Story recommendation: After the Races · 9:46pm Sep 6th, 2016
Nighthawks After the Races [Drama] [Equestria Girls] [Slice of Life]
An allegedly very trustworthy rodent left an intelligent, well-written comment on one of my posts. So I checked out this rodent's home page. Mysterious, pretentious phrases in lowercase, yes, but some good story choices, too. One of his or her stories was already on my "Read it Later" for some reason. So I read it.
I'm preparing to take the GRE in English Literature in October, and I began collecting and plowing through a list of about 100 short stories last week, all the ones remaining on a study guide list that I hadn't read before. Stories by Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, Stephen Crane, Eudora Welty, DH Lawrence, people like that. Good stories.
"After the Races" doesn't look shabby next to those famous stories. The creative descriptions of Adagio's thoughts and feelings really pulled me into her point of view, even though I hate her in canon. It's a beautifully-written story about how each of the Dazzlings deals with becoming mortal and losing her powers. There is no stunning plot twist or resolution. (Well, there is a stunning plot twist, but it's not the point of the story; it's about a third of the way through.) This story's strength is its precise, convincing description of how the Dazzlings might have reacted, and why. It makes them all fuller characters than they are in the movie.
Many readers will be unsatisfied with its ending. They'll want to know what happens next. But it isn't that kind of story. It's about Adagio realizing what's already happened and what she's already decided. The VTR calls it "a little piece about independence and self-discovery."
Those tags, though. I think "drama" and "slice of life" are a genuine case of tags that are incompatible by definition. I'd just call this "drama".
It has 406 views and 21 thumbs up, and was rejected by EQD. The rodent has 25 followers, myself included. So if you want to say you liked it (the story) or it (the rodent) before it was cool, now's your chance.
Very nice. Well worth the read.
I was reading and following very trustworthy rodent long before it was cool. All of his stuff is excellent, although "The Patriot" is a bit difficult to understand unless you have some familiarity with the material it is imitating, WWII-era Japanese fascist writings, I think? A rather interesting if disturbing worldview, certainly unlike anything else I've seen on this site.
I read this story long ago, and... I don't know what you're seeing. It has very nice dialogue, but as you've said, there's not really a turning point or a resolution. It does have an open ending, but that doesn't mean a story can't be resolved—in fact it should. For me, this was precisely the wrong way to have an open ending, in that it states or suggests the way things could go, but doesn't particularly invest the characters or me in the multiple possible outcomes. I think it's strong as a scene, but I don't think it makes for a story. But fwiw, I did enjoy it. And now that I look back through the email archives, this wasn't given a flat rejection. It got a fairly extensive discussion, which is unusual.
4196109 A story should say something, but that doesn't mean the plot needs to resolve, or that the story needs to resolve (answer) a question. Rather than argue the point theoretically, I'll list some of the stories I just read that are generally considered among the top 300 or so stories in the English language and that end in the same general way. Like "After the Races", these stories throw out a plot hook and then don't tell you what happens next, because the story isn't about what happens next, but is to show you the problems the characters faced already, see what options they had, and get you to think about the general phenomenon that the main characters' decisions hinged on. To find out what Adagio did next, or even whether Sonata killed herself, would diminish the importance of the decision Adagio already made to live the life she now has, and either validate or repudiate that decision rather than asking you to think about it.
William Faulkner, "That Evening Sun Go Down". You never find out whether Jubah kills Nancy, because the story is about Nancy's complete lack of options, her being railroaded by fate down this one path, to the point where she may be weeping not for fear, but because she doesn't even know if it matters whether she lives or dies.
Ernest Hemingway, "The Killers". You never find out whether the killers kill Ole Andreson, because the point is not whether they kill Ole Andreson in particular, but that this is a world where such killings are a business and eventually everybody accepts it, even the victims.
D H Lawrence, "The Horse Dealer's Daughter". You never find out whether Mabel and Jack get married, or whether they "really love" each other at all, because the point of the story is to ask whether "love" is anything like how we imagine it, or just a mad, non-cognitive, mechanistic response to stimuli.
In all of these cases you don't find these things out because finding them out would focus your attention on this specific instantiation of the story with these specific people, and appear to give an answer to a question that doesn't have an answer.
My story "The Gift of Lethe" also resembles this pattern.
4196363
I'm not sure if you're offering a counter-argument or a supporting argument. It's worded like the former, but it's echoing what I said, so... huh?
Yeah, a story doesn't have to have plot closure, but it does need some kind of closure, to a character development arc or a theme or something. We agree on that. What bugged me here is that it presented the decision Adagio faced and left it at that. No, we don't have to know what decision she made. But we do have to know what investment she has in the various possible outcomes, or else we have no reason to care what choice she makes. That's where I found this wanting. The way to make an open ending work is to state or imply several possible outcomes, demonstrate that the character has strong feelings about most if not all of them, state or imply how likely each one is, and make sure each one is plausible. I covered this on the Advanced Writing Panel we did together at Bronycon, which I wrote up as a guest column on Chris's blog. I do disagree a little in knowing what happened to Sonata, but it's more on a procedural ground, in that suicide is a delicate topic that needs enough development to make it feel justified, at least from the standpoint of an EqD rejection. That comes straight from Seth, though I think it's not a bad stance in general for a story element that can be an easy way to generate pathos. The level of profanity was apparently also an issue, though of course that's not reflective of the writing quality.
Interestingly enough, I've read all three of this author's stories, and another one is also covered by material from that panel: "The Wealth of the World" is purportedly a journal, but it does a lot of things that aren't reasonable for the format. It was a write-off entry, and the author doesn't seem to have incorporated any of the feedback he received during that event. I don't remember if I had just read it out of interest or if it was on my voting slate. The key knock against it with the voters was that they found it boring, though Cold in Gardez had an interesting take on it where he thought it mimicked an archaic writing style effectively, though that would kind of make it applicable to a niche audience who would recognize that and enjoy it on those grounds. I think that came out in a private discussion, though, so it may not be reflected in comments CiG left during the write-off. While I personally didn't agree that it was boring, I did find "The Patriot" so. It's probably been over a year since I read any of them, so I'm not going to be good at remembering specifics, but I do recall my overall impressions.
I normally wouldn't do this, because authors deserve secrecy, but inasmuch as the author himself has admitted to this story being rejected from EqD, I'll add to my previous comment that I went back to look up the response emails to all of these stories. Two of them were mostly positive, and one was quite long, meaning it must have included rather extensive feedback, though I didn't go scrolling through it.
I enjoyed both "The Wealth of the World" and "After the Races," but I thought each one suffered from a significant flaw to a critical part of the story. Verytrustworthyrodent is a good writer, and his biggest strength is probably in dialogue, but he's so far chosen to write very common plots, meaning it's even more important to do them just right, and there's something missing for me from each one of them. He also doesn't seem willing to use reader feedback, or I'd have offered to help him.
4196818
When you talk about open-ended stories, you talk about stories of the same type as "The Lady or the Tiger?" or The Iliad [1], in which the focus is on what decision the character makes about what to do next. This is shown both in what you said above:
... and what you said in your Pony Rambling:
[1] We never find out in the Iliad whether Achilles lives or dies, or who wins the Trojan war, because more focus is on the general ethical issues involved in Achilles' decision to fight again. We care, perhaps (okay, I didn't) whether Achilles lives or dies, but the important thing was his decision.
Incidentally, I think this kind of story completely vanished from Western literature between The Iliad (~ 800 BC) and "The Lady and the Tiger?" (1882). I can't think of a single example during those 2,700 years.
In my comment 4196363, I was talking about backward-looking stories. These are similar, but the main character sometimes makes no theme-relevant choices at all, and the focus is not on the consequences of a decision, but more of a meditation on the phenomenon the author wants the reader to look at. The plot isn't resolved, and the reader isn't supposed to dwell on the possible alternative outcomes in the way you describe, because the outcome isn't important. In this case, Adagio will not feel she was wrong if Aria gets back to Equestria but right if Aria doesn't. That outcome is irrelevant.
Like forward-looking open-ended stories, the problem at the heart of the story is not something that can be easily answered by a utilitarian, consequentialist calculation. In the forward-looking stories, though, the focus is still on comparing outcomes; they're just difficult to compare. In the backward-looking stories, the focus is on framing the problem, or asking why this problem exists. [2] Some of these stories still frame the problem as a dilemma, but the choices are only in accepting or rejecting an aspect of reality ("The Killers", "The Horse Dealer's Daughter"). Some don't frame it as a dilemma, which is a radical break with Western tradition, which has always conceived of every ethical problem as a choice between two binary oppositions. "After the Races" shows three possible responses to the same situation. In "That evening sun go down", Nancy has no meaningful choices at all.
[2] So "The Gift of Lethe" is more like the forward-looking stories in that way; it's about comparing outcomes, but one outcome already happened.
Quick question since I notice not knowing some of the characters in the description: do I need to have seen Rainbow Rocks to understand the story?
4196934 You need to know who the Dazzlings are, that they feed on negative emotions in a vague, predatory way, and basically what happened to them at the end of Rainbow Rocks.
4196957 Okay thanks, been meaning to catch up on that movie anyway.
4196906
I'll see if I can do a better job of explaining my dissonance with this.
In some cases, it's not necessary to know what the result of a decision is or how the plot will turn out, but when the decision features prominently in how the story goes on, then it leaves me feeling unsatisfied when I don't even know what options the character would feel passionately about, how passionately, and why. To me, "The Lady or the Tiger" works more as a logic/philosophical exercise, not so much as a story, because it uses such a detached narrator that I don't feel that attachment to the lady that the narrator assures me the protagonist has, since it's never demonstrated. It's interesting because of the thought experiment, not because I feel attached to the characters, and an intellectual investment is much different from an emotional one.
The Iliad is yet another matter, because it was a huge historical event at the time. We don't really need to know whether Achilles dies or who won the war, because the reader presumably already knows, especially readers at the time it was written. So the compelling thing is his decision, and he struggles with it as the story happens. Same goes for "The Lady or the Tiger." The protagonist is faced with this decision during the story.
You've probably seen plenty of stories written by inexperienced people, where there's little or no dialogue, and the entire thing is narration of some momentous event, but told as a wrap-up after it happened. They're not effective because it's far more engaging to see things as they happen (which still is often how a story is understood to happen, even in past tense). Others do have a lot of dialogue, but we still don't witness the events as they happen, because the characters are acting as a proxy for that narrative infodump and speaking about events well after they happened. While it can present the same conflict, it's less engaging when the reader knows that conflict has already been dealt with, even if they don't know the results of it yet, even less so when they do know the results. For instance, this is a problem for any non-AU story about what happens to Nightmare Moon, since the reader already knows she'll be defeated, if that's to be the story's central conflict.
So yes, in this story, we're examining the consequences of Adagio's decisions, but they've already been made. We already know the end state. We didn't see her struggle to make those decisions, and we're not presented with any struggle she's experiencing in deciding what to do next, which robs that open ending of its power. By the time the story starts, she's already past that first set of decisions, and when it ends, she hasn't moved any further, and that's key for me. She hasn't changed any from the beginning to the end. I'm with you so far. This is a backward-looking story, so it's a little different, but I'd still expect it to use much the same playbook. While examining the "how did we get here?" question can be interesting from an academic standpoint, it just isn't particularly entertaining, at least to me. If even after the fact, we got a clearer picture of what Adagio was like before she made her past decisions and what the struggle to make them was like for her, then we do see her change, but in this after-the-fact way that has to be handled very carefully to keep it from being blandly expository—this is usually done by seeing some overt emotional reaction on her part to having these memories rekindled, so that we essentially get to see the original instance replayed, its effects lingering. In short, the "how did we get here" and the "why did we get here" are far more interesting than the "we are here," which is largely the domain of history books. Of course, history books can deal with the why and how as well, so the trick is in making the "how" and "why" poignant instead of factual.
So that's why I didn't find the transition from past to present compelling. I didn't get much of a sense of her turmoil over it and how it changed her. Then that leaves the transition from present to future as the other source for change or conflict resolution, and as I've said, I didn't see Adagio's investment in the future possibilities put on display, so that didn't draw me in, either, which isn't surprising, since the story's not trying to do that.
That leaves me enjoying a nicely written scene, but not a story that lets me learn something new about Adagio's character or makes a point about the world as a whole. Maybe it's just a kind of story I'm incapable of connecting with, but I never got drawn into empathizing with Adagio at all. For some stories, I can point to this reason or that which may be attributable to the author or not, and in this case, it was the lack of any on-screen struggle.
You obviously felt like it did adequately explore Adagio's struggles with what she's done. Or else felt that it didn't need to, in which case we might just be at irreconcilable differences in what makes a story move us.
And that word "realizing" can run the gamut anywhere from reacting with a shrug to a piece of trivia to redefining your entire life. This hit toward the former end of the spectrum for me.
In any case, I'd encourage the author to resubmit, if he cares to. Just make a brief neutral note asking for reconsideration based on the discussion in this thread, and a different pre-reader will take it. I'll stay out of it, too. It may still need to tone down the profanity and take a little more developed look at the implied suicide, though.
Thanks for the shout-out.
You've touched on one of the major elements of this story's writing process in your comments—that this is a backwards-looking story reflecting on the decisions made in the wake of upheaval. That's why it's called 'After the Races'—the story's centre of gravity is in the past. It's about reintegrating Adagio with the decisions that made her who she is. I had been wanting to write something in the idiom of the American realist short story, and these things all converged when I watched Rainbow Rocks. At the end, the main characters cheerfully assert that the Dazzlings had been turned into 'normal teenage girls' with their pendants broken, which actually shocked me. It's a huge revelation that gets no meaningful treatment thanks to the genre, tone and format. I thought the implications of immortal beings with enormous magical power being reduced to mundane human teenagers demanded attention that the movie couldn't provide. Anyway, the title hit me immediately and it proceeded from there.
4196818
The thing is, you're entirely correct, but it's not something I really want to change, for the reasons that Cold in Gardez gives. The story is a pastiche of nineteenth century literary idealism, specifically that of Hawthorne, whose idiom is almost entirely dead in the West, especially after 1945. This is a little tangential, but if we go back to an even more Platonic era, the Middle Ages, dream vision poetry was popular because writing pure fiction was a little ignoble, a kind of lying or imitation of reality, whereas dreams actually happened and moreover could imply revelation. Writing about things that were obviously not real as if they were real was one of the best ways to write freely, especially if you wanted to write about something controversial (the anticlericalism of Piers Plowman is a great example) . A completely straight reading of Chaucer's House of Fame would tell you that Chaucer himself had the following dream: he was reading part of The Aeneid in a glass temple, whereupon he met a giant eagle sent by Jove who carried him off, engaged in a detailed dialogue with him about authorship, fame and the classics, and eventually delivered him to a mansion built on a block of ice where he met an idealised representation of Fame (and so on…). The House of Fame breezes through all this as though it's meant to be a real dream, even though everyone reading it knows that it isn't. By the time you get to Hawthorne several centuries later, he could openly write a story like 'Earth's Holocaust' as a parable rather than a dream vision.
We don't tend to write like this anymore—modern tastes prefer realist characters and situations, not unlike 'After the Races'. But I like both, and it's one of my goals as a writer to explore these alternative and ignored ways to read and write fiction. Analogously, it's something like the difference between medieval plainsong, polyphony or even baroque music (excluding Bach) vs. Romantic symphonies. Most people have modern sensibilities, attuned to realism and raw, eruptive expressions of individuality, and so they tend to prefer the latter in my experience.
That's not to say your criticism is wrong—quite the opposite. As a realist story, it fails. People don't write down quoted rhetorical dialogues in their private diaries, and I emphasise that it's my failing since the idealist character of the story should be more obvious to the reader. But basically, it's not meant to immerse you in the life of a real, mundane pony on a real island with a real journal. The fact that it did is a failing in and of itself. It's also not what people read ponyfic for, generally speaking.
As for your criticisms of 'After the Races', I don't really object. They're the kind of criticisms I would expect for this story, and I don't really know if I could correct them. There is a fundamental (and potentially off-putting) lack of agency or change of the part of Adagio because the story probably relies on evoking emotions that maybe move me more than you—nostalgia and/or saudade, which aren't really feelings that have a solution or necessarily create the kind of response or struggle that would invigorate the story for you. I don't mean to presume what your tastes are, but hypothetically, I could have written this about the Aria character (or made my Adagio more like her) so we see her failing or succeeding to access that lost and probably unreachable life she's longing for, and making a new decision afterwards, but personally, that wasn't as interesting to me as an Adagio who had already accepted that defeat and found herself in a place of reflection. I just have a feeling that we're on different wavelengths in terms of what you want out of this story.
His, for future reference.
4196103
Thanks for your abiding support!
4197305 4197154 It's late, I have only minutes to reply, and I've now spent more time talking about the story than reading the story. So I may now be describing my re-imagining of the story more than the story itself...
Pascoite, you're right that a story that shows change happening is, by definition, more dramatic than one that comes in after the fact. But truth is even more important than drama. Sometimes, you look back and realize that you made a momentous decision gradually, without realizing it. Since this is a significant life event for some people, describing it must be a valid kind of story.
I think the 2 key words up above are my use of the word "realization" and your use of the word "entertainment". This is a realization story, not an enactment story, and it isn't entertaining.
This is a good discussion, but I'm leaving in the morning and won't be back in time to be notified of any replies.
4200375 Ah, you're back.
Not to belabor the point, but it also depends what a person considers entertaining. If something makes me laugh or jump sure. But if it makes me think or get contemplative, I also count that as entertaining, but with things so static and unaffected, I don't even know what I'm supposed to be contemplating.
And succinctly, here's why the open ending bothered me. The typical thought process is this:
Reader – "I want to know what happens."
Author – "That doesn't matter. It's the struggle that matters."
Usually, we stop there. But this one goes a step further.
Reader – "What's the struggle here, then?"
Author – "There isn't one. That doesn't matter either."
That's just what open endings do, so to put one there at all is begging to set up such a struggle, then it feels to me like a massive unfired Chekhov's gun when it doesn't. So I can appreciate what this does in an academic sense, but it doesn't make me empathetic with the characters. Maybe that's my loss.
4218204 If what's lacking is a struggle, then that makes it undramatic, but not open-ended. It wouldn't be any less open-ended if the same change happened with a struggle.
4224879 Agreed, but that's an entirely different point. It does have an open ending, but it doesn't use it to any particular effect.
4225203 This story is not supposed to have an ending that produces an effect, nor a dramatic struggle. There was internal struggle (3 of them), but they are contrasted rather than dramatized. Drama requires making the reader take sides. This story is, I think, trying not to do that. A drama would want to convince the reader that one of the Dazzlings was right. This story wants the reader to understand the difficulty of their situation, so it mustn't do that.
(I think. Maybe VTRodent will comment.)
It isn't a "story" of the structure that they teach in film school, but I'm not hung up on whether it has a three-act structure or a rising and falling tension or a denouement. For me, a story is, roughly, a narrative that is art. The art here is how it gets across what the Dazzlings confronted, what they felt, & how they responded.
Consider The Pilgrim's Progress, or most any other medieval allegory. Its protagonist is often named Everyman. Everyman is often on a journey, and his destination may be Paradise, or A Right Attitude Towards Earthly and Heavenly Things, or anyway something that has an obvious Christian referent. Perhaps the Pit of Purgatory lies between The Grave and Paradise, and Everyman is in the end helped across it by Good Deeds, his only friend who would come with him past The Grave, and so Everyman finally arrives in Paradise.
These allegories have all the requisite elements of stories: a plot with tension, a climax, and a resolution. But they aren't, to me, stories; they are just claims told in story form. You don't learn anything new from them; you don't gain any insight into or sympathy for Everyman. Such a story doesn't want you to think; it wants to spoon-feed (or force-feed) you answers. It's a mnemonic tool to remember Christian doctrine, not art.
My point is that saying "a story is this", and listing structural features, may be a good way of simplifying the definition of story, but it leaves a lot out, and includes a lot that it shouldn't. I often try to define stories that way, but my purpose when doing so is heuristic: I want to save myself time by not writing stories if I don't understand how they're supposed to work. I want some hint what to do when I have a set of images or scenes that feel powerful to me, but I don't know what to do with them. I use more specific, rationalist definitions of "story" when I'm more lost and confused. I can't say "a story is a narrative that's art" because the term "art" is too vague to tell me how to fix my story.
If I want to exclude some narrative somebody else wrote and says is art from having the status of "art", though, that's a different situation.
Maybe we're getting hung up on the word "story". Would you ever call something "narrative art" but not "a story"? I don't mean to invoke cases like Finnegan's Wake, which is (its supporters would claim) art with words, or lexicographical art, or an artful puzzle, but more like a crossword puzzle than a research puzzle. IMHO it's too unreadable to be considered narrative art. I don't even mean stories by Thomas Pynchon or some other modern writer who writes pseudo-random plots with beautiful sentences. I mean a text which describes a sequence of events, and that sequence of events (not the paper they're written on, or the letters they're written in, or even the pretty words or individual sentences) is, in some sense, art.
I think you and I would agree that slice-of-life stories are often not stories. (I'm using the term's literary definition, not its fimfiction definition.) I think you're seeing this as a slice-of-life, but it isn't, because it examines a major turning point in its characters' lives.