First Impression Critique: Supernatural - By Saternaut

Doing this again. Criticism is for the soul, I guess.
Link to Fimfiction's Guide to Writing: http://www.fimfiction.net/writing-guide

Link to story: http://www.fimfiction.net/story/174334/supernatural

Date: March 16, 2014

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Firstly, the most important thing that will attract the readers on a work of literature would be the description itself. It gives readers expectations on the story, as if it will be interesting or not. Failing to achieve the basic things such as grammar, summarization, and knowing when to stop will cause readers to instantly become disinterested of a story. Going over key elements of the description will help in creating an interesting summary for readers to become interested in a story.

1. For this website, no story needs more than four tags to describe the story. The limit put on stories have been placed for a well reason, which is to stop people putting every single tag when the story slightly relates to the tag put up for it. Tags are used to tell readers what they are getting themselves into, such as genres of the story. If skimming slightly over a descriptive tag in a story without having it as a main theme, such as “Comedy”, then the tag isn't worth putting up to describe the story. Staying on the specific tag put for the story, as the entire theme of the story, will make it eligible to be put up as a tag for the story. The only good tags for this story would be “Crossover”, “Adventure”, “Alternate Universe”, and “Human”. When putting tags such as “Random”, they are more centered around “stories are similar to comedy ones, but tend to be a lot weirder and are often full of references to internet culture.” Tags such as “WTF” or “Crazy” would fall under the category of “Random”. The tag “Sad” should only be used if truly necessary, as it heavily reflects on the plot or theme.

With “Comedy” tagged stories, "unless your story is packed to the brim with jokes and intended to keep the reader laughing all (or most) of the way through, it’s not comedy. Having little bits of humour sprinkled around your slice-of-life or adventure story is a good idea (if it fits the mood) and I encourage it, but a few jokes here and there are no reason to call your work a comedy.

And another thing: unless your joke-packed extravaganza that keeps the reader laughing all the way through is a story, you’d be better off giving it a Random tag. Stories, even comedic ones, need plots and characters." So, unless it is truly to the theme of the story would the “Comedy” tag be needed.

2. There are plenty of things that can add to a story, and can also remove from it. The overuse of ellipses (the “...”), usage of numbers instead of the word for the number (using #1 instead of number one), et cetera.

Touching up a bit on how to use ellipses: "Ellipses should not be overused in fiction… their use in narration is often frowned on… because they are distracting… and also a cheap way to build suspense. They work better in dialogue, usually to signify the speaker trailing off… In addition, an ellipsis has exactly three (3) dots." The majority of times when ellipses are used, they can easily be replaced by commas or periods, since all they’re doing is adding a pause in a work of literature.

With the usage of the this line: “Attracting people from all around....including racers....illegal racers”, this is a pure example of using too many ellipses. Two ellipses in one sentence will only cause people to either (a) lose all interest in the story, (b) have strain and disinterest for the literature, or (c) make them read on because they truly want to know how bad the work of literature is. Another thing would be the spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors. Having a spell checker checking for errors is a huge help, as long as the spell checker is reliable.

3. Grammar is a very important and delicate thing that has been created for the specific reason to be followed. The main failing point in the description is that there aren’t spaces where there need to be. An example of this would described “Full of nice cars and fancy,big houses.” Things such as these are easy to fix and should be fixed immediately, because no one likes to look at a story full with errors.

Word/punctuation usage is pretty important in a work of literature. It’s never a good idea to write literature if one doesn't has the basic understanding of grammar, spelling, and punctuation of the language that is being used, such as English.

A tip on word usage would be to add in a broader vocabulary of words in the story. Although simple words such as “nice”, “fancy”, and “big” are simple and easy to use, directly getting a point across on detail, interest can be added to a story if using words such as “extravagant”, “stylish”, or “humungous”. There are over a million words in the English language, and finding one that will be able to fit in a work of literature isn’t that hard, especially when thing such as Thesauruses exist. Though, when adding a more broad vocabulary in a story, don’t overuse it, as it can become annoying for the reader, as well as using too many advanced words, for that can become obnoxious. Moderation is key, simply adding a few advanced vocabulary words will do.

In the description, it had stated that "The equestria part starts off at the end of the chapter 'Exitus Acta Probat' in 'The Brewing Storm'". This isn't really ideally the best thing, for "Fanfiction readers are notoriously impatient and fickle, and forcing them to read through a bunch of stuff they likely don’t care about before they can get to the story they’re trying to read is a bad idea.
I do think that it’s especially important for authors of stories which don’t use canon characters in main roles to think pretty deeply about whether their fic needs to be based on MLP. if you’re making your own characters and telling their story in, let’s say, far-distant future Equestria where everything’s war-torn and unrecognisable, and the princesses are dead, then you really need to think deeply about whether your story would actually benefit from being tied to the canon of a little girl’s show about ponies."

Now, for the actual story --

Something of great importance when writing literature is knowing how to break a story into different scenes, as this story uses it. The thing though that needed to be covered, however, is how long the break is. The writer is on an iPad, and filled the entire line on his screen with dashes for the break. That is something that should never be done. Doing a short break will do the exact same thing without stress from others who have a smaller screen, and view that as a ten line break.

Moving onto the first sentence of the story, incorrect usage of proper tenses is already active. When "John watched as he saw the police come out of every direction", John did not watch himself see police cars appearing (Unless you're "daring metafictional pieces of time-travel"). This is using “as he saw” redundantly, since “watched” has already been used as a past tense verb. Another thing is that the story used both past and present tense in the same sentence, as “watched” is past tense and “come out” is present tense. Simply fixing it to “the police came from every direction” would fix it.

Something that should be strayed away from while creating books is the usage of links in a story. This is meant to be a book, not some homestuck-style-reference-everything-on-the-internet type of literature, unless, of course, it was intended to be, although it would give readers even less of a reason to read, since they’re on fimfiction, to read books.

Going back onto grammar, it’s always important to add commas before addressing someone. The usage of “Talking to yourself again Rog?” is done incorrectly, as it should be “Talking to yourself again, Rog?” This should as well be used when not using names, but still addressing a person or group of people. “Catch me if you can boys” is done incorrectly and should be corrected to, “Catch me if you can, boys”.

Although there have been plenty of corrections throughout the story, such as grammar, spelling, punctuation, past tense, present tense, et cetera, there are a number of things done correctly. One thing done correctly would be the characterization of each character. "So unless werewolves suddenly start appearing out of nowhere, were gonna worry about the racers first” is a nice example of the characterization used in the story. Another thing done correctly would be the splitting of paragraphs for each individual speaking. Since both basic concepts are done correctly, needing to work on it isn’t really required.

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Breaking the third person perspective for the conclusion: As a reader who has read this story, or at least the first chapter of it, I would not recommend this as a good story. There are way too many grammatical errors done in which could easily be fixed if given time for fixing. The readers who do read this would be too distracted by the many errors. The overuse of ellipses in the description as well as the over-usage in tags would disinterest anyone who gave a first look at the story. Although being that the characterization and format is done well, there are too many flaws in the story. If the author had spent the time to fix the grammatical, spelling, and punctuation errors before releasing to the public, then maybe it could had been a good read if it were on a different site due to it’s vagueness referencing alone to ponies.