Response from EQD

A few days ago I submitted The Princess That Equestria Always Had to Equestria Daily, and today I got a response.

This blog will be quite long, but I ask you to read it and respond with your own thoughts on the critiques mentioned. I really would like this to appear on EQD one day. It's the fic I'm most proud of, and the one I've spent the most time cultivating.

There's the odd editing error here and there, but nothing too alarming. It just needs a good proofreading sweep. You do have a number of other issues that are pretty pervasive. There is a lot of word and phrase repetition, where you use the same wording two or more times in a close space without there being a thematic effect.

The other issues, I assume, are what are detailed below. Word and phrase repetition (one of which I knew going in was going to be "raising and lowering the sun and the moon") is a fair critique, though I think at the time I hadn't figured out a more concise way to say such things. Since the majority of the fic is from Twilight's mind, I figured such repetition would get a pass.

There are also instances of directly informing the reader of a character's emotions. Instead of having the narrator state a character is sad (or in other forms, that she behaved sadly or did something in sadness), make her act and appear sad. Think about how an actor gets you to believe his character is sad. He gets you to read his behavior and appearance. This is how people observe and make judgments of each other's moods anyway, so it feels more natural. Written character should mostly be portrayed the same way. This also helps to visualize the scene, since the reader can see in his mind's eye what the characters look like, and that leads into another issue: there's not much description of where any of the story occurs, at least for the first two chapters. Chapter 3 starts to improve on this front.

I don't remember the first issue mentioned. I'll have to reread it to see where it might apply. As for the description, that was pretty much intentional. All the locations in the first two chapters are well-established, and I didn't feel the need to go into much detail. Again, these are locations familiar to Twilight, so from her perspective she wouldn't spend much time detailing such things.

Paint a picture of the setting as well, so the reader doesn't have to invent all that for you. Likewise, a lot of scenes just get glossed over. Take the part near the end of chapter 1 where Rarity encounters Coco. It's not unusual for a story to do a time skip and summarize what happened in the interim, though it brings the story alive to present at least a couple of anecdotes than to rely entirely on the summary. But you summarize only parts of it, like saying Rarity met with Coco, but nothing about what the rest were doing while that happened, so it's strange to single her out, particularly because that meeting really has nothing to do with the plot, so it gets special treatment, yet it's completely extraneous.

I see what the proofreader means about not mentioning what the others are doing while Rarity's talking to Coco. It's a scene I came up with to add more reality to the fic, because I don't think enough stories include random scenes that have no relevance to the overall plot. Who knows? Maybe I'll write a Coco Pommel fic eventually.

The sheer number of call-outs to canon events is a little bit off-putting, even more so for how few of them are actually important to the plot.

Also intentional. I'm guilty of liking continuity.

Your narrator sounds omniscient until chapter 4, where it becomes decidedly limited. It's possible to switch from one to the other, but I don't understand what effect you might be going for in doing so, and without a compelling reason, it just makes the story feel inconsistent.

Again, this is something I didn't realize was going on and a reread would help. The chapter mentioned, however, is the chapter where Twilight meets Star Swirl, and there's a lot more dialogue. In that case, I chose to let the characters speak more. Show vs tell, as the case may be, and this critique possibly contradicts the earlier one.

I see in your author's note for chapter 8 that you wanted to experiment with shifting perspective, but that's not the kind of thing you want to do without a compelling reason. I don't think you did a bad job of it, but you do need to consider which viewpoint is the best one to use for a given scene. You can even change partway through a scene, but there are a couple of things to consider. The longer a perspective remains constant, the more the reader can identify with that character. So when you have a story like this that's so focused on Twilight's experiences, then it doesn't make as much sense to move away from her. Those scenes in another perspective don't inform Twilight's story, and even if they did, would Twilight inform her own story better? If there were significant character development that the story wanted to accomplish for these other characters, then fine, but you don't do that. When considering a change in perspective, you really have to ask yourself: what does the shift achieve that wouldn't be possible otherwise? One common misconception is that you have to go to Rarity's viewpoint to show how she feels, but it's perfectly viable to put her emotions on display through Twilight's observation of them, for example. So this certainly isn't a bad application of shifting perspective, but it's also a fairly pointless one. For that matter, there's a fair amount of pointless shipping bait thrown in, too, which never goes anywhere.

Switching among three perspectives was fully intentional, and not something I ever plan on changing. Chapter 8 is the premeeting among the three advisers, and the switches, often without indication, was meant to reflect the conflict in the nations as well as prepare the reader for the next few chapters where it's the natural progression. Initially I was going to have a single chapter for each tribe from the decision to leave to the discovery of the new land, but I chose to keep the timelines of each chapter more or less the same across the board. Hurricane is the first perspective when talking to Pansy after the summit, as well as the first to find the new land because as a pegasus, he can travel faster in the air than on hoof. For a proofreader that initially preferred showing how a character is sad over telling that they are sad, they don't seem to realize that's what I'm doing. It's also why I give the windigoes perspectives and personalities of their own while keeping them undetected until the chapter they'll finally be seen in the cave. Perhaps I made it too subtle, or perhaps the proofreader isn't as good at it as they thought. As for the shipping bait... I didn't put any in that chapter. The only shipping that I've made intentional was the relationship between Glitter Gold and Star Swirl in chapter 5, which Star Swirl had cut off before it could have begun, and between Hurricane and Pansy, which I wrote to feel like a natural progression rather than something contrived. Anything else is unintentional and/or open to interpretation.

In chapter 10, you're still in other perspectives, but these actually advance the plot, and they're not events that Twilight is present for, so they are more justified.

And having the multiple perspectives without any indication I was going to do so would bring more criticism, so to each his own.

Overall, I can see the reasoning behind many of the critiques listed, but they're also critiques that I was planning on developing in future chapters as well as some that make little sense. This fic has a 93% like/dislike ratio, and half of the dislikes came the same day I published the chapter that revealed that Twilight was Clover the Clever in the flesh, which I expected. Some people just don't like time travel in fiction. It has the reputation of being there for no purpose, but this fic is the opposite. Time travel is necessary for what happened in the past and for the events of the show, as I prefer everything I write to be canon compliant. As long as I'm on a short break with Always Had, rereading and editing what I already have published may be of use during this time.