First Impressions Critique: Lost In the Stars - By Wackiestrolly · 12:41am Aug 7th, 2014
First Impression Critique: Lost in the Stars - by Wackiestrolly
Link to the Story: http://www.fimfiction.net/story/179071/lost-in-the-stars
Link to Fimfiction's Guide for Writers: http://www.fimfiction.net/writing-guide
Link to How to use Comma Splices:
http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/comma-splice
http://grammartips.homestead.com/splice.html
Date Created: August 6, 2014
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- First Impression -
Crossovers within fanfiction is expectedly going to be a very popular thing, as an author fantasizes about their two favorite canons coming together and making a story of their very own. Lost In the Stars, by Wackiestrolly, is no exception to the either. "Crossover" is a very touchy subject in the land of fan fiction, as the majority of it is filled with plot holes, grammatical errors, and the simple fact that the stories themselves are just plain bad, speaking in a general over all stories combined.
One thing noticeably done correctly is that the story has been labeled properly, under the simple tags of Crossover, Adventure, and Human. Something very expected to see when going over a crossover between My Little Pony and Starbound. No outrageous tags, such as "Random", or "Comedy".
One thing that would bug anyone when previewing for a story to look for is a misleading description. In the description of Lost In the Stars, it says that "Luna rejoices at the chance of meeting an alien for the first time as well as getting an opportunity to travel the stars." The first thing that would come to mind for a person who is reading that would normally go along the line as of "Why would she get excited for an alien ship?", as a ruler of a nation would be more worried about their subjects rather than their own personal fantasies of space exploration. Or maybe it would go along "Why would she expect an opportunity to adventure out into outer space?", as they would think that she wouldn't immediately assume that the alien would be friendly.
Another question would go along the lines of "How would they get lost in space?", which could be easily fixed by changing the line "She gets more than she bargains as she finds herself lost in space alongside the ship's pilot, Nico", to, as an example, "Now with a broken control panel, Luna finds herself lost in space alongside the ship's pilot, Nico". Questions like these that are developed by any reader will end with the reader get too confused by the apparent plot holes that they wouldn't even bother reading the story, or the reader would continue reading anyways to figure out, which is relative to a 10% chance of happening.
The description also attempts to build suspense within the end of it by asking questions to keep the reader thinking while they're reading the story, but the author doesn't understand that suspense doesn't work that way. Suspense works like humor, it is supposed to be subtle and unnoticable enough to the point that it's not obvious, and then it becomes clear to peer, or reader, once the punchline has been delivered. Asking questions in general is not a sufficient way to building suspense, and it's not recommended to be done by anyone; as it is as cheap of a way to build suspense as ellipses do.
Oh, and it's supposed to be "Lost in the Stars". No capitalization needed.
- Grammar, Punctuation, and Style -
This story, at first sight, has plenty of errors. Heck, there's even an error in the title. The two most commonly occurring errors throughout the story would be the misuse of capitalization and punctuation. In the first sentence alone, things like "The Darkness" and "There" should be easy enough to notice and fix. It shouldn't be hard to fix the common and simple errors such as this, and if one doesn't take the time to go back and fix these errors, then you'll drop a lot of potential readers who could be interested in the story. There are plenty of capitalization errors ranging from those two pointed out in the first line alone of the story, to even further on in the story, such as words not being capitalized even though they are the beginning word of the sentence. "On the capitalisation of race names: either do it for all of them or don’t do it for any – both systems have been used in fiction by different authors. Be consistent, and ignore spell check's insistence on “Pegasus” if you’re not capitalising. If you’re not sure which method to use, don’t capitalise – that’s more or less the fandom standard."
Going onto the side of comma errors, this can be a little bit more understanding in the world of writing - that is, if you're new. Sentences like: "Within the Alpha System silence has been replaced by the sound of explosions as three ships chased a cruiser," and "The Darkness of space lit only by the countless stars that dot the universe," it's somewhat understandable to be a little sketchy on the side of commas. Commas should be used to separate two different clauses of the sentence, for example, the first sentence should be corrected to: "Within the Alphei System, silence has been replaced by the sound of explosions as three ships chased a cruiser." The second sentence could be as easily fixed, by simply doing this: "The darkness of space, lit only by the countless stars that dot the universe." Anyone can also look up how to insert commas inside a sentence by either simply 'googling' it, or clicking on either 'this link', or 'this link'.
Another common problem within the story would be the confusing and somewhat misleading wordplay inside the sentences. A prime example of confusing wordplay would be: "Few ever get the opportunity to travel among the stars, fewer ever get to comprehend understand the significance of each one." Although some people would understand in an instant of what the sentence may be talking about, there are going to be -- without a doubt -- a couple of people who would have to re-read the sentence in order to understand what it may be talking about. The example sentence could easily be revised through, to something along the lines of: "Only a few number of beings gain the opportunity to travel among the stars, but only a fewer number gain the comprehension of each significant being." Words such as 'comprehend' and 'understand' do not need to be used in the same sentence, as they basically mean the same thing. Keep the wordplay simple, easy to follow, and don't try to filter it only with complex words. The more complex words filtered into a story don't make you look any smarter, it only makes you look more like an ass in front of everyone.
After the extremely cliche opening first paragraph, the story introduces the first sign of conflict between the main protagonist, and an angry crew of penguins. The second and third paragraph could be used as great examples to outline two problems found within the story. The first problem spotted would be the not-so-great paragraphing between the topics. The second being the work that could be put on in describing a certain object, and how it relates to other objects.
Starting with the describing, in the story, the first description of the three ships chasing the cruiser seen would be that they "were shaped like giant saucers", and that being the only given description for all three ships. In the third paragraph, the story then goes on to describing the fleeing ship in what seemed to be a lackadaisical fashion.
"The fleeing ship had flat grey color along with red accents on the sides. It was equipped with thrusters on the stern and the bottom of the hull, and it was equipped with weapons on the bow. Though armed, the ship was still making its way to escape."
In the paragraph above, it becomes apparent that the story is more onto leaning toward the side of telling, rather than showing. The story is telling more on what to see, giving the most basic of things to think about, rather than giving a more immersive storytelling side to the story. The best way to show the difference would be to show examples of telling versus showing, as listed below:
Although it is always great to show rather than tell, it can sometimes be troubling if you do too much showing, instead of telling inside a story. Telling can be greatly used for the more interesting parts of the story, and the parts that don't really add much to the story anyways. Showing can be fantastically used to give an understandably aura of the setting, mood, or tone given to the story. In one of the examples above, showing was used to direct the tone to give a give a good sense of the mood for the story. A great sense in using telling would be as someone is going through an airport, or someone is visiting someone's house. Reading a largely unimportant part of the story to minutes on end will give a lot of readers a good sense of boredom, so telling would be used to skim past the events that have taken place there. A couple of examples could be seen below for when you want to use telling, instead of showing:
Tell: Walking down the hallway of the hospital, I checked the room numbers passed by until I made it to room 405.
Show: Slightly cringing from the foul smell of old people entering my nostrils, I continued walking down the hallway. Constantly checking each room number I passed, I glanced toward the room number '405', knowing I had arrived.
Tell: The door opened by a white male inside the house. Greeting us, he let me inside.
Show: The door swiftly opened as a white male stood on the other side of the doorframe. He extended his forearm, firmly shaking my hand with a wide smile. After greeting himself, he let me inside.
As it can be seen, telling can someone be used to speed up the slightly more boring parts of a story. Although it sometimes could be used to show these events, rather than telling them, most of the time it would be recommended to tell, as you don't want to drag out your story longer than it needs to be. With every sentence being as long that, it would lead to viewers becoming - more often than not - easily bored with your story. Mainly because the story is tagged as adventure, it is possible to see things being dragged out already, with adventures, but dragging them out than they require to be sometimes doesn't do you any good.
Going back a bit to paragraphing, paragraphs are used to organize different topics within a story. "New writers often have a bad habit of clumping all of their text into one or two paragraphs, likely because they don’t entirely understand the purpose of paragraphing, and they think it makes their writing look really long and impressive or something.
I will be the first to admit that I probably use too many paragraphs, but it’s better to do that than to use too few. Paragraphs enhance readability, and if your work’s not readable, no-one’s going to read it!
Paragraphs don’t have to be a certain minimum or maximum length. A single sentence can be its own paragraph. A paragraph can also, technically, be as many sentences long as you want, but you’ll usually find that it’s time to start a new one when you get past seven or eight.
The general idea is this:
One idea per paragraph.
The first paragraph of this section was about the paragraphing habits of new writers" - or in this case, the introduction of paragraphing into the critique. "The second was about my own possible shortcomings in regards to paragraphing. The third one was about paragraph length. This one is a summary of all the paragraphs that have come before.
Ice-cream is very tasty. My favorite flavor is vanilla, and I never put anything on it, because you should never put anything on good ice-cream.
Now that I’m done talking about ice-cream, I've started a new paragraph to talk about something else. There are no hard and fast rules about where to begin or end a paragraph, but you should get the hang of it with enough practice and enough reading."
You could combine the second and third paragraph of the story, to fully utilize showing by describing to the reader what the battleships look like and in what they are doing, rather than just telling that three ships are chasing one other ship.
Going down the list, said tags are recommended to be used all throughout the story. Even though a conversation may be between only two characters, it is still recommended to have said tags so then readers wouldn't be confused either way. Said tags are never to be capitalized, as they are never complete sentences. Dialogue can end only in a question mark, an exclamation point, or a comma if there is a said tag being proceeded after it. "Think of them as the subject and verb of a sentence that has the dialogue you’re applying them to as its object. You don’t write “The boy kicked. The ball.” so you shouldn’t write “ ‘Hello.’ He said.” either."
Another thing would be that quotation marks are not required in order to show the reader what the character is thinking in a third-person perspective story. It is relatively easy to do without them, and they can become confusing for the reader to sort out if the quotation marks mean that someone is thinking, or speaking.
Other than all of those major problems in grammar, punctuation, and style, there are a number of ones that aren't as prevalent. Slang words that require apostrophes to show that they are slang, requiring an indention in before each and every paragraph, the transitioning between using the name "Nico" and "Niccolo" within the same paragraph, even though they both are the same person, typos such as "clear" in the first chapter, and "china" in the second, and randomly underlining the phrase "Happy Feet" for some reason. Other than that, this story could really use some work.
Oh, and it's supposed to be "Penguin Chase". Gotta' capitalize it.
- Story -
The story in general is pretty straightforward all in all. There's nothing branching off of it into smaller plot branches, and there's only a few number of plot holes if you aren't looking for them. As the story begins, as stated before in the critique, the story goes on as if it's one of those space movies, going on about the "Final Frontier" or something appropriate to that. Then, as three ships appear in the Alpheli System, three ships shaped like saucers chase after a cruiser, apparently able to create sound in outer space, even though the last time I checked that was literally impossible.
Oh, and since this is a fanfiction story, and not the game itself of Starbound, the author may want to list all of the sectors so then readers won't get confused as Nico travels to the Delta sector.
The pacing of the story entirely isn't really all that great. The chapters range from a short 1k words per chapter, to a whopping 7k the next. There could be a lot of extra information added in between the 1k chapters to really even them out with the 7k chapter, but nothing like that is seen to be done. All in all, though, the pacing is consistent, which is good in the long run, but with a story like this, it would be more than needed advised to be slowed down in a number of ways. An adventure story normally drags out the chapters by the length, and having an adventure story that doesn't have that much length into it is really saying something. The advised length for chapters for a story like this would range from 4-8k in words, and really shouldn't dip below the minimum.
Starting with the former, there are plenty of 'errors' -- as could be said -- in this story about how it goes and characterizes the characters in the story, mainly though the mane six. From things that characters would never say in their lives, to interactions that the character would never go through.
A couple minor characterization 'errors' would be that Luna, in this story, uses slang words like "gunna", even though she's not really the type of pony to be using them. The story all together seems to have a good basic grasp on her speech, and the speech of most of the ponies -- even Applejack, surprisingly, as she could be said to be the hardest -- but a little more could be added on into the story to improve their speech further. Luna should never use slang, as she is a Princess after all.
When the Mane Six, Luna, and the guard go into the Everfree Forest to search for the ship that has landed, one thing that would bug anyone would be when Rainbow Dash, the Element of bloody Loyalty just ups and leaves her friends to go practice flying, something she does all day, non-stop. What's even worse is that Twilight, the Element of Magic/Friendship, just lets her leave. If these were the actual characters, Rainbow Dash wouldn't just up and abandon her friends when they could use the fastest pony in Equestria to help search for a giant fucking ship in the forest that is landed. Twilight Sparklebutt wouldn't just let her friend abandon her when she knows very well that she is the Element of Loyalty.
Later on in the story though, when Pinkie Pie convinced Fluttershy that her friends are being eaten by the alien, I wouldn't go as far as to say that Fluttershy would faint after hearing that. Sure, she is probably the shiest pony in Ponyville, but we all have seen what lengths she would go to if her friends needed protecting. I honestly think the exact opposite would happen, and Pinkie Pie would convince her to not faint, but get pissed off a little. Also, even if she didn't get pissed off, I wouldn't really go as far as saying she faints, because not even Fluttershy is that weak. There are some weak ponies who would faint at the smallest bunny stampede in Ponyville, but Fluttershy wouldn't be one of them.
After Luna hears a series of screams, identified to be Rarity, Luna goes off and sees what the commotion is all about, leaving the guards to protect Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy. Luna then goes toward where the landed ship is, and completely ignoring the fact that she just heard a pony scream for her life, she goes inside the ship and quite literally starts playing it off as if she was in a comic book that she's read. Not only did she completely forget why she had started sprinting in the forest for, but now she's acting like a child who got a gaming system for Christmas. Last time I checked, Princess Luna wasn't a child, and the chance of this ever happening is as slim as the Element of bloody Loyalty abandoning her frie-- oh wait.
Anyways, after Twilight, Applejack, Rarity, and the guard find their way out of the forest, Twilight is forced to pull the arrow out of the guard without any medical knowledge prior, and is already doing it like a pro. Why didn't Twilight Sparklebutt teleport him to somepony at the hospital along with her friends, I don't know, but the only guess that I have is that that scene was forcefully pushed into the story by the author just to have it in there. It would take less than a second to teleport everyone to the nearest hospital, and she has plenty of magic capable of a four-pony teleport, as she is the Princess of Magic, after all. It would take less than a minute to explain to the nearest doctor what had happened, and then less than a second to teleport back to look for the alien before he goes off and does something else.
The last characterization error, though that's not as worthy to be noteable, would be when Twilight begins interacting with Nico, the alien. She begins telling him orders to come out and then drop his weapon. After the first command to come out, she would begin wondering if he speaks her language. After the second command though, to drop his weapon, it would become pretty obvious that he understands her, but she only notices that he understands her after he speaks the same language. It's pretty understandable though why the story did it the other way around, as some animals understand them, but don't speak the same language on their planet. It really just comes down to how one understands things presented in stories, and this isn't really required to be changed, but just to be noticed.
Going to the latter in this story, plot holes, there are plenty of them if you really know what to look for. A few small plot holes that are noticeable is that why didn't Princess Celestia go out and help in the search for the alien ship? She is the diarch of Equestria, and is on equal levels as Princess Luna when it comes to ruling the nation. We've seen her a number of times already make holes in her already extremely busy schedule to look at other urgent national crises. For her to not come is pretty much the equivalent as saying that she doesn't really care all that much about aliens.
Although this is a really irritating plot hole, it's even easier to cover for it. Saying that another national crisis has risen, but not as big as that one, say, in the Crystal Empire, or that Luna persuaded her into greeting the alien alone with the Elements could also be understandable as well. That could even be put into the first chapter directly after Princess Luna discovers the alien ship above their atmosphere, to really balance the pacing in the story.
Going back to the fact that the Element of bloody Loyalty abandoned her friends -- no, I will not drop that -- why doesn't any of the pegasus ponies fly up and look for the ship aerially? Looking for a giant ship that has landed in a clearing -- or one that made it's own clearing -- would be easy enough, and they have about four pegasi in their group after the Element of bloody Loyalty abandoned them. As long as the trees aren't the size of a three story house, then the ship would be easy enough to find after flying, say, fifty feet in the air.
Other than those main plot holes that are apparent in the story, there are a fewer number of minor ones, such as what happened to Pinkie's group after the shock wave occurred by the ship going F.T.L.? Did they die, or did they make it out of the forest before the ship went off? Why is Nico so determined and driven by revenge, and what is he trying to get revenge for? These plot holes, though, can easily be covered in the chapters ahead, and should really be looked into filling so then the readers don't get too confused later on in the story through the questions that pop up in their heads.
More characterization could be put into the character Nico, as basing him solely on 'revenge' against something makes him sound like he's something off of Batman. It's a bit unrealistic to a character's development unless what made them want revenge scarred them for life -- for example, someone killing their loved ones.
Two things that could be removed entirely from the story as a whole could be the cliche in which Nico jinxed himself with the line: "I hope I won't get into anymore trouble where I'm going," said Niccolo as he closed his eyes to rest, "It can't be worse than a mob of angry Penguins." The second thing could be that Nico is referred to as "The Alien", and sometimes "Niccolo", even though he's already been properly introduced as "Nico". Pick a name and go with it, don't transfer between the number set for a single character, as that can become confusing too fast.
Oh, and it’s supposed to be “Threat Level Six”. Don’t use numbers in a title -- unless it’s a big number -- and ya’ gotta’ capitalize it.
- Conclusion -
Breaking the third-person perspective of the critique, I personally wouldn't recommend this story to anyone. Although this story has great potential to become a fantastic story, every other story has the same exact potential. It really only comes down to the fact if the author is capable of recognizing that potential and fully using it. I don't see that potential being used any time soon, and with simple things such as grammatical errors filling the entire story, I can't hope for the best for the future of this story.
The best solution to the grammatical errors would be using something like Microsoft Word. If you can't afford Word, then just use something like Google Docs. If you're too lazy to create a free Google account, then tough.
And I still can't get over the fact that the Element of bloody Loyalty just up and abandoned her friends like that. That shit makes me pissed.
Oh, and it’s supposed to be “Hard Lan--”, oh wait.
After reading this, I realized that I'm lacking the qualities of an author. As an author who holds a sense of love for his story, reading this felt like getting splashed in the face with ice cold water mixed with habanero salsa. Still, I want this story to be good and I have realize my own faults. Thank you for showing them to me. When I'm finished with another chapter I'll review my whole story and re-work it. Again, thank you for opening my eyes to this.