Star Dust - Waiting for the Beginning to End

“People have forgotten how to tell a story. Stories don’t have a middle or an end any more. They usually have a beginning that never stops beginning.” - Steven Spielberg

Also, spoiler alert, Luna is a changeling!

Not really. But a quick aside before I get into this, cover art is part of the story too. When the art for itself is a spoiler for one of your reveals, you may want to consider changing it. But on second thought, is it really a spoiler in this case since it appears to be the focus of the story? Let’s dive right into it.

I just got done reading the incomplete Star Dust by Juu50x. Seeing that cover art on my iPhone made me curious as to what might lie within its pages, but after spending the better portion of my morning reading, it reminded me all too much of my mistakes when I first began writing. I felt a need to explain things that were happening in my fictional worlds and it got drawn out, boring and confusing. In regards to this story, let’s just say that I found a good example of what happens when exposition gets too long, ten chapters too long to be exact.

Just a heads up, I’ll be dropping writing terminology like it’s hot throughout the critique. Most mean exactly what they sound like, but I suggest googling terms or picking up a book like Story: Substance, Structure, and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee to alleviate any possible confusion. It’s focused on Screenwriting, but a good read for any storyteller in my opinion. I spot it frequently in John Green’s library during a Vlogbrothers videos for all you Nerdfighters out there. If you click the link the Book is more or less directly to the left of John's head near the center of the frame. However realizing I just made two plugs for unrelated things, I’m gonna stop with my free advertising for them. Moving on!

Something I recommend all writers is to be familiarized with Three-Act Structure. Used a great deal in scriptwriting for plays, television, and movies, the classic method of storytelling is a way of building the backbone of your story gives you solid foundation for your story’s events. For many, it is rigid and restrictive not letting the writer allow their creative muses to flow, but strict focus is what many novice writers need to be sure to pace the flow of their plots accordingly as to not meander through their stories and get to what’s important.

In Star Dust, we see this problem creep up on us as we go with the flow of the story. The work never clearly establishes where it’s going. We see Twilight Sparkle buy firewood, freak out over a royal invitation, ensuring her friend’s attendance, and many other happenings that add nothing to the story which easily confuses the reader by misdirecting what is important. Throughout the story, I found myself asking “Why am I reading this?” when something would happen and quickly resolve itself. There is no focus as to what is going to occur to give us a reason for reading about the lives of beloved background ponies like Lyra or Octavia nor is there any reason for Star Dust to get drunk when nothing happens. This reminds me of the principle of Chekhov’s Gun, pulling the quote from Wikipedia (Take that college professors and your hatred for the wiki):

Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.
—Anton Chekhov

To summarize Mr. Chekhov, don’t go putting elements in a story that ultimately wasteful and bearing no purpose. For instance, In playwriting, you don’t bring on a character without some meaning behind it. Aside from the character not adding to the story, this means a tangible loss for the people putting the play on as it means another person has to be hired on and another costume has to be made for basically no reason: a truly meaningless expense which is a death sentence for any play. In the same sense, the firewood, the parties, the interactions with the different ponies, babysitting, none of it matters in the long run as the story goes right now and just adds to the word count which eventually wears the eyes out of tedious detail.

Looking at our Three-Act Structure plotline, the readers are waiting for that moment a problem arises to be focused on, the Inciting Incident. Something needs to upset the balance of the story so much that the central character or agent of action must address this imbalance to bring about a satisfying conclusion to the story, be it positive or negative. We don’t have that here, at least clearly. The first different thing that occurs is a shy and lonely pony named Star Dust meets Twilight Sparkle. This action of the story refocuses our attention as we seek some sort of problem or conflict to arise from Twilight Sparkle making friends with a lonely Star Dust by inviting her to spend a week in Ponyville. It’s what the story seems to be about as it happens in Chapter 3, two chapters later than it should be. However, this proves fruitless as well considering how the next chapters tell of her interactions with everypony, and I do mean everypony, of significance in Ponyville.

The problem is, for all the actions in the slice-of-life we get, nothing happens. Sure, mundane problems occur, but nothing actually happens enough that shifts the balance of the story one way or the other as they are resolved fairly quickly. Star has a great deal of fun with Twilight in her friends while dropping “subtle” hints about her mysterious past, which I guess is an attempt at keeping an air of intrigue about, but again, the cover art. Seasoned veterans of Friendship is Magic knows, aside from Maud Pie, the mane 6 know how to treat a guest to their small town splendors from the get-go. The reader knows unless something comes up, Star Dust is going to have a good time. Spoiler alert, Star Dust has good time in Ponyville.

So we then come to Chapter 10, good ol’ Chapter 10. Surprise! Star Dust is Princess Luna in disguise! What, you’re not surprised? Oh right, cover art. Sorry, I meant, Surprise! I finally found the Inciting Incident for the story’s plot! (This is the part where you gasp.)

Yes, this is the biggest problem with Star Dust as it is written now: the conflict begins in Chapter 10.

What does that mean? We have over 42,000 words before something really happens in the story. This is a big problem! Before someone argues adding color to the world and character exploration, answer me this, what did we learn in chapters 1-9 we didn’t know before that adds to the conflict of the story? Let’s approach this problem with what is called a Logline, a quick summary in around twenty-four words that describes the main action within a story. This is what you might call the 30-second sale for a story.

Logline: Princess Luna struggles with her fears of acceptance as she makes friends with Ponyville – all made while hiding her true self disguised as the unicorn Star Dust.

The conflict here is Luna hiding behind this fake persona as she is scared of being rejected by the ponies around her as the Princess of the Night. A relatable struggle we’ve all been through trying to make friends of our own at one time or another while not being true to ourselves. Something worth writing about, and it’s just now being discussed clearly at Chapter 10. Why didn’t this happen earlier? We all know what is going on, we just don’t know why for sure until it is addressed here. She’s been more or less seamlessly blending in, what is she so scared of? This point of conflict of living a lie should be addressed far earlier in the story. In fact, the events leading up to this point, since they didn’t add much to the plot of this story. This could easily be addressed by moving the events of Chapter 10 to Chapter 1 or Chapter 2. A reader can easily get by with reading part of Chapter 3 with the Winter Solstice Celebration, the Light show, Twi meeting Star Dust, then skipping to Chapter 10 since Luna retells all that happened to Celestia.

Another issue is Twilight Sparkle. Why does so much of the story focus on her point of view? So far, none of it has mattered. With the additional information we’ve gleaned from Chapter 11, we might go somewhere with her perspective, but considering what the actual problem is within the story, her view of the events is both jarring and unnecessary. If the heart of the story is in Luna’s insecurity, why misdirect the reader’s focus on Twilight Sparkle and her friends so often, or better yet, at all?

I feel as though the method used her is derived from the episode “Nightmare Night”, in which the story focuses on Twilight’s perspective while she pals around with Luna. The problem in Star Dust is that since Luna is hiding her identity from everyone, including the reader. Even from the perspective we receive from the narration of the story, her identity and true motives for all of her actions are hidden. We aren’t dealing with the Princess of the Night, we are dealing with Lulushy as she gets over her own problems of a fake persona. In “Nightmare Night”, the method of focusing on Twilight works because the action is her helping another person finding the magic of friendship even though Luna was formerly the embodiment of endless nightmares, an external conflict of acceptance. This story deals with Luna’s own insecurities in regards to making friends as the Princess of the Night, a more internal conflict.

On another note, something I found odd was the lack of slip-ups on Luna’s part, a missed opportunity to keep the action moving. If through all these mundane events, we had Luna’s perspective and see her desperately try to keep her Luna side showing through the Star Dust persona, it would’ve worked a lot better. She does slip up every so often, but not in a way that draws too much suspicion or blows her cover. Even her extreme prowess is magic is easily explained away considering how powerful Twilight herself is.

A plotline should look like a waveform, highs and lows of the action being stirred up and settled over and over. These are called barriers or obstacles and keep the reader interested. For instance, in the case of this story, if the author had purposely let the reader in on the secret from the beginning, the happenings in and around Ponyville could be weaved into an interesting narrative of Luna trying to deal with the mundane lives of ponies, something she isn’t familiar with being Canterlot royalty and an ex-banished super villain. Instead, the first nine chapters serve as exposition to the story before anything happens. This would be like if the movie, Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring, had two hours of Shire happenings before Frodo and Gandalf find out that Bilbo’s ring is Sauron’s Ring of Power.

In the end, the work itself is unfinished with the plot beginning so late in the story, we have yet to see how the problems will be handled. However, the basic problem of the conflict not arising until Chapter 10 is a problem which cannot be fixed without rewriting and revising the story. There are other problems within the story as well barring the spelling and grammatical errors here and there. My favorite so far is Twilight’s “Your mother doesn't exactly sound like the most friendliest of ponies,” with the double superlative. Twilight messing up her grammar made me laugh harder than it should have. However, even though I’ve been hard on it, I do look forward to seeing where the story goes in the future. With the recent events within Chapter 11, let’s just say things will be coming to a head fairly soon.

Random Afterthought: The romance part finally starts coming into play in Chapter 11 in case you were wondering. To be honest, I had forgotten the tag was even there. Also, it was jarringly sudden with very little hinting towards since I didn’t glean any foreshadowing or spoilers tho- oh wait. Cover art! Dang it!

Foolish fool spoiling the story with well-drawn foolishly foolish cover art!