Quill Reviews: Through the looking glass (X3n0heart)

Yesterday, I tweeted about this weird review thing I'd done, and somehow a few people noticed it. Among them was X3n0heart, who asked if I could take a look at one of their stories. Being a tiny bit afraid of how much I might end up writing about anything longer than, say, 5,000 words, I decided that the best course of action would be to review a one-shot. Hope this helps you, X3n0!

Through the looking glass
Read the story here!

So far as the story in this piece goes, I'm pretty divided: on the one hand, the first half of the story is really quite a good way to begin a "two outcasts become close friends" story; on the other, the second half of the story is an unfortunately rushed and not easily believable romance. The biggest problem, and one I wanted to address as soon as possible in this review, is that the second half seems almost like a completely different story to the first, which makes the transition from one to the other (specifically, the moment that Trixie kisses Sunset) really jarring for the reader. You manage to recover well from this, making it a reasonable interpretation to say that it was little more than a kiss of gratitude, but then all of a sudden the cheap romance cliches are showing up, everyone's blushing, and the entire tone of the piece changes.

This is bad romance. I'm sorry, there's not really another way to put it—we have absolutely no reason to believe that Sunset finds Trixie attractive until Sunset suddenly blurts out the line "I mean, I've always secretly liked Trixie" right before she gets in the shower with her. It's sudden and doesn't quite gel with what we saw in the first half of the story, where Sunset barely reacts to finding out it's Trixie who's kneeling in the dirt and the rain (so, uh, mud? I feel like mud would have been a better word than dirt here.) There's no sign that she likes this girl, let alone that she's attracted to her—and yes, I know she's more concerned about Trixie's wellbeing, but if you want to make the ensuing romance more believable it's probably best to let us know Sunset's got a crush before they start having showers together.

And when you do that, don't just state it. I know this is the most cliched piece of advice I could give, and you've probably all heard it a million times before, and frankly I just dislike it... but show, don't tell. Don't tell us that Sunset has "always secretly liked" Trixie—show us through Sunset's actions and words and thoughts. Give her a moment or two of not quite seeing who it is on the road ahead, of peering forwards through the rain to see if she knows this stranger, only to have her breath catch in her throat as she sees that it is Trixie, and she feels the familiar, unwanted racing of her heart. Pick and choose your favourite romance cliches! But put them in, because they do one very important thing: they tell the reader that they're reading a romance story.

I want to have a brief aside here, because I really don't like giving nothing but criticism without a little bit of a break to talk about the things I liked in a story. Because there are good things here: for a start, the first half of this story is quite a nice opening for a friendship story and, though that ended up not being the story you were telling, I did quite enjoy it. You have these very clear, vivid images—throughout the whole story, not just the opening—that progress naturally and with a consistent, steady pace to tell a story. And though I might take issue with the story that's being told I can't deny that it is well-constructed. Your scenes merge seamlessly together, dragging the reader forward. You don't waste too much of our time, and I feel like you matched the pacing of the writing well to the story that you were telling. This is great!

The problem that's lurking beneath all of that is that the pacing of the story that you were telling is off. I spoke briefly above about how the romance seemed rushed? It is. The story goes from having no hints of romance to having the characters share a shower in the space of a few hundred words, and I don't really know how to respond to that. This feels like a story that would benefit from being a lot longer (heck, probably multi-chapter), to give you the time and space that you need to develop this relationship and these characters. Start them out as just friends! You've got a fantastic opening to base that off, and it could work really well to just develop a first chapter that ends with the two becoming close friends. Chapters can follow with Sunset slowly falling for Trixie (or at least, more slowly than the romance progresses in this story!), because if you ask me the second half of this story feels like something that should come after a good ten chapters of character development.

And at the end of the day, that is what this story is lacking. Character development is a gradual process that is satisfying for readers, because we get to see these people grow and learn from their mistakes. It's at the heart of narrative itself, and if you ask me is probably the most compelling part of a good story. It's most certainly not a binary switch in which a character's behaviour completely changes overnight (except in the case of extreme, life-changing events, which usually make for whole stories in and of themselves.) In this story, Sunset Shimmer doesn't have any room for character development: sure, you have this time jump at the end where she declares that she's "in such a better state of mind", but this is that issue of telling vs showing again. In character development, telling really doesn't work, and I think this is because it's much easier to say that you've changed than it is to actually change. A character just telling us that they're mentally healthier, for example, doesn't do much to convince us that they are—we need to see them thinking more healthily, responding better to stimuli that would have aggravated them before, etc. This is what this piece really lacks, and I think my earlier suggestion of a longer form story would give you the opportunity to really explore that idea.

I think that's all I really had to say about story: let's talk technique. I'm gonna keep this brief, partly because there isn't that much to talk about but mostly because I know I can get really bogged down in details when I talk about this stuff. My biggest piece of advice for you here would be to connect sentences up more (I know I have a horrible habit of using far too many colons and em dashes, particularly in reviews, but I think there's also such a thing as not enough of these constructions.) Let's start with your opening sentences:

Sunset Shimmer. That name used to bring fear to those who heard or spoke it. Now, its just something to laugh at or to mock, in one way or another.

You've presented this as three distinct, separate sentences, but they're all just a word or so off being completely linked and connected. Consider, for example, this alternative:

Sunset Shimmer: the name used to bring fear to those who heard or spoke it, but now it's just something to laugh at or to mock.

I've made a couple of minor changes (the least amongst which is the correction its->it's, but you'll be pleased to know that that was the only typo I spotted during my reading. I can't confirm that there aren't any more, but it's a good sign if I only spot one or two!) but overall it's almost identical to what you've written above. So why am I being so picky about the choice of punctuation here?

I am not a fan of full stops—or periods, but I'm British so I'm going to call them full stops. And in a way, I prefer that name for more reasons than just national pride. "Full stop" describes their function: they bring the pace and the flow of a passage to a full and complete stop, before the next sentence picks things up again, and this is something no other piece of punctuation necessarily does. Sure, you can end a sentence with a question mark or exclamation mark, but you don't have to and they can be used in the middle of a sentence to indicate inflections. I'll repeat that: the full stop is the only punctuation mark that brings the flow to a complete halt. By making the passage above three disconnected sentences, you've built a stop-start pacing into the piece; there are times when having that stop-start quality is fantastic, where that frantic pacing that short sentences lend a piece is exactly what the tone of the piece needs, but I don't think this is one of them. Sure, you have medium-length sentences, but you also have a lot of places like this where ideas that are linked and should be related and connected are separated by unnecessary full stops. And of all the complaints I've made in this review, this is the one that I had the most difficulty with, because every now and again an unnecessary full stop would break the flow and thus break my immersion in the piece. That's the one thing that you should be trying to avoid as an author (in almost every situation imaginable, with the exception of particularly obscure moments in literary fiction where one may want the reader's immersion broken for contextual reasons.)

Finally, I want to end this review by just emphasising a few points. I know the tone of this review has been particularly negative, and I really don't feel to great about that, but I want to make sure you're aware that I give this kind of feedback when I know that an author can do better. And I know you can, X3n0—Through the looking glass, despite its flaws, had a firm grounding in the story you wanted to tell, and didn't get confused or distracted along the way. Like I said above, it also had really strong, defined scenes and effortlessly smooth transitions, and I feel that with a bit of work on creating compelling imagery you can make those scenes even more powerful and draw a reader into the world you're writing about. And I think that taking this story, or a similar one, and making it longer in the ways I suggested above would really offer you a chance to practice some of the ideas I've mentioned here. I know I've said a lot and it's quite a bit to take in, but I also think that these are things you can improve on. I hope this helps you, and I wish you all the best in your future writing endeavours

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I know that this review was more author-centric than I would have liked, but I hope that it might still be an enjoyable read for anyone other than X3n0heart! Let me know in the comments below if there's anything you think I could improve on, or just chat about the story/my comments. Also, if you'd like me to review a fic of your choice, let me know either in the comments below, a PM, or any other method you might have for communicating with me—I'm open to reviewing any fics with an E or T rating, so long as they're not too long (and ideally complete. I don't really know how I'd go about reviewing something when it wasn't finished...)

I seem to be making these reviews a daily thing, now, so I guess I'll see you all tomorrow!