorn, and a somewhat disoriented-looking pale yellow pegasus tribesmare – skulked through the Canterlot sculpture garden, en route to the castle's westward walls.
Let me repeat this, for emphasis: I was skulking. Across my own lawn.
It is difficult for words to describe the oddity, but I will try, nevertheless: I have crept; I have snuck; I have sidled; I have tiphoofed; I have on occasion even, if one is to believe some of the more florid poets of my fair kingdom, Tripped Lightly, Yea, Not Unlike the First Sunne of Morrow 'Pon Well-Tempered Seas.
I have never, in my memory, skulked. And I have a very long memory.
Fair use! Fair use!
So this isn't perfect—I never claimed he was perfect, and for all I know I'm responsible for more of his negative reviews than anyone else—but what a way to start a story! Ignore the "after all" and the perhaps-too-purple scene-setting. What's the best part of this introduction?
Celestia, being word-persnickety.
We haven't gotten a single character name, but if you don't know who's narrating this story, you're just not paying attention. And boy howdy, do we know a lot about the narrator. She owns a very nice house. She has a very long memory. She does not skulk. And poets really need to shut up about her.
"When donning disguises and mingling amongst the common folk, it is important to be as secretive as possible for maximal fun!"
Nightmare Night makes a lot more sense, now.
But always and ever since then, that distance in her eyes… And, I expected, in mine as well…
This thing is layered. We've got Celestia, not quite sure what's going on and very wary. We've got Twilight, acting like the giddy schoolfilly she always is, at heart. We've got Luna, pretending to be the princess she was never very good at being. And we've got all sorts of trouble brewing beneath the surface. Everypony but Twilight hiding her fears and motivations. Given that I've read the story description, I'm calling foreshadowing.
"Don't sound so glum, my faithful student," I said, catching up to Twilight. "I am bound and determined to have a good time with the both of you, to-night."
One hyphen, and a bucket-full of characterization.
"I wouldn't worry," said Twilight, with the easy confidence of the completely inexperienced. "After all, Canterlot's such a nice city, right?"
Well, I didn't claim he was subtle.
The evening had not gone as planned.
I'm skipping some very good material before that line, but I don't want this to just turn into a swamp of Skywriter-text.
I've said this before, in various places, but it bears repeating. No one on this site, no one, starts stories as well as Skywriter. This is just a scene change, and I'm sucked in so hard I'm still looking for the event horizon. The first eight words of "Infernal Machines" are, for my money, the best first-eight-words I've read. They demand your attention.
What Skywriter's doing here, on the scene change, isn't nearly as efficient, but it's still excellent work. Transitions are a pain. They're a lot easier to handle if you just ignore them. So we get a smash cut straight to action, we start the next scene in media res, and we don't actually find out what happened next until we're well and truly engrossed in the scene. We want to know what happens next, which is precisely the right time to drop any necessary exposition. Reader interest is a fine balancing act. You can do all sorts of things to lose it. Gaining it is harder, and you usually can't gain interest everywhere. That way lies writing-by-entirely-too-much-action, c.f. how Rainbow Dash does it.
Skywriter is doing something fairly basic but really critical here. He's bridging scenes in a way that makes sure you can't check out from the story just yet, and then once he's gotten a toehold, he's free to step back and spend a little interest to bring the narrative up to speed. You see a lot of writers these days doing this by ending chapters on cliffhangers (I'm looking at you, YA Fiction). That works well, but it's also kind of annoying. It's nice to be able to put a book down from time to time. Skywriter's a decent kind of mensch, and he's giving us an actual break with that scene change—but when we come back to the story, he's refilling that interest bank account as fast as he can manage. It's good stuff.
Indigo scales glittering with aggrieved pique, he bid us all farewell and shooed us out the door, leaving us confused and dinnerless.
My favorite kind of sentence—one that ends somewhere unexpected.
"Oh, never mind," said Twilight. "Chopsticks are pretty difficult for an earth pony and a pegasus to manage, anyway!" She winked theatrically at the both of us, throwing into startling relief that it was not me Luna should be worrying about when it came to "breaking character". "C'mon, 'Moonbeam'! C'mon, 'Heartfelt'!" she said, trotting away. "Let's go find us another restaurant!"
Yay, conflicting emotions! On the one hand, Twilight is cracking me up. On the other, I kind of want to grab her by the shoulders, shake her, and make her understand that, no, actually, letting on that you're slumming Canterlot with the royal diarchs is maybe not such a good idea. Oh, sure, you're with them. You'll be safe as houses. But somepony might have to incur some serious property damage or bodily harm before things sort themselves out.
Eventually her patience gave, and she broke into a mad charge toward one of the food carts lining the public square we found ourselves in, desperate for a candy apple or a falafel or something, but Twilight faced her down in much the same way she had once faced down Luna's corrupted shadow, explaining – in no uncertain terms – that this night was too special for vending-cart food.
Have I mentioned that this is standard Skywriter. This story is tagged [Slice of Life] only.
Come for the entree, but feel free to enjoy the complimentary salad and breadsticks. And wine. And dessert. And heated neck massage.
Canterlot's airship docks are a triumph of activity in any hour of the day, in any weather. They spread out in a broad arc across the face of the mountain like some sort of busy insect colony, stretching all the way from the luxury private yacht-berths of the west end, past the merchant marine piers with their massive cargo cranes, up to the shipyards themselves beyond. In a very real sense, the docks are a city unto themselves, a city filled with buskers, hawkers, fillies-of-ill-repute, sailors, stevedores and all manner of good solid salt-of-the-earth ponies, some of whom smelled better than others. Beneath the long, ponderous shadows of airship envelopes, lit up in this light like an assemblage of moon-jellies from deep beneath the ocean, we walked along, our hopeless quest continuing.
When you write description and want it to stick, there are a couple nice tricks to have at your disposal. One of them is multi-sensory imagery. I read an adage, once, that descriptions only really stick in the mind when they hit three senses. Visual descriptions are easy, and I'll admit that's most of what Skywriter has here. But there are hints of sound with the mention of buskers and hawkers (who take pride of place at the front of that list—I doubt this is intentional, but Skywriter has good instincts and I think they're probably cluing into the importance of the auditory hint here, even if he wasn't doing this consciously). And there's a brief mention of smell, as well. But don't assume sensory imagery has to fit nicely into our standard five senses. I'd argue that "the long, ponderous shadows of airship envelopes" stands alone as a separate sensory input. Most of us probably have the experience of being in the shadow of some towering, enormous thing. There's a feel to that, almost physical, and that makes the description here a little easier to latch on to.
Most of what Skywriter is throwing out here, though, is simile. Describing a thing is often easiest when you just make reference to some other thing that it's like. If you tell me an office is busy, I don't get much of an image in my head. If you tell me an office is like an insect colony, I jump straight to imagining people in suits bustling between cubicles, stacks of paper in hand. It's an efficient way of doing description. Certainly not the only way, and certainly not the best way in every circumstance, but I think it's a solid choice here. We want a feel for this scene, but we don't need to dig in too deeply unless we're going to be coming back to scenery elements that interact with our characters. As long as the reader can create an image that will function and not jar with later details of a scene, things are good.
If you're reading along, make sure to check out the next few hundred words past the quote above, too. There's a lot of excellent descriptive work in here, and Skywriter goes multi-sensory a lot.
"Regard this, Miss Twilight and Miss Heartfelt!" cried Luna, returning to us after having slipped away during my little confrontation. "To distract myself from my aching hunger, I have just given two bits to a cunning 'performance artist' who stands in one of these public squares in the semblance of a bronze statue! I FIND HIS 'ACT' TO BE MOST INGENOUS!"
And this is why everypony loves Luna.
Okay, that said, I'm going to take a break from this incessant commenting and read this story for a while. It's got me hooked, and I'm still less than half way through it. I'll be back in a bit.
Another hour later
Or, from your perspective, right now, I suppose. Hello again, person who didn't go anywhere!
I swear, this stream of consicousness thing is about as timey-wimey as it gets.
...and now that I've read the story, this is exactly what I was anticipating / afraid of:
I'm sure this is going to go well.
Just go read the damned story, already. It's beautiful, and poignant, and far better than anything else you're likely to read tonight. It's the best sort of Luna and the best sort of Celestia. It's "Lullaby for a Princess" and "Home" and all the things I wish I could write for you. But I'm not that good.
And that's why you need to read Skywriter.
Okay, so here you're recommending a follow-up fic to a spinoff fic to a huge fic that it's gonna take me a while to get around to reading. What did my free time ever do to you?
I commend you for trying to analyze Skywriter's awesomeness instead of just falling over at it and twitching for a while like us mere mortals do.
That bit about the descriptions is useful. I'll have to make use of it — although that way lies madness and self-comparisons to Skywriter and cringing inadequacy, so I'll have to do so very carefully.
1697647
If it helps your free time any, "Beloved" stands as well as it does on its own. You don't really need to have read "Heretical Fictions" to understand it.
(EDIT: Except, I suppose, the bit about the Solar Throne near the end, but I think y'all can get it from context.)
He's not just great, either, he's consistently great. Every one of his stories is like that, even the stupid joke one-shots.
I'm honored, really I am. Really far more than I deserve. Thank you for not mentioning my extremely non-professional use of capital letters and the disgustingly twee Snowdrop-like titular OC I inserted into the second half of the narrative. Holy crap I hate how I write kids.
1697647
1697694
Agreed. It's been probably a year since I read Eternal, and a good six months since "Heretical Fictions". I didn't feel much lack for not being current with them. They inform the characterization of Celestia and Luna here, a little, but it's not like those characterizations aren't well inside fanfiction-standard at this point.
Though I should say that Eternal and "Heretical Fictions" are definitely still worth your time, when you have it. NB that Eternal isn't Skywriter, though, and the first couple chapters can drag a little. But the payoff is amazing.
1697702
I kind of liked her, to tell you the truth. But we didn't have to spend a whole lot of time with her, which might have helped. And she felt a bit more like a Derpy expy, though I can see why you make the Snowdrop connection.
I think it was Vimbert who once pointed out my own use of capitals, and in a far less critical way than he might normally have done. Which I mention by way of saying, I think they actually have a bit of a place. Italics for emphasis, allcaps (or 'Canterlock' if you prefer) for shouting. Dockworkers, Luna, and Rainbow Dash do enough of the latter and routinely lack the subtlety necessary to correctly manage the former that I think it works.
1697704
I have 226 stories on my to-read list, and Eternal and Heretical Fictions are both there. Looks like I'll have to ration out those chapters if I want to do any actual writing of my own.
Oh, good. It's hard being a fan of both ends of a bitter rivalry. It's like in Civilization when I try to befriend the world and everyone grows to hate me because I'm friends with their most hated enemies, and I end up being the most despised person on the globe despite not having done anything.
And then I perform artillery barrages until they love me again.
What were we talking about?
Oh, right, Skywriter. Yeah, he's pretty much awesome incarnate.
1697762
Yeah, that happened to me when I tried playing Master of Orion II.
Now I just want to see what dirt Bad Horse was slinging around here to start this whole thing. Can someone hit me up with a link?
Looks like this is Skywriter week. I just finished spending several hours annotating "Torn Apart and Devoured by Lions", for posting tomorrow or the next day.
I will absolutely agree that Contraptionology is a brilliant story. I wouldn't call it my number one favorite—that goes to It Takes a Village—but it is certainly in my top five.
Also, the rest of his stories are pretty rad, too. He's just a swell author!
1697775
Ooh, thanks! I especially appreciate traffic to my non-Pony stuff, as it doesn't get quite as much love.
1697838 That is a silly thing to say. Google "torn apart and devoured by lions" Jeffrey Wells:
... and going through the first 30 or so, they are all reviews that mention that story.
1697775 Why do I get the feeling that isn't a feel-good comedy, or a romance...
1697660
Don't do it! Self-comparisons to Skywriter are the leading cause of suicide among Fimfic writers!
Remember, boys and girls, Skywriter is a robot from the future, designed in the machine-foundries of Regulon V to be the perfect writer. His sub-mesonic brain is the size of a planet and is capable of processing upwards of sixty million similes a second, and his Synthetic Soul programming give him delicate poetic sensibilities tunable from 'classical Greek' to 'hostile punkadelic.' You can never, never write as well as him, but that's okay, because you don't have the still-living mind-states of sixty thousand of the very best writers in galactic history implanted in your memory banks.
This message brought to you by Writers Against Skywriter-induced Shame-suicide.
1697838
Well, it would help if you were to link to it from time to time and... what? Top of your user page you say? Really? A blog and everything?
I guess I'm just rubbish then.
1698219
Unbelievably, it is in fact a feel-good comedy.
1698186
Oh, yes, that particular one was pretty well-received. I just meant that it's nice that you're reminding people that Pony isn't all I do, because in general I get less loving on my conventional non-comic non-derivative work.
1698415
I wonder if there's a better way to drive traffic from here to there without needlessly spamming those who are just here for the horses?
1698443
Honestly, I'd just post a blog with a link every time something new shows up on Scrivnarium. It's dead easy to ignore a blog post, and I suspect that the majority of your watchers would welcome fresh Skywriter words even without pastel horses in 'em. I know I would.
Well... I can't say I didn't expect this the moment you declared your rivalry
.
I'm a bit surprised you never read Beloved until now. It's one of Skywriter's best and seems to be the best conclusion of the Sun Nag's character arc until we get something better.
1697702
It probably helped that the focus never left Celestia and Luna. The story remained about them.
1698915
There are actually quite a few I haven't read. I was late to the Skywriter party, above and beyond just being late to the pony party in general. At least 6/22 by my count, and possibly more than that. It's nice to have a few things sitting in reserve for a rainy day, when I find myself really in need of a pony fix.
'course, it wouldn't hurt if 1697694 wrote more stuff that was unabashedly happy instead of being all feels-packed—because when I really need ponies, I usually need them to cheer me up, and I can't go slog through all however-many-thousand words of Contraptionology all the time.
I'd say something or other about, "Why doesn't this fandom write more happy stories," but I suspect it's because the show already comes pre-packaged in little 22-minute bliss capsules.
ETA: And people wonder why I tend to write with so much original flavor...
1697702
Also, I just wanted to notify you because I get the feeling that this comment will be more like a blog post that I grafted onto another blog post because of reasons.
I'm about to type up a longer comment, but yeah, the title character was indeed the weakest part of the story. Too pwecious. And that name, good lord.
-----
Alright. I pretty much ignored everyone's advice and read Eternal and Heretical Fictions before this story. It was good advice, too, because not only was the background knowledge pretty much unnecessary, but Beloved is a much better story than either of its predecessors.
I liked Eternal for just how deep it was willing to go into character psychology and the examination of a relationship (and it convinced me that Pinkie Pie would make a good mayor), but reading near the end was like forcing myself to finish an entire extra-large pizza. It eventually became less about the texture and details that Device Heretic worked so hard on (and then dropped in the epilogue) and more about wanting to know what would happen next.
Heretical Fictions was a very different beast that I'm not as enamored of as much as I get the feeling you all want me to be (except the humble author himself). The shift in tone between the comedic aspects like the concept of characters reacting to fanfiction of them and the sad bits with Twilight getting worried about her relationship with Celestia was clunky. Skywriter made the odd choice of throwing in made-up fantasy words that threw me for a loop and took me out of the flow a bit (though I'm sure that hardcore Skywriter fans who have sampled his ouvre like fine wine will no doubt scoff at my confusion
), and this new fanon also feels a bit weird, like putting my shoes on the wrong feet. But I don't regret reading it, since the idea of all of the fanfics being books that the show's characters can just read still makes me smile. I can't wait to see the look on Pinkie Pie's face when she sees how Kkat envisioned her future. 
Beloved does a much better job of transitioning between the happy and sad bits than Heretical Fictions, and it takes much less time sketching a good portrait of Celestia with her fears and worries than Eternal did. Aside from the issue with Beloved's characterization (Beloved? Really with that name!), I can't think of anything I would have done differently.
As for how Skywriter's prose has been treated, I'm not quite at Bradel's level where I need to clean the screen off after reading the story for the first time, but I definitely appreciate it. It's a different kind of appreciation than I'm used to; normally when I read something with prose that stands out (like Eternal), I realize that it's so grandiose, florid, or complicated that it's something that I'd have to work really hard to replicate, if I can do it at all. But Skywriter (in this story at least) exemplifies a kind of quality that I feel I could actually achieve on my own if I could buckle down and spend time actually writing my own stuff.
Wow, I actually came off like a real critic for a second there.
1753805
Me, fanboyishly adoring another writer's work to the point where I find it necessary to pretend to be his nemesis to cover up the fact that I'm shamefully enthralled by the things he writes?
*cough* No, I say! You are mistaken, sir! This is in no way a fair characterization of me and my perhaps biased viewpoint! For shame!
(Thanks for adding on the long-form critique here! It's wonderful, and I'm going to go put a mention in the blog post in case anyone ever comes and reads this again)
1754092
I felt like such a bastard phrasing it that way.
But I do thank you for the learning opportunity this blog post provided.
Also, I feel very similarly about Ether Echoes, so I know where you're coming from about the wanton admiration.
1753805
Thank you for the remarkably in-depth feedback here! For what its worth, I know exactly what you mean about the approachability thing. It's why some writers that are technically more "pop" novelists inspire me far more than the classics do.
1754483
I don't mind fantasy terms in general, but I've never seen it done in multiple short stories instead of a novel before. Is there a glossary on a blog post of yours that I can read?
1754939
Meh, I just kind of make it up as I go and then it sticks for future stories if there's no need to change it. No glossary, sorry.
1754949
Alright. Can you at least tell me what that word beginning with the letter V means, please?
1756241
That's actually a real word, not a made-up one! It's the legitimate feminine form of the word "viceroy," someone who sits on the throne in the absence of a monarch, which is literally the role Twi is being groomed for here.
1756310
Oh right. The thought had crossed my mind, but I never connected the dots because I just assumed that if you meant "viceroy," you would have just said it. Guess not.
1756313
I like fancy obscure real words!
Whalp, I guess I'm finally reading that first then!
iambrony.steeph.tp-radio.de/mlp/gif/132814619872s.gif
*BRB*
*Afterwords*
Whalp, that happened. Shaking my metaphorical fist at both of you, now. You're right, Skywriter is just that good.
1756353 Your stories more than most have me frequently googling words, but I never feel like you're trying to impress me, because they always fit in so naturally!
2013493
Thank you! I'm glad I avoid Thesaurus Disease in your eyes.