Woahhhh · 3:05pm Jul 14th, 2015
Yesterday I posted Things Better Better Left Unseen, after having made sure to lower my expectations. After all, it's my debut mlp fanfic and my first comedic piece.
I've never really been good at forcing myself to be funny. If we're friends, it'll take me a bit of time to understand your sense of humor before I can adapt in conversations to give you some laughs. To make comedy for the general populace is of course, much harder and I've read a few stories that tried, and it's too obvious they tried, resulting in the jokes falling flat and making me cringe.
That was the absolute last thing I wanted.
And so I sat down and started writing while keeping that thought in the back of my head. And I guess it worked because holy crap my story is on fire! Like there is literally a flame thingy next to the number of likes it has (can anyone explain to me what that means and how a story can get it?).
I didn't really know what to expect from all of you so I decided to just brace myself for the worst but I could not contain my joy as people actually started liking and favouriting my story. Heck, I'm even seeing it on the main page of fimfiction in that box with other really cool sounding stories.
So thanks to all of you for the support. You all just made my week.
So for future works, this was the first of my master plan to write a one-shot for each genre. My writing is still quite rough around the edges and the only reason this first story was in any way presentable was thanks to Fransesca whom I met in the chatrooms. He(or she? I'm not sure and I didn't ask), graciously took the time to point out all the errors and weak spots in my writing as well as provide some ideas that inspired the ending of the story.
The point is, I'm still a noob and I'd like to practice writing a bit of all the genres to get a feel for what I'm good at and what I'm bad at before I tackle any larger, more epic projects. Next on my list is Sad. Time to test whether or not I can bring on the feels.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you'll look forward to my next work. I'll do my best to make it every bit as good, if not better than my first story.
Someone might comment by the time I post my comment, but basically the little flame you see on your fic means it's "hot" - from what I understand, it means it has enough traffic and likes to be considered as such.
So congrats!
And yeah, not forcing yourself is the best you can do. That way you will write the way you like it, and it will end up even better!
Of course, assuming you don't write just for a little part of the people but a more general one, heh. I'm bad at explanation.
Have a muffin!
I've somehow managed to find myself on your page... People have made it to mine, though, so stranger things have happened. Now, for similarly unknown reasons, I feel like sharing some comments.
First, congratulations on your story's reception; I've only made it to "Popular Stories" 4 times, but nothing in the featured box. That's pretty promising for a first story.
Now onward to my commenting style of quotes:
Call me a goofball, but I have the hardest time writing anything serious. Somehow, people think my joke are pretty funny. This isn't just my writing, I get this a lot in real-life, too. This line suggests you respect that others' sense of humor isn't identical as your own, which often leads to
Those are the worst.
~~~
That means your story is "hot", which is an indicator that a lot of people are looking at it and/or liking it over a small-ish amount of time.
Okay, maybe I'm commenting because
both sound really familiar... almost as if I know someone who thinks the same things... I'll came back and edit this if I remember who.
Though, currently I am trying to write a multi-chapter piece. (See my recent blog post I hate self-promotion, but I might as well use what I have for details and my sense of humor.)
~~~
About your story, then.
I'll start with the negative thing(s – there are two):
First, there are just a few mechanic/technique (maybe some people call it grammar) flaws, such as the first line of your story:
Further – I'm sure you'll love the nitpicking (honestly, I love it when people point this stuff out to me) – as you may have noticed, I haven't been using hyphens for anything other then compound words (e.g. light-blue). For interrupted dialogue or an aside – like this – you should use an en dash or em dash (look them up for a better explanation then I can give, or click here)
Secondly,
Adverbs: kill them with fire.
Not really, but this is use that you don't want. It might be better to go with "said", "asked", or something similarly simple and commonplace; you don't want to overdo this, though – I'd recommend experimenting with action tags; that way you can denote the speaker in the paragraph without overusing the same sentence structure. Also, I am told omitting the speaker can help when it's obvious who's speaking, but I can't say I'd recommend it if the dialogue is actually taking time to occur (and the characters are doing things while speaking – not the same thing per several lines of dialogue, but if Zecora mixes a cup of tea and sits down with it during a few lines of conversation, you could include that; bonus points if you write in how the tea smells without it getting bulky and unnecessary).
~~~
To the good:
The aforementioned points aren't quite as important as having a story to tell, and knowing how you're going to tell it. Things Better Better Left Unseen suggests that you are quite capable of this (and I'll wager that your attempt at romance is likely to turn out well).
You can correct spelling, punctuation, and grammar, but you can't really fix not having a darned clue what to write. One of these things I am good at, one of these things you are good at. This is why your story landed in the feature box (again, congratulations; that's pretty awesome) – not because it's a flawless masterpiece, but because you wrote something worth reading, even if it's a little bumpy.
From one random person to another, if you'd like someone else to help go over your following stories to pick out spelling/grammar/punctuation slips, or some comedic advice (advice on comedy, or advice that's just funny? If you ask me, it'll probably be neither), feel free to fire a PM my way.
I can only hope that offer will make up for all the me-talk I've used.
~~~
This post has been made in 100% good cheer; anything offensive is purely accidental and should be used to berate the author of this comment at reader's convenience.
3237321
Thanks for the explanation as well the muffin! Ohm nom nom...
3237349
Yessss these are the types of comments I'm just loving right now.
Please nitpick more! No sarcasm intended, I really do like it when people point out the little stuff to me since I can't catch them all. They can be distracting when I read a story and I'd like to spare my own readers from that.
And thanks for the advice on dashes and adverbs. Is there a special way to type an em dash or is it on my keyboard and I'm just blind? As for the adverbs, yes I really do need to fix my habit of overusing them. They do the job, albeit a bit less elegantly than other methods, but they do it nonetheless and as a result, I've never felt the intense need to change. Whelp, not anymore. I'll be more conscious of it for my next story.
And I'd love to take your offer to help me on future stories. I just got vague ideas at the moment which I will hopefully start fleshing out today. I'll send you a pm if I got a story ready or something comedic I'd like some help with.
Thanks again for spending the time to write such a long thoughtful comment. I enjoyed reading every second of it.
3237794
Concerning dashes:
How you can type them out really depends on your operating system (Windows, Linux, OSX...); I have simply remapped Caps-Lock to be a "Compose" key, which allows for several characters that would either be a pain to memorize through Unicode ("CTRL+Shift+U" then "2015" = "―" (not supported on Windows to the best of my knowledge)) or would take a while to type out, but you could copy/paste after the first one, which is another option – some programs will provide an enormous set of characters that you can copy/paste from. That's a bit tedious for writing at any reasonable speed, though. Anyways, the Compose key allows for two or three letters of your keyboard to be pressed after, and if it's a valid combination, it'll instead print the character that it is a combination for ("Compose" then "---" = "—" (an em dash), "Compose" then "--." = "–" (an en dash)). There are some fun combinations here, such as "Compose" then ":)" = "☺"
I apologise if any of this is getting a bit complicated to read through. It looks worse in the comment editor.
I'm going to guess that you're one Windows, so you'll have the option of installing something that will allow for remapping a key to become Compose, or using the "ALT+" codes, which I understand less than Unicode input. If you're using third-party software/independent of operating system text editors, they may have other ways of typing Unicode characters, or they might automatically replace certain character combinations for you ("word - word" automatically replaced with "word – word"). A brief inspection of Google Docs (which I have grown to like, especially given the ease of collaboration it allows) shows that you can set your own automatic replacements, so if it does something stupid you can only blame yourself.
No you aren't blind, there isn't an en or em dash key on your keyboard.
~~~
Only as elegantly as a brick sails through the air, unless you use them just so. Well, comparatively speaking. The biggest problem is that they may "convey" your message, but none of the readers are really going to feel it; they're just reading through it. It tends to read more like a list than a story (which may be because of the lack of sentence structure variety that they encourage). As they say... "Show, don't tell." If you read about writing, you've heard that dozens of times, with less than as many good examples and explanations.
I preread, too (having written myself, I can, and enjoy, assisting during any/all stages of development). Bouncing ideas around is great fun, and very helpful. I've seen several stories that really looked like the author could have used a good conversation about their story before writing, but skipped that part and wrote a flat piece. Usually they end up plot-driven instead of character-driven (a useful distinction to keep in mind).
If you're going to say something, you might as well take the time required to say it right (and I still fail occasionally). Also, I fail miserably at writing shorter comments – I've tried.
I wouldn't really call it a success in comedy. It was entertaining. Not funny. (and they're not the same thing)
That aside, great story. Focusing on implied shipping + alternate dimension what if scenarios is almost always a win in my book.