On clean slates, telling-not-showing, and being totally unqualified

So, I recently finished a story that seemed... odd to me. The story in question is Clean Slate by Alaborn, and I feel like there was something that deserves discussion. Consider this a review that I am by no means qualified to give.

Also, I heavily suggest you read the story before finishing this. It's 20-something chapters and clocks in at 107,804 words, but if that seems like too much, read the first two chapters. That should be enough to understand what I wanted to discuss.

Quick story summary: Diamond Tiara gets in an accident and falls into a coma for months. After she wakes up, she doesn't remember anything about her past and is essentially a new character, and her now-deceased father gives custody of Tiara to the Apple family.

So, the thing about this story that I wanted to discuss came from the narrative voice. The narrative is written in first-person from Diamond Tiara's perspective, and the issue that I saw was that the story seemed to have issues with telling over showing. One of those things that English teachers tend to drill into their students brains is that it is better, when writing, to show instead of tell. If you want to learn about that, I'd recommend looking at this section of FiMFiction's Style Guide on show v. tell.

The thing is, for the first half of the story, it kind of works. The shorter sentences, or sentences with few adjectives, sounds very much like it is being written by this new Diamond Tiara, one disinterested with the world and more or less not wanting to show passion at any point. It's strange, but it works. It's a nice example of a rule being bent, intentionally or not (I choose to believe it's intentional, good on you Alaborn!), for a good effect.

However, this breaks down in the second half of the book. After a while, Diamond Tiara could be said to have "settled in" on the farm, but stuff keeps happening. Things like the visit to Manehattan, or the visit to her uncle, or even the CMC getting their cutie marks, continue to happen, but no more significant character growth occurs. And these events are still more told to us, instead of shown. Also, the story has a bad habit of building suspense with events, thinking that things are constantly going to mess up right now, but they never do. The story just kind of ends happily, all the time. It's all very strange.

Like I said, this isn't a very good review. I'm still not sure if I really liked the story. I think I liked it, or I liked the plot and premise, if not the total execution. However, I think it did some interesting stuff with narrative, and probably justifies being read.

So, give it a read if you want. I'm really tired so this blog is making less and less sense as I go along. What was I doing? Something about slates? And jam-covered pizza? No, that's another blog. Anywho, may your roads lead you to warm sands!