CCC: cleverpun's Critique Corner #31 — A Thousand Roses · 6:18am Mar 22nd, 2017
Title: A Thousand Roses
Author: Titanium Dragon
Found via: I follow Titanium Dragon.
Short summary: After a magazine declares Twilight the most eligible bachelorette in Equestria, her castle fills up with bouquets and love letters from all across Equestria. Not a single one of them is from Ponyville. At least not at first.
As Twilight’s friends help her sort the chaff from the wheat, Rainbow Dash makes a suspiciously strong case for one of the less impressive bouquets.
The Title/Description: The title is pretty underwhelming. I actually had to look it up while writing this because it’s pretty forgettable. I think something referencing to one of the main characters rather than the setup might have been a better hook.
The description is a great example of how to provide just enough information to hook the reader, but not enough to spoil the story. It covers the premise and hook, but stops just short of revealing important details about the plot. It informs and entices, but leaves the rest of it to the actual story.
Genre(s): Romance, Slice of Life, Relationshipping
What does this story do well?: I think this story’s first strength is its pacing. The story does a good job of moving slowly along, without being monotonous or breakneck. In particular, there’s some good comedic lines and moments sprinkled throughout, and they help the story seem varied. In a story like this, with a moderate wordcount and a very specific subject, it can be easy to linger too long or too briefly on things, or to cover its one subject excessively. There’s a good amount of variation and clever pacing here, and it makes the story read smoothly.
The next highlight for me was the characterization. A romance hinges on the two leads being likeable and engaging. Obviously this is easier in fanfiction, since we are already familiar with the characters in question. I think, however, that the story does a good job of playing off Rainbow Dash and Twilight Sparkle’s characterization from the show. Rainbow is emotionally blunt and has trouble expressing herself, but she isn’t stupid or immature. Twilight is believably torn about both her feelings about Rainbow Dash and her own love life, and it leads her to some decisions that are questionable but understandable. The two of them (and to a lesser extent, the rest of the main six), feel like they fit their show selves, but with a bit more mature subject matter.
Finally, I think this story’s greatest strength is the verisimilitude in its depiction of romance. Romance, like all other parts of life, doesn’t have easy answers. Relationships are not clear-cut things, and often fiction oversimplifies them for the sake of storytelling.
This story does a great job of portraying relationships as the complicated things that they are. There is no obvious happy ending, no kissing, no blatantly unrealistic trappings of TV romance. There is some simplified elements (this is still fiction, after all), but overall the story feels very believable. It feels much closer to an actual relationship between friends, with all the awkwardness and confusion that entails.
Where could this story improve?: This story has severe problems with demarcating conversations. Not only is there a lot of Said Bookism—awkward or needlessly specific dialogue tags—there is also a lot of pointless actions mentioned, clearly for the sake of marking who is speaking. At every turn, the narration seems afraid of stating who is speaking in a simple way, yet also afraid of not stating it for fear of the reader losing track of whom is talking. This leads to some extremely obtrusive sentences and said bookisms. The characters only rarely “said” something. Almost exclusively they “blinked” or “sighed” or “scowled” their lines.
This simultaneously blunt and over-descriptive narration style extends beyond just the dialogue markers. The narration has a severe problem with what I call “stage directions”. Whenever it comes time for a character to move around, their physical actions are described in the boring and straightforward possible terms. Lines like these are the vast majority of narration:
Twilight lifted her hoof to rap on the front door three times.
Twilight paused in mid-flap, then rapidly beat her wings as she began to fall to regain altitude.
Rainbow Dash tucked her wings in against her sides, rapidly descending back down towards the second floor before landing.
These read more like notes for an actor—stage directions—than anything that belongs in prose fiction. When I encounter these sorts of lines, I tend to quickly skim over them, because they don’t add anything to the story. They don’t even do a good job of breaking up lines of text, since they are so dull to read through. They stand out all the more next to the few more creative descriptions (like the description of all the flowers at the very beginning of the story).
Finally, the story oversimplifies some of its characters. I complimented Twilight and Rainbow’s characterization above, but that was just one aspect of their character done well and matching the tone of the show. At times, the characters feel one-dimensional. Twilight spends the entire story worrying about becoming a Christmas Cake and having panic attacks. It’s cute at first, and it does fit her show self, but its her only point of characterization for such a long time that it almost becomes grating. The other characters with smaller roles fare a little better, since they don’t get enough screentime to become tiresome. I do feel that Pinkie Pie, however, was a particularly bland version of her show self.
In a single sentence: A cute romance story that has some great ideas and engaging verisimilitude, but often stumbles with its narration and delivery.
Verdict: Upvote. I often make a distinction between a story’s presentation and its ideas. And a story’s presentation can be further divided into all sorts of categories; after all, things like sentence-level presentation and thematic presentation are very different.
This is a story that I enjoyed reading. It’s ideas and themes of realistic romance are things I don’t see enough of in fiction. But this was absolutely hampered by the way in which the story was told. The way its sentences were constructed, the way its narration is phrased, and the things it chooses to focus on made the story harder to read. This issues weren’t enough to ruin the story or make me stop reading it, but they were definitely there, and they undermined the experience a little more than I would have liked.
I took your critique the same way Gordon Ramsey critiques one of his hopeful chefs from Hell's Kitchen.
Hey, thanks for the review! I really appreciate you going out of your way to review this story today. Thank you.
That being said, I have to disagree with you about something:
A said bookism is a synonym for said or said + an adjective - it is a form of dialogue tag.
The story actually uses few dialogue tags, let alone said bookisms (something one of my editors commented on, though they liked it) - a quick search showed only 48 instances of ," in the story, plus 16 askeds and nine instances of dialogue tags following a !". That's only 48+9+16 = 73. Which sounds like a lot, but there's something like 580 lines of spoken dialogue. So only about an eighth of the story's lines have dialogue tags. And of those, few are said bookisms - only eight were said + adjective, and I only used a sprinkling of other ones. The sighs, the six blinks, and the two scowls were all emotes.
In this story, I mostly used actions to mark dialogue rather than dialogue tags. This is most evident in the final two scenes of the story, when Twilight is talking to Spike and Rainbow Dash and Twilight are talking - they're doing a lot of emoting. One of the major reasons I was doing so was to reinforce the emotions of the characters and the environment around them. For instance, in the scene with Spike, Twilight storms into the room, and as the scene goes on her emotes were used to reinforce her struggle with her emotions, wavering between fear, anger, frustration, feeling bad that she had overlooked Rainbow Dash's feelings, and not wanting to deal with it at all. My goal was to reinforce Twilight's feelings by having her move around, and while she might have been milking the invisible cow a bit, I was trying to do it to reinforce how she was feeling there. Dialogue is powerful stuff, and I love it, but if you lean too heavily on it you can end up with talking heads syndrome, and can lose out on other cues which are useful for reinforcing character actions.
I also tried to use them to paint the scene a bit, particularly in Rainbow Dash's house, and tried to use the setting there - as Twilight and Rainbow Dash move through Rainbow Dash's house during the course of their conversation - to reflect Rainbow Dash's mood and defensiveness, and as Rainbow Dash eventaully falls back to her bedroom, she's finally left with no further place to retreat (phsyically or otherwise) and she and Twilight ultimately conduct the most intimate part of their conversation there.
I was trying to be deliberate in my use of the emotes. In particular, one of the ones you called out was conveying important emotional detail:
This wasn't just a random stage direction. Rainbow Dash is not happy with the conversation, and as it keeps taking more uncomfortable turns, and as she feels increasingly certain that the conversation is Twilight awkwardly trying to work up to the "I just want to be friends" spiel, she eventually pulls her wings close in against her sides, closing in on herself, as she physically retreats from the conversation, moving away from Twilight as she goes to land and enter her bedroom.
This marks the beginning of a transition in the setting from them flying around aimlessly to Rainbow Dash retreating to her room, moving away from Twilight in the process, while Twilight refuses to let Rainbow Dash shut her out and follows her in. The actions here are meant to show Rainbow Dash's internal conflict externally - Rainbow Dash doesn't want to be turned out, so tries to "complete" the conversation herself and end it, but Twilight doesn't accept Rainbow Dash's idea of how the conversation should go/end. And while Rainbow Dash doesn't want to be rejected, and so moves to terminate the conversation early so as to cut off the pain, she also doesn't want to be rejected, so doesn't shut Twilight out when Twilight keeps following her and talking to her.
Rainbow Dash simultaneously wants to be and doesn't want to be around Twilight, and the conversation and emotes (and even the setting) are meant to reinforce that, as well as Twilight wanting to understand and not give up on Rainbow Dash, as well as better understand her own feelings by listening to Rainbow Dash.
There were some pieces where I deliberately used emotes to say things that I didn't outright say in the dialogue at all:
Fluffing her wings was... perhaps extraneous, but in my mind, it was the sort of idle action she might be doing there, sort of a cross between nervous figiting and trying to square one's shoulders in order to confront some uncomfortable issue. And indeed, that's something I sometimes see actors emote to convey the same idea - that they're simultaneously trying to do something with themselves, and steeling themselves for doing something.
The rest of it - Rainbow Dash looking at the picture, then at the small bookshelf - were meant to show what Rainbow Dash was thinking about there - her friendship with Twilight, as well as what Twilight means to her in particular, as both of those changes in her room were due to Twilight personally, with one being a group thing while the other is a thing between just the two of them. It wasn't meant to represent a precise thing, but rather a mixture of feelings she was feeling at that moment, as she was doing something she didn't want to do (basically, telling Twilight that she didn't have to go on a date with her, despite the fact that Rainbow Dash does want to go on a date with her, because Rainbow Dash is worried that Twilight is doing it for the wrong reasons), and was reminding herself of why she was doing it anyway (because of what Twilight means to her).
I guess what I'm saying is that the curtains weren't just blue - I wasn't just having them do random crap for the sake of it, I was actually trying to convey/reinforce emotional mindset.
This, on the other hand:
The problem here was that it was a very simple emote, but it was made unsimple by the action the characters were engaged in at the time. If it was on the ground, it would have just been:
But in midair, there's no simple, one-word emote for stumbling, so it ended up being... well, that. I probably should have just found some better way for Twilight to show her surprise there.
I think this is the major root of the issue you had with the story:
I like the description of the flowers at the beginning - indeed, it is my favorite bit of narrative description in the entire piece, and I wrote it very early on because it clearly stuck out in my mind that it needed to be that way and I had a good idea of how to convey what I wanted to convey there. But I have to admit I am guilty of a tendency to write plainly, to which I default - I can write things like the flower description, but it is hard for me to do so consistently, and sometimes it can feel like I'm going a bit overboard. The Butterfly's Burden is a story I wrote a few years ago where I was specifically trying to do fancier descriptions where I think I ended up on the purple end of things. Annoyingly, I find I generally have more success with it when I'm adopting a different narrative voice from my natural one, which is probably why The Butterfly's Burden feels too purpley to me - it is my natural narrative voice, but me awkwardly trying to be fancier with it.
Readers tend to see things which are bland as unimportant - in fact, this is one of the reasons why invisible dialogue tags can be a good thing, as meaningless but elaborate dialogue tags can draw attention away from the dialogue. If something seems bland to a reader, they're likely to gloss over it. And while this is a useful tool for focusing attention, it also leads to the problem where if something isn't supposed to be meaningless cruft - if the other stuff is meant to be significant - if it seems boring, it is apt to be overlooked, and thus, it will seem pointless and the reader will be left wondering why on Earth you spent so much time talking about eating Irish babies, with the author's point entirely lost.
If the author fails to make the important bits seem important to the reader, they're going to lose them. And I think that's what happened here.
I'm sorry that you found the actions in this story dull, and I think that is why the emotes seemed pointless to you when in fact I was using them to convey some important stuff (at least, stuff I felt was important).
Do you have any suggestion of how to write some of those bits in a more engaging way? In particular, this one that you called out:
The scene around there (which I quoted above) was intended to convey some emotional stuff (as noted in my explanation). What would you recommend to spruce up that bit so that it would have been more interesting to read, so that the emotions of the characters were more clearly conveyed instead of being lost to folks who might not find the action tags engaging?
I'd really love to write more consistently interesting descriptions. Narration is the weakest part of my writing, so any help you could offer there would be appreciated.
4467389 I critique because I care
4467450 Point of clarification: I was lumping Said Bookisms and action tags together; that's why I introduced the paragraph as "demarcating conversations". Marking dialogue can be done different ways, even if some dialogue markers also serve other purposes.
Yes, and that's all fine. Physical action should be used to reinforce character's emotions and mental states. It should also, however, be done sparingly. The actions themselves also need to be described in an interesting way. The main issue with the story I had was that it seems to be almost exclusively dialogue or straightforward descriptions of actions, with little else in between.
My issue wasn't with the use of actions to mark dialogue, or with the use of actions to show a characters mood. My issue was with the huge volume of actions and their dull description. There's a fine line where these sorts of actions become extraneous and boring. It's different in a visual medium like film, because there the actions do not take any additional effort or screentime to convey. In prose, this is not the case. Narrative Filigree requires additional space to show, and it actively takes the reader's attention, because it all needs to be written out. (Though there are exceptions, like Terry Pratchett-style footnotes).
This is one of those things that is hard to advise about, because it is something I've also had trouble with in my own writing. The time I tried to do the opposite and provide more elaborate descriptions (“Princest Is Wincest,” It Said), I also ended up going overboard. I spent a full three paragraphs of description on a window, and used many lines worth of description on Celestia's muffin and juice. It ended up having the same issue of being boring and unimportant to the narrative.
I think the key here is that descriptions in this particular story are needlessly specific. Prose does better when dealing with vagaries. Things like blocking or exact body position do the opposite of what prose is good at. They force the reader to imagine a specific scenario, bog them down in details, instead of giving them the freedom to see the scene for themselves.
So with that in mind, lets take a look at this sentence again, and pick out only the most important detail:
For me, the most important part of this is the fact that Rainbow is descending. Which floor she lands on, the angle of her wings, all that stuff is ancillary to one main detail. So if we cut out all the non-essential stuff, then this is what we are left with.
Now obviously, this is pretty boring. So now you as an author must dress up this action in order to make it convey the emotion you want. In this case, it's really simple. Rainbow Dash's physical descent also matches her emotional descent. So one way to make it a bit more engaging would be to draw parallels between her physical action and her emotional one.
Now, of course, this is only an example. One could argue my metaphor here is too blunt and purple in its own way. But hopefully this illustrates my point.
You can apply the same principle to Twilight's mid-air stumble. If a stumble in mid-air is hard to describe, then play that up. The tone of the story is light enough that the narrator can add a bit of theatrics to the narration without calling attention to themselves.
Notice how the last line is worded vaguely so it could apply to her emotional state or her physical one. If one wanted to make things more concise, then this line could be the focus instead.
Again, this is just an example. One could make the argument that the telliness of this line isn't worth the comedy value.
If you want to try making your descriptions more engaging without sacrificing your personal voice, then try that old trick: imagine yourself telling a story to someone physically, instead of via written text. If you were having a conversation with a friend and you had to describe Twilight stumbling in midair, what sort of tone or metaphor or verbs would you use? That's kind of what I did: I let my mind wander a bit about what an interesting way to describe that would be, then wrote it down and edited it slightly. You may not even need some gimmicks: I know from your reviews that you can inject more of your personal voice into your writing.
And again, remember the Law of Conservation of Detail. If something isn't important and you can't describe it in an engaging way, then cut it. Let the reader do the work for themselves instead.
As always, I have to conclude my advice with that same old caveat. Fiction is subjective. Just because I found the descriptions blunt and skippable, that won't be true for every reader. Even my "improvements" have their pros and cons. And of course, if you have any questions or I explained something poorly, please ask and I'll do my best to clarify/expand it.
(This response is already as long as the review 
)
4467500
I always appreciate your critiques; they're very in-depth and you do a good job of saying exactly what it is you liked and didn't like about a story. Understanding where someone is coming from is very valuable, even if you disagree with their conclusions, because at least you know what it was they liked and didn't like and why they did or didn't like it.
Anyway, thank you for your examples. That said, I think the biggest problem with the mid-air stumble is that it just isn't worth the verbiage necessary to describe it properly in my story; the point was to illustrate some surprise, but it really is meant to complement the conversation there, not take center stage. It really is closer to a dialogue tag, but with a slight tint of adding something more. As you noted, its really an example of something where the Conservation of Narrative Detail makes it just hard to describe well. If it was more important - something totally shocking - going with the more elaborate description which played it up might work well, as it would exaggerate the character's shock. But where I put it in my story, it just isn't something that can really justify that kind of focus.
Oh, I get that. I mean, someone wrote a page-long comment, half of which was specifically talking about how awesome the emotes in this story were, which I had just finished responding to that when I saw your review go up. (I also found the thought experiment that they proposed in that comment very interesting - the idea of looking at whether a story, sans dialogue, would still communicate the tone of it and give the audience a general idea of what was going on).
The thing is, it isn't even necessarily the case that one person is right and another person is wrong, either; one person can be happy with something that another person can be dissatisfied with, and sometimes it is possible to make both people happy. Narrative prose is, I feel, my greatest weakness as a storyteller; I don't think I have a very interesting narrative voice, though I am getting better about my characters blinking (must be all the eyedrops I got them). If the prose doesn't bore one person, but does bore another, it is something which can be improved and possibly make both people happy.
I also think there's something of a continuum of difficulty to please as well; I think it is easier to get a positive rating out of PP than it is to get out of me, and that I'm easier to please than you are. You're hard mode. Or maybe I'm hard mode and you're nightmare difficulty, where there are demonic spiders lurking around every corner and you only get one heart.
On the other hand, one of my editors said like, literally the exact opposite of what you said about my use of dialogue markers (they were very happy with them and were impressed that they flowed so naturally) so I really don't know where to go there. That's why I find explanations so useful; it helps me to understand where people are coming from, so I can try to find a solution space that satisfies both. But sometimes you just get straight up contradictory advice and you just gotta decide what you think is best.
That said, I still find such feedback valuable because, well, if I only heard from one person, I wouldn't know that the other person had a different opinion.
Incidentally, you mentioned that the title was pretty underwhelming. What would you have called it?
I could have gone with something like "Twilight: Equestria's Hottest Single Mare" or "Twilight: Equestria's Most Eligible Bachelorette", (or possibly just left off the Twilight bit) but they felt too clickbaity and honestly didn't feel like they represented the story very well.
4467525 Lol. Horse Voice also once called me the optional, harder boss of fimfic. Maybe that's a quote worth sticking on my userpage, now that two people have said it
But yes, that's one of the tricky aspects of fiction. It is so subjective, that two people can disagree vehemently about a story, and neither one is necessarily wrong. Like I often say, opinions are not mutually exclusive.
I agree, however, that there can often be a middle ground that pleases everyone. Like you said, sometimes you get contradictory opinions, and it is up to you as an author to make the final decisions. I do think that it is good that you are making effort to recognize and improve upon your own weaknesses.
I'm not going to say you should redo this entire story or anything like that. If you ever want any advice in future, however, my inbox is always open. (I actually considered responding to your call for prereaders, but by the time I saw it you already had more than enough applicants.)
4467530 I dunno, I suck at titles. I usually take some song lyrics that somewhat hint at the theme of the story or take a line from the story I thought sounded cool.
As I noted in the review, I think a reference to the characters would be better than a generic note about the flowers. If you really want to keep the flower angle (and I wouldn't disagree since that's the catalyst of the story), a reference to Rainbow Dash's specific bouquet might be nice. Alternately, you could make a reference to how one of the bouquets is unique (in both the person who sent it and its appearance)
"A Thousand Roses and A [one?] Broken [Wilting? Crushed?] Sunflower"
"One Thousand Roses and a Wilting Daisy"
"Red Crayon and [a?] Crushed Sunflower"
"A Daisy among Roses""It Came With a Bouquet of Weeds"
Roses are so common (and that's even a point in the story) that the title lacks any memorable details. There needs to be a contrast with the generic thing if you want it to stick in the mind of the reader.