Formal Review: On Target

Ladies and gents, it's that time again. The Pleasant Commentator and Review Group got about 90 stories submitted this time, and I'll be attempting to tackle one per week – at least until I run out of relatively short ones that fit this format. As always, I will reproduce all such reviews here.

I'm hoping to have a few words on what I call the 'opinionated narrator' up here tomorrow to resume my Invisible Ink posts.

PRESENTS

On behalf of:
The Pleasant Commentator and Review Group

---

On Target

By Kestrel

"An arrow can only be shot by pulling it backward. So when life is dragging you back with difficulties, it means its going to launch you into something great. Just focus, and keep aiming."

For Snapshot, life has ground to a halt ever since two years ago. The last Equestria Games nearly ended in tragedy because of a stray arrow in the Ice Archery event. Why in Equestria did his shot go astray? Seasoned athletes don’t make mistakes like that without a good reason…

---

Technical

While I don’t go out of my way to get super picky about punctuation and grammar in these reviews – pointing out a few typos rarely helps an author – it’s still nice to get through a work without stumbling over any missing commas, wickedly abused semicolons, or misused words. Kestrel has clearly gone to great lengths to make this story technically spotless and it is noticeable (and appreciated).

However there were a few things that I found that were worth making a note of as I went through.

Firstly, and in all seriousness most important by a country mile, is the formatting of the indentations. It’s done by spaces and it’s an eyesore. As much as it may be a limitation of how FimFiction’s formatting works, it is still what you have and thus it is your problem. Tabs not spaces, please.

He had to be there for Pin, somepony had to, and he swore to himself he wouldn’t stoop that low, never.

While I might be able to buy ‘never’ in this context of it was offset with a dash rather than a comma, the way in which you have presented it demands ‘ever’, instead.

He took another swig, poured another shot and drank it too.

Something is missing from this, and I can’t say what without knowing the intent behind it. One way or another, the construction of this sentence just doesn’t work.

His irritated, bulging red eyes leaked out tears, carving rivulets down his cheeks.

Oil leaks out of a pipe, but a pipe leaks oil. Given the context, lose the preposition.

Salty drops fell and collected in his glass, and he cried until he couldn’t anymore, slamming a hoof into the hardwood floor.

The participle phase at the end does not not fit the clause to which it is dependent. Such a phrase gives context to the entire main clause and is not an action appended to the end. As such, you have a finite action described in parallel with an extended circumstance.

Sighing, he got out of bed and took a quick shower, anticipating and simultaneously dreading the lesson he was going to give Pin Point.

There were a few similar things that may come up later, but the general problem here is that the grammatical context implies that the two verbs somehow play off each other, yet in reality they don’t.

Also, that’s another participle phrase that doesn’t work – unless he sighed the entire way through his shower, in which case he’d probably have died from asphyxiation.

“Okay…” he relented.

While I generally thought the quality of the attributions fell as the story went on, this was the one time I threw my hands up and said ‘no, you can’t have that’. Saidisms that I believe to be poor and a bad idea is something to be discussed, but this is one step over the line, as I see it: it isn’t a saidism at all.

I don’t care how many times Dr Watson ejaculated, in 2015 we look back at it as quaint and very weird.

But yeah, all in all a noteworthy effort in the technical department.

Presentation and Voice

I quite liked the opening line, but as I went on to the opening paragraph, then the opening scene, I saw what was to become the greatest problem I see with this story: show and tell – and I mean and.

While it is a big enough issue that the story is frighteningly heavy on emotional exposition, both in terms of overuse and saturation of pace, what really took me back is that the reliance on it was not a replacement for scene-setting prose, but in addition to it. Thus, not only did I find such exposition to be grating in the narrative sense, but it was largely also redundant. I say largely because there were times when the telling seemed to come out of the blue:

With another arrow nocked, he took more careful aim than during his rage fueled firing frenzy.

The lead up to this sentence doesn’t do anything to make it feel like a ‘rage-fueled firing frenzy’ (and yes, that should be a hyphen – shame on me for missing on the first pass). As such, not only is this a very bad case of emotional exposition, but it is entirely against both the style of writing and the context of the scene.

Which it’s odd, since the author clearly has some understanding of the concept since I can remember a couple of spots where he used stark sentences set aside in their own paragraph for added punch. But for the most part the flow of the piece doesn’t change any more than is absolutely necessary for perfunctory variation in sentence structure. I say perfunctory with explicit reason, too: it does perform as required (it was certainly never what I would describe as dull), but it is entirely mechanical in its approach and shows little or no personal flair or inflection of mood – it’s all pretty much the same.

Which leads us back to the beginning and the overuse of emotional exposition combined with the saturation of a monotone mood. ‘Once is usually enough’ is a maxim I picked up while I was learning and it applies here: if you’re trying to convey mood through show, then emotional exposition (telling) is redundant in addition to its other inherent flaws.

If she was expressing an interest in sports too, that would make him so happy and proud. But… it reminded him again of Ace as well and his heart sank, causing that inner flame to die out.

This is an example of emotional exposition that I would consider a deal-breaker for any story. There is no space here for connecting dots or empathising with a character's emotional journey; it’s a direct explanation with no wiggle room, and it is exactly the sort of thing I would suggest is best avoided at almost all costs. Which is not to say that emotional summaries are never useful tools, but that’s all it should ever be: a tool for a specific circumstance, not a general style.

Further, there is a slight stiltedness to the prose that looked a lot like an assumption that ‘technically correct’ equaled ‘good enough’.

Ever since he had gotten his cutie mark, he had realized his calling in life was to see things.

There’s clearly nothing wrong with the grammar here, but again I find myself thinking of it as perfunctory. This is a lot more like a hyper-specific answer to a grammar test than it is polished prose. ‘He had’ feels both repetitious and superfluous; the sentence could so easily have been constructed in many other ways:

From the day his cutie mark appeared, he knew it was his calling to see things.

Now, always you should judge these things for yourself, but isn’t that just smoother to read? Now imagine that this author uses the full ‘he had [verb]’ construction an awful lot, and then think how nice some additional variance would be. And this is what it feels mechanical to me – as if there was an assumption that a technically correct way to write it was the correct way to write it.

Similarly, we have lines like this:

The shaft slid down the bow and accelerated for only a moment as it failed to reach anywhere.

This is a sentence that, to my mind, fails to achieve any particular purpose. It doesn’t give much in the way of clarity and it’s completely dry with regards to style. It’s more or less dead weight: too many words to be a brief description, too few to be evocative of any greater meaning or emotion.

“Okay then Pin, this is what I like to do for fun sometimes, or at least it’s something I used to do a lot,” he started, not quite sure how to begin.

And here, the wording trips over itself, presenting something that does make some sense underneath, but does so in a way that seems initially contradictory and draws attention to the words, rather than the story.

The stallion took the bowstring in his mouth and carefully tied it at both ends of the bow, securing the string into strong knots.

Likewise, the extra words make a bit of a mess here, and it isn’t a case of writing a stronger description so much as simply using less words. A bit more brevity here would put the onus on the reader to make up the difference with imagination, which is something I strongly suspect the author isn’t entirely comfortable with (and let’s face it: we’ve all been there).

Anyway, since I’ve gone this far I may as well bring up the other nitpicks I noted while reading...

In the moment he thought of Ace, his focus became muddled. When he released the tension in the bow, the shaft sailed through the air, flying high over the target and into the distance.

This passage comes directly after the thought about Ace, meaning that the opening clause is both entirely redundant and a case of inappropriate telling. If something that literally just happened is the trigger, do readers a favour and let them work it out for themselves. This is telling to the point of demeaning the audience.

Despite being happy, he still felt ashamed at the same time.

I’m not sure where the author was going with this, but when you say ‘despite’ like this, the assumption is that what follows would normally be assumed to stand in contradiction or conflict of each other, but these emotions don’t conflict at all – ask anyone who won a game by fluke if it’s perfectly normal to be ecstatically happy and deeply ashamed at the same time.

Writing it as if they should be in conflict is quite jarring.

More clouds began to float into the sky overhead as the mid-afternoon overcast skies came into effect, cloaking the warmth of the sun further. So much for that silver lining that everypony had always told him about.

I literally couldn’t figure out the meaning of this passage. Obviously there is a lot of context surrounding it in the story proper, but the purpose of it eluded me entirely, which is exactly the sort of thing that led me to one final conclusion.

The prose feels like someone trying to emulate a style without understanding the purpose of it. There are many occasions where a sentence is constructed like a stylistic flourish, but doesn’t do anything in and of itself. It’s like the author is aware of what other stories do and is trying to emulate it, but in doing so makes most, if not all, of those flourishes into jarring and inconsistent knots that drag down an already belaboured narrative.

As I said before, the technical competency and effort to polish the work is clear, but every step outside of core mechanics feels like an exercise in blind mimicry. There isn’t much that’s actually egregious, but very little of it works well, either.

Construction and Story

I could say that this story is in third-person omniscient, but I think it’s something of a cop-out to label things that way. Yes, it is a valid perspective to write from, but it’s also very hard to do well and more often a result of no knowledge than active choice.

For the most part I thought it was just a lack of control over the main character’s perspective, but this appears to be solely due to there not being another character for a large chunk of the story. Not long after a second character enters, we get her emotional exposition, too.

Also, the perspective is difficult to pin down because the bulk of the prose is either historical summary or direct telling. We’re not really inhibiting any character’s perspective so much as existing in the same place as them and having their feelings injected into our brains with a nailgun. There’s vague, often wordy, description, and there’s exposition, with little in between. And again my instincts tell me that it has a lot more to do with not understanding perspective properly than it is misusing it.

A story like this usually relies on a reasonable intimate perspective on the main character to carry the emotion, but between the presentation’s heavy reliance on telling and the lack of definite perspective, it’s hard for me not to read this as more of a ‘what if’ screenplay than a story.

What really sealed my conclusion about the floppy PoV was a dose of opinionated narrator towards the end:

She collided into the downtrodden stallion’s chest, ensnaring him in a tight hug, wrapping her hooves around one of his.

It’s one thing to use narration to force emotion upon a reader, but to define a character as downtrodden is way over the line and and more like telling the reader how to view the character. It could be that this is how one character is viewing another character, and thus a weak form in indirect monologue, but even if that were the case the narration would have to have a consistent perspective from which to base that assumption – it would have to so clear as to be automatic on behalf of the reader. It is not.

Another oddity was having the narration switch from full names to abbreviated names for no apparent reason. This is often okay if a full name is used the first time and then truncated, or it changes with a suitable shift in the story, but that’s not the case here. If it’s a factor of the narration itself then there should be a pattern or reason to it, but if it’s a factor of perspective (and thus voice), then the perspective it is coming from needs to be an awful lot clearer.

Perhaps it’s just a matter of clashing with the very formal sentence structure and style, but it also felt more and more off the more the abbreviated names were used, as if the narration was being both distant and inflexible while trying to be intimate and personable – like walking into an elevator and standing so close to the one other occupant as so touch and then completely ignoring them. It just felt weird.

So, aside from the wandering PoV, I was quickly put on alert by the switch from the immediacy of the story’s opening into a more summary-based retrospective. Maybe it’s just that the opening didn’t deliver a meaningful hook, and thus what followed felt disjointed and somewhat flat by comparison yet didn’t serve a purpose with it. Essentially, the story seems to bank on the reader’s interest in a ‘what if’ scenario and does little to build any tension beyond this assumption. Usually, this results in a work feeling more like an long-form idea than a story, and I definitely got a sense of that here.

Of course, some people are fine with that.

There are also a host of very weakly constructed sentences like this one:

Snap went to set up a target about seventy meters away from where Pin waited.

Okay, so he went to do it, but did he? Sure, we can simply assume that he did, by why on earth wouldn’t you state for sure that he did? It’s in the active voice, but it has all the wishy-washy non-directness that forms the basis of why the passive voice is largely eschewed. On its own it’s a minor oddity, but layered on top of the existing issues it stands out much more.

Snap hadn’t missed the triumphant smile his daughter wore.

This is another weak way of expressing something. ‘Hadn’t missed’ is a very loose way of saying ‘had noticed’, and while there is again some cause to say that the issue may only be related to the background noise of flat narration and floppy perspective, it’s still an example where I can’t discern any possible advantage of wording it this way rather than any other way.

I mean, there are a lot of negative descriptions that work just fine because they’re doling out hard information. ‘There was nothing in the box’ for example, is a much more definite statement than ‘it wasn’t in the box’, which could lead to idle speculation of what else may or may not have been in the box. Sticking to definite descriptions and statements goes a long way to increasing overall readability and reducing possible sticking points.

And beyond even all that, I was hard pressed to find much mileage in the dead spouse trope. Not that I’m saying it should never crop up, but there’s a big difference between using it as the setting for a story rather than the basis for one – especially when the narrative has already pulled the ‘love at first sight’ card in addition to ‘total mutual attraction’. Having these things consistently told rather than shown makes the whole situation an awful lot worse.

Final Thoughts

As is often the case, the details about paint a much worse picture than the reality of where the story actually is. It’s kinda flat, but not insultingly so. It’s overly telly, but it’s not like I can’t see where the author was trying to show. It’s a trope-laden and underdeveloped plot, but we all know there’s an audience for that on FimFiction.

The bottom line is, however, that evaluated critically it doesn’t come up as more than perfunctory in any given area. If I were to suggest a primary target from improving writing ability, I’d suggest focusing on perspective: this story really needed to be in a strict and intimate third-person limited. A strong narrative voice, thematic use of interior monologue, and character-based reasons to surmise bulk information and decipher what needs to be shown and what can safely be told would go a huge way towards making this a more engaging read.

I considered the question of ‘who would I recommend this to?’ and realised that, despite it being more technically competent than most, there was no-one I actually would recommend it to.

Therefore:

NEEDS WORK

-Scott 'Inquisitor' Mence