Read It Now Reviews #72 – Not Alone in the Crowd, Gentle Persuasion, The Smartphone, Spoilers, Princess Celestia’s Legendary Litany of Laughable Losses · 10:28pm Feb 5th, 2016
The Writeoff Association is a great way to produce a large volume of work. Unfortunately, at times it can also be a great way to produce a large volume of stories that you wrote in a short period of time and then need to spend some time cleaning up, resulting in a large backlog of stories which need some serious editorial love.
Such has been the case with me; I presently have 18 such stories in my backlog. But fortunately, that number has gone down by one more with the release of my latest story, now with 300% more poetry:
The Wishing Pool
Comedy, Romance
1,333 wordsRarity has traveled across the length of Equestria to reach the Pool of Dreams.
Her goal? To finally find a stallion worthy of being her boyfriend.
The remains of those who used their wishes carelessly lie strewn around the pool.
But Rarity is no fool. She knows exactly what she wants.
It had been a long time since I last wrote a bunch of poetry, but unlike the modernist rock poetry of The Collected Poems of Maud Pie, The Wishing Pool contains much more traditional metered, rhyming poetry. Folks seem to like it well enough so far, and I think it is significantly enhanced over the original writeoff version, proving once again that the writeoff can drive you to write stuff you weren’t ever planning on writing.
Also unlike The Collected Poems of Maud Pie, this is a prose story which contains poetry, rather than a poetry collection.
In other news, I decided to take a gander at a bunch of recently published stories, most of which spent at least some time in the featured story box, and I figured it was about time for me to get more reviews done. I actually have three sets of reviews done, a set of Read It Later reviews which will appear sometime this weekend, as well as a set of Recommended Story Reviews which will appear Soon™.
Today’s stories:
Not Alone in the Crowd by Doccular42
Gentle Persuasion by Minds Eye
The Smartphone by SilverStar7
Spoilers by Super Trampoline
Princess Celestia’s Legendary Litany of Laughable Losses by Prak
Not Alone in the Crowd
by Doccular42
PSA
1,821 wordsUsually, we feel alone when we're by ourselves. But sometimes, the loneliest place is in the middle of a crowd. Spike has to get away, and he needs somepony to talk with him so that he can get through the evening.
Why I added it: It was featured.
Review
Spike has a panic attack. Fluttershy comforts him.
Frankly, I don’t think Spike is particularly the right character for this story; Fluttershy and Twilight have both shown signs of this sort of thing (though Twilight is more neurotic than the sort of acute anxiety you get in a panic attack).
However, the largest issue with this story is that it is a PSA which doesn’t really make good use of the characters; they feel kind of generic here, and while that is valuable in a PSA, it doesn’t make for very good storytelling. It is just “it is okay to have panic attacks, just know that you’ll be okay and everything will get better”, and while that is an okay message, this story doesn’t really go beyond that to connect it to a powerful narrative.
Recommendation: Not Recommended
Gentle Persuasion
by Minds Eye
Romance, Slice of Life
4,885 wordsRumble has a special gift for Scootaloo's birthday. Now he just has to tell her about it.
Why I added it: Minds Eye is a good writer.
Review
Thunderlane and Cloudchaser have brought a low-quality cloud bank to Ponyville to act as fog. Of course, there are some ulterior motives – Rumble likes Scootaloo, and he has never seen her fly, so he figured that she’d think that being able to clown around in clouds like any other pegasus would be fun – and with fog being so close to the ground, it is the perfect opportunity for her to learn what it is like to live in the clouds.
There’s just one problem – Rumble has to ask Scootaloo to head out there with him.
And he’s terrified.
Good thing Thunderlane and Cloudchaser are there to make sure he can’t chicken out. Just, you know, ask out a chicken 
This story is fundamentally focused on a cute little colt struggling to ask out a girl, with his big brother around to try and give him a loving shove forward. It is a kind of fluffy piece all about Rumble’s adorable excuse-making for not asking Scootaloo to go bounce in some fog with him, and if you like cute stories, there’s a good chance you’ll like this one.
Recommendation: Worth Reading.
The Smartphone
by SilverStar7
Comedy
2,884 wordsOn her latest visit to the human world, Twilight decides that she likes having a smartphone too much. So she steals one and takes it back to Ponyville with her.
Sunset does not approve.
Why I added it: It was featured.
Review
Twilight Sparkle took Sunset Shimmer’s smartphone, and is not giving it back. It is way too interesting! Naturally, Sunset Shimmer objects to this, while the rest of Twilight’s friends are just curious about what exactly a smartphone is.
The basic premise of this relies on your accepting that Twilight would be willing to steal an expensive piece of technology from Sunset Shimmer and refuse to give it back because it was too cool. The story is also a bit telly at times as well, and is deeply in love with saidisms, some of which are pretty questionable, like “defended”, though I mostly only noticed them while reading it through the second time.
Ordinarily, I find stories like this to fall flat for me, especially when they have issues with the prose. But for some reason, this one actually amused me. Twilight’s poor attempts at keeping the smartphone a secret, as well as her possessiveness and attempts at making it work independent of human technology, are amusing enough, but I think what amused me the most were all of Twilight’s friends (other than Rainbow Dash) playing the smart man at the same time.
I you like silly, dumb stories, you might enjoy this. Just be aware, there’s some potential deal-brakers here.
Recommendation: If like stories with silly premises, are willing to accept the central premise of Twilight stealing the phone, and saidism abuse and a bit of telling don’t throw you, you might like this, but if any of those things bother you, you’d best make like a crystal cow and steer clear.
Spoilers
by Super Trampoline
Sex, Comedy
1,866 wordsPinkie Pie really wishes Cadance would stop telling her increasingly hard-to-keep secrets. Set between seasons five and six.
Contains spoilers, if the story title and the cover art weren't enough to clue you in. center]
Why I added it: Super Trampoline said I had to. Plus, how could I not with pun cover art like that?
Review
I’m not sure how many of you are familiar with Super Trampoline, but this story is very, very him.
Full of meta-references to other fanfics, music videos, bits of fanon, fandom drama, and numerous other things, this thing is weird from beginning to end. It really struggled a lot in the first half, getting bogged down in a bunch of fourth-wall breaking humor which ended up being pretty excessive, but it felt less so towards the end, as it became less concerned about talking about its own author and more concerned with throwing as much ridiculous stuff into the story as possible.
This is fairly raunchy, and extremely self-aware. On the whole, the story felt like it was trying too hard to be funny, and while it was intermittently amusing (in the way that most “everyone is secretly a sex fiend” comedy stories are), I struggled to get over my initial negative impression and never really fully did.
Recommendation: Not recommended.
Princess Celestia’s Legendary Litany of Laughable Losses
by Prak
Comedy, Slice of Life
3,121 wordsA breakfast conversation between the princesses turns toward Celestia's long history of losing fights.
Why I added it: The scent of drama in the comments drew me, like a shark to blood.
Review
Apparently all the blood belonged to Princess Celestia, though.
It has been noted by some wags that Princess Celestia never seems to win fights. Of course, she is a memetic badass within the fandom, as evinced by basically every picture of Celestia with a burning mane.
Figure 1: The cover art used on half the “Celestia turns evil and sets Equestria on fire” fanfics.
But of course, she went down pretty quick when confronted by Chrysalis hopped up on the love of the second most powerful unicorn in Equestria.
So, naturally, Prak thought it would be funny to write a story about Celestia repeatedly losing fights in an increasingly ridiculous manner.
The core of the story is Princess Luna teasing her older sister. Celestia insists that a lot has changed in the last thousand years, and she did beat Princess Luna that one time (even if she cheated and used the Elements of Harmony). Luna dismisses it, and proceeds to thoroughly embarrass her with the stories of confrontations long-past which Celestia loses in an increasingly improbable manner.
While this story has the proper structure, with the correct general sense of Serial Escalation that really makes stories like this, I never really laughed at it. I think the problem was that all the humor ended up feeling too telegraphed to me; it was obvious that Celestia was going to lose every one of those fights/confrontations/baby viewings from the get go, and while that sort of thing can be funny, the fights sort of hinged on the idea that her loss came from something unexpected, while the very nature of the story meant that we knew she was going to lose. While sometimes this sort of thing can still be funny nevertheless, and the sort of serial escalation here is key to that, it just never really quite crossed that line for me.
I think the other issue was that the conversation between the losses ended up detracting from the humor rather than adding to it; had it been one failure right after the other, bam, bam, bam, it might have been more amusing just from the rising sense of hilarity of increasingly improbable circumstances conspiring to deprive Celestia of victory time and again, but with the interruptions of the conversation, the sort of sense of rising comedy ended up feeling like it was sort of lost, as the excuse-making and Luna’s jabs at Celestia somehow seemed to drain the humor from it. I think it might have been the lack of contrast in terms of humor; it went from higher levels of humor in the punchline to each scene, to a lower level in the conversation, and thus never really felt like there was all that much of a back-and-forth in terms of the hilarity level, making it come off as flatter than it might have otherwise.
While the ending was amusing enough, it really would have worked better had I been laughing the whole way through.
Recommendation: Not Recommended.
Summary
Not Alone in the Crowd by Doccular42
Not Recommended
Gentle Persuasion by Minds Eye
Worth Reading
The Smartphone by SilverStar7
Not Recommended
Spoilers by Super Trampoline
Not Recommended
Princess Celestia’s Legendary Litany of Laughable Losses by Prak
Not Recommended
I believe I am going to focus over the next few days on getting some reviews done for the writeoff, as well as trying to get another story edited up and ready for publication. I have a RariJack RomCom which I hope to get done before Valentine’s Day, but before I get there, I think I’m going to try and get a rather more serious story done – a story I have delayed on finishing since the season break between seasons 3 and 4 for no adequate reason.
Expect another review set in the next few days, and hopefully another story again by this time next week.
Until then, folks!
Number of stories still listed as Read It Sooner: 111
Number of stories still listed as Read It Later: 417
Number of stories listed as Read It Eventually: 1816
It can also be a great place to write some story reviews, but it doesn't give you the chance to advertise your recent fic at the top.
3735319 Rank Hath Its Privileges. Think of it as that commercial in front of the TV program you want to watch, only a good one like a Snickers commercial, not some lame one that makes you want to run out of the room that starts with "Do you experience cramping more than twice a week...."
3735355
I don't mind the ads on TD's blogs. I mind waiting for reviews of my freakin' writeoff story!
Pestering TD seemed like an obvious solution.
3735367
I mentioned this to Horizon the other day, but at this point, if I don't read other stories during the writeoffs, I don't ever read them, now that we're down to the three week schedule (seeing as I am, apparently, completely insane and compete every round).
This is, incidentally, why I still haven't reviewed Lost Time. I even bumped it up to my highest priority shelf, but I haven't sat down and, you know, read it all.
3735355
Now, now, restless leg syndrome is a legitimate medical condition which they totally need to advertise the cure for. How else would people with restless legs know that they could get some help for their terrible, tragic condition?
It is actually less ridiculous than it sounds, though, as apparently it can cause insomnia in some people.
What, I didn't abuse enough saidisms for you? You gotta give Smartphone all the love?
Ah well. I suppose I'll have to console myself with being the sole Worth Reading on the list. Always nice to get a signal boost.
3735381
It was a cute story!
3735374
I'm
mostlyjoking.And I wasn't holding my breath on Lost Time. I'm really looking forward to it one of these days (the judging from the contest, and reviews from you and First_Down when he finally gets back are the last "goals" I have to check off on that fic.) But I know that sometimes long fics have to wait for an opportune moment to read them.
media.giphy.com/media/lqmMKZumTwxEs/giphy.gif
3735367 Well, he does have quite a backlog. (opens up Read Later Important and browses)
Hm. So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish, good. Small-Town Charm, very good. The Enchanted Library, very nice. Land of the Blind which is still not done, darn. Asylum, oh yeah. And The Temptress Came Unto Her, The Best Night Ever, Flitter, Letters From a Senior to a Junior Changeling, quite good. Celestia Sleeps In, quite long and quite worth it. 55 Gallons of... (ahem) Okay (and reading, seems more interesting on the inside... I better quit there). Hm, I could have sworn TD had already reviewed some of these. Quite a few i there that I recognize and liked.
Wooo, my first NR from Titanium Dragon! I'm in the big leagues now, baby! ( I don't disagree with any of what you have to say, and this is on the less random side of my comedies.
)
I do hope that someday a quarter to a half a year from now when I actually do get the rough draft of my magnum opus up, you'd be willing to take a quick look at it. Don't worry it shouldn't be more than 20,000 words.
3735579
FYI, the 55 gallons one is because I have a note in my long document that there was some comedy potential with that product, and then someone went and wrote a story about it, and I'm curious as to what it actually is.
Thank you for taking the time to review The Smartphone. I agree with your assessment of the story. Had I known the story would get featured, I would have spent much more time on it.
As for the "saidisms," I didn't realize that was a bad thing. After all, my sixth grade writing teacher forbade us from using "said" in any of our creative writing, demanding that we use other descriptors. I remember one day she had the class brainstorm words to use instead of "said" and kept the list next to the board for us to consult when writing for the rest of the year. Those who still used "said" were marked down for it. The use of "said" was also discouraged in my high school. A quick Google search reveals that apparently using "said" has come into favor in the last few years. So I suppose I should start using "said" again instead of avoiding it at all costs.
The telling nature of my stories is something that has plagued my Internet writings for years. This is because whenever I stay true to "show don't tell" I have readers getting frustrated at the lack of clarity. When I read for myself, I sometimes wonder about the motivations of characters, or what an action "means," but don't mind that the author is not telling me outright. After all, that's how real life is! Yet online commenters have complained when I've done this. The only way I've found to avoid any ambiguity is to tell things directly. I sometimes attempt to compromise by doing both the show and the tell, but that's really just "telling" with fluff.
Perhaps I'm just not "showing" well enough. Maybe I should just let the questions happen; not care if something isn't 100% clear. Is writing how I know is right better than writing what I know works for the audience? I've justified continuing to tell by saying to myself "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," but I also want to improve as a writer. Is there a way I can stop telling without alienating my established audience?
I don't know if there are answers to these questions... What were we talking about again?
Oh, right. Thanks for the review! I'm glad my story got a "Not Recommended Unless..." instead of just a flat "Not Recommended." If another one of my stories ends up on this list, I want it to be "Worth Reading" so I guess I need to get better.
That's a pretty insightful take on the Celestia KO story. I liked the idea and the whimsy of it, but yeah, I can totally see how better pacing would have significantly improved it.
3735549
Okay, that's twice now tonight you've sniped the comment I was going to come in and write. :V So to add some sort of value I'll just mention that now I want to read a story in which that pun is used as a racist joke in Equestria now that the Crystal Empire has returned and crystal cows are actually a hypothetical thing.
3735319 3735374
Dunno about you, TD, but my solution to this is to give up on the "enter every writeoff" thing, like I said I was going to a few months back. I talked about skipping one out of four in order to bring the writeoffs-participated-in count back to approx 1/month, but at this point I'm totally comfortable just skipping the minific competitions entirely, and I'll have like an entire six-week stretch with no Writeoff obligations that I can use for my editing.
Now, if I can only convince you and Cold in Gardez to do the same, I might even keep my top rank.
3736116
You're welcome! Congrats on being featured. The upside of being featured is that it gets you a lot of attention. The downside of being featured is that it gets you a lot of attention.
This is possibly one of the worst pieces of commonly thrown around writing advice that is tossed around in school.
The problem is that it is completely wrong, but arises from a real issue that the teachers misunderstood and propagated amongst themselves because they don't know how to write.
The core issue is one of repetition. Repetition is a powerful tool - it draws attention to itself. The problem is, unintentional repetition also draws attention to itself - and this is bad, because it is distracting. Repeating the same word too often is generally bad unless you're doing so on purpose in order to drill it into the reader for some reason.
The reason why they (wrongly!) think said is bad is because you end up with things like:
"Blah blah blah blah," said X.
"Blah blah blah," said Y.
"Blah blah," said X.
"Blah blah, blad de blah blah," said Y.
This is bad, but it isn't actually bad because of the repetition of the word said. The real reason it is bad is that it is repetitive sentence structure. You don't actually fix the problem by replacing said with saidisms, you're just trying to ineptly mask it.
Unfortunately, the teachers don't recognize the real problem, and thus, think that said is bad. The real problem is that you shouldn't be writing this way at all.
When you look at the writing of good writers, what they do instead is use a large number of other things in order to mark who is speaking. They'll have characters emote - that is to say, use body language - or otherwise give contextual clues as to who is talking. Indeed, if it is obvious who is talking, they will often omit any sort of dialogue tag at all, and just let the line hang on its own because the reader can follow along just fine.
Saidisms aren't bad; good writers do use them. In fact, if you look at the Harry Potter books, about half of the dialogue tags are saidisms.
The thing is, though, she just doesn't use saidisms or said very often at all in an absolute sense; having sixteen dialogue tags per chapter, and half of them being "said", and the other half saidisms, often equates to about one or two every page.
Saidisms are useful because they allow you to add inflection to speech; you can have a character shout, or hiss, or whisper, or ask (which you should use when someone is asking a question), or explain. You can use said bookisms in the same manner - a said bookism is like "said sternly" or "asked quietly", where you use a modifier on the verb.
So why not use them all the time? First off, a lot of saidisms are just outright wrong. For instance, "defended" isn't actually a saidism at all. While you can defend someone in court, and you can say something defensively, the word defended isn't actually a synonym for said. A lot of the worst saidisms fall under this category.
The second problem with a lot of saidisms is that they're often telly and redundant. They fail to add additional context to the words. One of the biggest crimes of telling is telling the audience something they already know; if it is contextually obvious, using a saidism can often make the reader feel like they're being spoken down to. And, as noted, repetition is distracting if it isn't being used for something important.
The third problem is that they're inherently attention-grabbing. A saidism draws attention to itself; it is an unusual word compared to said. This is not a bad thing in and of itself; indeed, it is the primary reason why we use saidisms. Stuff like whispered, shouted, yelled, mumbled, ect. all actually does add useful information.
The problem is that when you use a saidism and it isn't really important, you're distracting a reader from what is important - the dialogue and actions of the characters.
The fourth problem is that when you use a lot of saidisms, they all lose their impact - when everyone is complaining, declaring, announcing, piping up, retorting, ect. all the time then all the individual saidisms lose their power. So not only are you distracting the reader by poking them with words which are supposed to be significant but aren't, but you're making it so that people lose track of which saidisms are really important. Using saidisms sparingly gives them more impact, which makes them more useful.
And the final problem is that when you're using a lot of saidisms in close proximity to each other, it is typically a sign that you're running into repetitive sentence structure, and should mix things up a bit anyway.
It isn't bad to have someone coming in hissing and spitting out words if the fact that this person is a maniac or angry or deeply upset is part of what you're trying to establish about the character. But by avoiding using saidisms excessively, you make the important uses more impactful, and don't draw attention away from the text otherwise.
Show, don't tell is kind of an oversimplification of the real rules. It is a shorthand for a complex set of rules that have become fairly intuitive to people.
Telling in and of itself is not bad; it can be used very well. The problem with telling is that it tends to be less engaging and immersive. If I tell you that Twilight was sad, you won't feel sad. If I show you why Twilight is sad, you're much more likely to empathize with her and get sucked into the story.
Showing forces the reader to spend a bit of effort involving themselves in the story; it makes them more of an active participant in reading, and draws them in. Showing is also more powerful because it shows the audience why the character is feeling the way they are or doing the things they're doing. It shows us what it is like to be in a place or to be a person, and that is intrinsically immersive.
The problem with showing is that if you fail to properly convey the character to the audience, the audience is left confused.
Properly conveying the mindset of a character can be hard, but it can really be powerful.
If you're interested, Twilight Sparkle Makes a Cup of Tea is sometimes cited as a story which does a very good job of establishing Twilight's emotions by showing rather than telling.
Spring Is Dumb gets us nicely into the mindset of Rainbow Dash by telling us exactly what she's thinking, but as we read on, we realize that she's deliberately hiding something from the audience, and thus her constant denial of reality serves to get us into her mindset. This story does outright tell us things, but it does it in such a way that the reader is drawn into Rainbow Dash instead of distanced from her.
The real goal is to engage the audience and to make them empathize with the character. Telling us how they're feeling tends to be less powerful than showing us how they're feeling, because the latter requires us to actually invest ourselves a bit to get into things, as well as increasing our level of understanding of how the character is feeling, and possibly the complex, mixed emotions of their reality rather than a flat, un-nuanced "happy" or "sad".
You can combine showing and telling in powerful ways in addition to weak ways. When you explain that someone screwed up their face as if thinking of something unpleasant, that is telling - but it can communicate something important about the character and make the scene more evocative as a result.
3736116
Incidentally, you may also want to read this blog post by Bad Horse about showing vs telling, and look at this annotation of some excerpts from a Harry Potter book.
3736327 Plot twist: Iron Will muscles in on Cadance's love life.
3736331
Please make this a blog post.