Not-So-Formal Review: Sweetie Belle's White Knight · 11:12am Nov 10th, 2015
I've been feeling constricted by setting myself specific things to write about, so I think I'm going to just let my mind wander this week and go wherever the mood takes me and get back to perspective later.
In the meantime, this is overdue because I couldn't find nicer ways of writing it.
PRESENTSOn behalf of:
The Pleasant Commentator and Review GroupAt the end of a long day of work, Sweetie Belle learns that some gentlestallions still know how to treat mares right.
This is going to be one of those times when the usual format just doesn’t serve any meaningful purpose. When a story has this many fundamental issues, the only way I can see to tackle it is to be blunt and to the point.
In short, I consider this a scene, rather than a story, that is probably worth about a thousand words, yet is stretched out to over three times that – it’s short, but somehow still bloated.
Still, I will try and be as precise as possible with my issues, and I’ll start with the simplest stuff that can be said once and safely ignored.
The whole story is double-linespaced. I cannot conceive of why – not that I ‘get’ using linespaces at all, but it is a preferred style I find I must make an allowance for – and it just stretches things out to a ludicrous degree. I would heartily suggest no-one ever do this. Ever.
Sweetie Belle was always amazed how it got so dark so soon during the winters in Ponyville.
As the opening lines of the story, I found this to be a bit of a flop. Now, I will concede that the style made a bit more sense a few lines on when I realised that the narrative was specifically thoughts that are no longer true in the present, but since the opening line has no immediate context to support it, what I actually see is a very washy, weakly-worded line.
As I have said before, ‘was’ (in its ‘to be’ capacity, at least) is always a word worth triple checking for stronger ways to write a sentence. Yes, sometimes is is absolutely right choice, either because a construction requires it or because it’s thematically appropriate, but what it very rarely does is set a tone for itself. It’s like Quorn: it takes on the flavours of whatever it’s combined with. In a first line it comes off as textureless and bland.
It’s hard to even suggest ways it could be spruced up because it’s hard for me to discern what the point of the line actually is. For starters, this is in a world where Princess Celestia lowers the such whenever she chooses, so being amazed at it seems a bit like being amazed at having dinner at five o’clock rather than six. It’s also worded as if the nights might come in sooner elsewhere, which we have no reason to think is true. I can’t even quite tell if the idea of night rolling in quickly is supposed to be the focus of the sentence, or Sweetie Belle is.
It’s just a bit of a damp squib, overall. It doesn’t actually serve the story in any way I can see. At the very least, ‘[the darkness] had always amazed Sweetie Belle’ or ‘[the darkness] used to amaze Sweetie Belle’ would be more upfront and definite with the tone.
The fact that it makes no sense that she would be amazed by this (or even what it is she finds amazing about it) is just something of a fly in the ointment.
Unfortunately, the occurrences of odd wordings and sayings are many.
You have a couple of inverted quotation marks:
”That sounds fine,”
”Oh great, what did I miss?”
And there are a few misused commas with coordinating conjunctions that aren’t actually coordinating conjunctions:
As Sweetie Belle leaned up against the counter of the Carousel Boutique she remembered the promise that she had made to the snow outside the window, and knew that she had broken it.
And lopsided hyphens are inconsistently used in place of dashes, throughout:
“And if you get hungry we have a little candy machine in the corner- if that’s okay.”
Then there’s...
she made a promise to the frozen specks of her coat dancing in the wind.
I’d love to be able to say that there was context in the prose to make sense of this, but if it’s there, I couldn’t find it. I just don’t understand what this means.
she took the time to gather the pins and measuring tapes in order to instruct the store’s other tailor on what the client wanted.
When you say ‘the pins and measuring tapes’, you’re imbuing the items with a degree of importance within the sentence, and you do not follow through with it. I’m left with what feels like an incomplete sentence. The items are new, so it’s not a mention of previously-described things, and I’d expect it to be followed by a qualifier: “[...] the pins and measuring tapes she needed [...]
As it stands, the sentence is just jarring. But the prose also dips into what I describe as negative description:
[...] becoming as unobtrusive and inconspicuous as possible.
Essentially, it tells us what the character isn’t doing, but doesn’t actually tell us what the character is doing, which is bad news for a character that is ‘on screen’ as it were, because mentioning them in the first place invites to reader to imagine. Actively describing nothing only draws attention to the fact that you haven’t described anything useful, and I find it a very annoying habit of some writers.
In a similar manner there are some word choices that feel like thesaurus abuse at first, except a little more thought reveals that they actually tell the reader less than a regular word would:
Beside the entrance to the Carousel Boutique was a small garbage receptacle,
A wastebasket? A bag? A wheelie bin? A dumpster? Again, it actively draws attention to the fact that it’s not actually giving you the information you need.
I found an awful lot of word repetition, but those don’t really rate a mention next to some of the other descriptive problems that cropped up regularly.
Firstly, the perspective isn’t very stable and isn’t well suited to the action being shown.
Sweetie Belle could not help herself
Not using contractions is fine, but it comes with the necessary conceit that you are pushing a fairly formal narrative that doesn’t convey a lot of intimacy with your focus character. Again, that’s fine if you’re showing a story in a cinematic style, but the prose here is quite the opposite.
Not only does it convey lots of what passes as emotional exposition or very bland interior monologue, but it does it in so many words that any hope of holding significant tension is dashed against the rocks:
But as she opened the door she heard the bell chime once more, and as she expected, there was a pony standing in the doorway.
Either Sweetie Belle hadn’t given the new arrival a close enough look, or his mood had just gone from bad to worse, but at this time it looked as if he had gone absolutely livid.
While the professional thing to do at this moment would be to try to get between the two and prevent the engagement from further escalating into an all-out brawl, Sweetie Belle couldn’t help but cower underneath the desk with her hooves over her head as if she was practicing a tornado drill.
No, none of these sentences are ridiculously long, but they are far too long given the information they contain, which is frequently very little. After a while, it really started to feel like they were just getting padded out for the sake of it, or on the assumption that longer was better, even if it contained no additional meaning.
Nowhere did this become more apparent than the absolute saturation of attribution – literally every bit of dialogue is attributed – and heavy reliance of similes:
yet at the same time spoke with such a gracefully calm tone that it could only be described as a whale gliding through the cold ocean depths.
At one point there were four in a single paragraph during the climax of the story. Some of them didn’t even make sense, and one was a simile that was literally the thing it was describing (as far as I could tell, anyway). It feels like this story is desperately trying to avoid just telling the reader what’s actually happening, which, for my money, is what it should be spending 90% of its time doing.
On second thought, I’m mistaken. Not every line of dialogue was attributed, but where it was missing, it should have been present:
“Well, I got my wife a present from here,” he slapped a paper receipt onto the table.
She reached into a drawer for a pen and sticky note and brought it up to the countertop, “But we’re closing in ten minutes and the tailor isn’t going to be in until tomorrow.”
Don’t use a comma to transition between a sentence and dialogue unless it’s attributed.
Further, the vast majority of dialogue appears after the attribution, rather than before it. While there is no technical issue here, putting dialogue at the front of a paragraph, rather than at the end, is generally stronger. It carries more punch there, while at the back it tends to fade into background noise. Since dialogue is usually pretty important in narrating scenes, I would expect to see the majority of it at the start of a paragraph, and almost all of it with the attribution placed at the back of the quotation.
It may not seem like a big deal, but trust me, go and read any published author and you’ll find dialogue up front is the norm by quite a long way. This is a for a good reason.
Okay, on to the last two major issues.
Firstly, I can’t help but find it extraordinarily lazy when authors use real-world-style cursing in a story. Sure, there are some stories where the author is clearly coming at Equestria from a different direction, or isn’t thematically using Equestria itself as a basis at all, but this is a story set in Equestria and using it’s characters. Being fanfiction, the implication is that readers will pull assumptions from the show as a baseline, and the following examples run entirely contrary to the world we get shown in twenty-two-minute slices:
“That’s a bunch of bull!”
“Don’t bucking tell me what to do!”
To me, this smacks of not bothering to formulate a way for these interaction to happen within the source material. If a story is strong enough to carry something like this, it’s usually fine, but it’s not going to work in slice of life – a genre where writing quality is absolutely paramount. This sort of thing was completely immersion-breaking for me every time, though obviously your mileage with different readers will vary.
But lastly, and I believe most importantly, this story has a really bad habit of just skipping over descriptions of things entire, or just getting it flat-out wrong.
“Hello, Sweetie Belle. It’s good to see you,” she said before hanging the scarfs of both her and the pony with her onto a hat rack.
That ‘other pony’ isn’t described in any way during the part where they enter the Carousel Boutique. Big Mac comes in afterwards, and I assumed it was supposed to be him and just badly described.
But then this happened...
He sat the foal beside him on the bench, becoming as unobtrusive and inconspicuous as possible.
This foal had just appeared out of nowhere. It wasn’t mentioned prior to this, and it took me several re-reads to figure out that it was the ‘other pony’ from above.
Though there was nothing that struck me as quite as egregious as simply not bothering to describe the scene that we clearly needed to have described, there were many other times where things just hadn’t been explained well enough for things to fit together seamlessly.
Moreover, during the same introductory sequence, Cheerilee heads off to a back room while Sweetie Belle is behind the counter, and then suddenly:
As Sweetie Belle waited for Cheerilee,
The magic of television jumped her to somewhere that seems contradictory to what the narration had previously described. If Cheerliee was meant to be seeing to herself while Sweetie Belle waited, the prose didn’t make that clear. The whole thing became a bit of a mist-mash around that point where I wouldn’t trust what the author is telling me.
And after all of that, I’m left to wonder what the purpose of the actual story was. Sweetie Belle gets a jackass of a customer and Big Mac throws him out. Okay, so I’m sure that’s mildly cathartic for anyone who works service and gets similarly crappy customers, but there’s no story element to this – it’s just a thing that happens through exposition. It doesn't tell us anything new about any of the characters or touch on any interesting ideas. I'm not even sure the lesson hinted at in the description even comes true.
I don’t know what else I could say. Perhaps there might be more to it the myriad writing issues hadn’t smothered it, but honestly, I suspect not.
NEEDS WORK
A lot of it, I’m afraid.-Scott ‘Inquisitor’ Mence
I hate doing such negative reviews, but like I said, I don’t think there’s any point sugar coating it.
