Whew, that’s a long title.

Hello, friends! It’s me, Cyo, back for this week’s review! This week’s story is written by Schatten, admin for this group.

EMoonlight In the Woods

• MLP: FiM
• Drama
• Horror
• Thriller

A pegasus looking for something in the woods finds that there is a reason no pony goes in.

• OC

Schattendrache · 17k words  ·  11  1 · 391 views

Don’t worry, I won’t be biased or anything, you can stop worrying about that. I’m sure Schatten wouldn’t want me giving any dishonest opinions here or something anyway.

With that out of the way, let’s get started! And do be warned, today’s review is going to be quite long.

Moonlight in the Woods seems to be Schatten’s attempt at writing a surreal story, with lots of things happening in the narration that may or may not be real. It follows our titular protagonist, Moonlight, in her attempt to escape the magical forest, the Deadwoods. It’s a somewhat trippy experience, as you might expect.

Angered by what she was having to deal with, Moonlight quickly grabbed her water canisters and aggressively began to tighten the lids before shoving them back into her bag. Seeing the empty bottle of iodine tablets still on the ground, Moonlight decided she was going to hurl it into the pond. As she grabbed the bottle in her hoof and was winding up to throw it as hard as she could, a noise from within the bottle made her pause.

Confused, Moonlight gave the bottle a light shake, and sure enough, there was the distinct sound of a tablet knocking around the inside of the bottle. As she looked at the bottle in astonishment that the last tablet had been returned, out of the corner of her eye Moonlight noticed the rock she had skipped across the lake. The forest had returned everything back to the way it had been before she had finished sterilizing her waters.

I’ve put this quote here, but you’ll probably find the best examples of this surreal style by reading the fic yourself. There’s lots of inconsistent narration, new memories coming from nowhere, and all that.

If you enjoy this gimmick, Schatten actually pulls it off pretty nicely. The surreal scenes are really fun to read through, and there’s enough unreliable narration to leave you second-guessing everything you read.

On the other hand, if you’re not a fan of something like that, there’s little in this fic for you. Aside from the main attraction of the mystical forest, the other elements in the story don’t really seem totally polished.

There’s an arc about Moonlight’s self-denial about not minding that she doesn’t have a cutie mark, and about her relationship with her friends. Honestly though, nothing that’s presented here is all that interesting when reading through the story.

The main problem is, these other side elements aren’t quite given enough time to get developed. We’re given just a glimpse of the problems that Moonlight’s facing in her life, supported by massive chunks of exposition. This issue gets the most obvious near the end of the first chapter, where Moonlight’s reflecting on her life in what’s basically an extended exposition segment.

She would always tell other ponies that she could care less that she had never earned her cutie mark. She had repeated that line so many times that even she had begun to buy into it. But on the inside, there was always a part of her that knew it was a lie, that she wanted nothing more than to earn that stupid mark. Why couldn't she have just been a normal pony and gotten her cutie mark when she was a filly instead of being a fully grown mare still looking for her purpose?

What felt worse though was what this desire had done to her social life. Her desire for a mark had driven her to constantly wander the country, never settling down, and never able to truly form many lasting friendships. It seemed almost fitting that her desire for that mark had dragged her friends into this nightmare, and was more than likely going to be the death of them. She had taken her friends for granted, had barely put forth the effort to treat them as actual friends, instead chasing after her selfish desire to find the thing in this world she was good at. Something which ultimately meant nothing. No matter what her talent was, it would never be able to replace the friends she had made.

This is unconvincing.

Now, I understand that this was meant to just be a short fic as compensation for Little Tigress’ art. Still, there’s something to be said about deciding properly which elements should be included in a story. As it stands now, the side elements haven’t really got enough story invested in them to really work, and they just feel like huge blocks of exposition. And there’s better ways to tell a story than through exposition. I mean heck, the setting’s a magical forest, I’m sure having multiple flashbacks or something would do.

Right. But how does the main meat of the story do?

Well, I mentioned above that Schatten does the surreal atmosphere pretty well here. There’s a disconnected feeling that comes when reading the story, though I actually suspect that that’s more a consequence of his sorta… “tell-y” writing style, more than anything concrete. I’ve already gone over this issue in last week’s review, so I won’t talk too much about it again here.

On a storytelling level, Moonlight’s attempts at escaping the forest are pretty entertaining, especially with the multiple endings that Schatten has included in the last three chapters. There’s lots of cool, ‘unreliable reality’ scenes as Moonlight struggles through the forest.

Unfortunately, no amount of surface coolness can save a story that is, at its core, dragging and empty. Stripping away all the extra gimmicks, what we’re left with is just a story about a pony trying to escape from a forest. There’s never really any development that happens in the story; Moonlight tries to escape the forest, making no progress for the first nine-tenths of the story. Then, she’s magically saved by something, and led out of the forest.

Does that sound like a very satisfying ending to you? Cuz it sure doesn’t to me.

And you might say, “hey, this story isn’t meaningless, it’s got internal conflicts and external ones! Moonlight’s journey is just her learning to recognise her internal problems!”

Well… maybe, but here’s where the issues I brought up with the side story elements come back to haunt us again. Because her internal issues are never really presented in a proper way, her internal struggles seem unimportant for the majority of the story.

As a story, the fic feels draggy and repetitive, until the very end where things pick up and actually change — especially in the three ‘ending’ chapters, those redeem the fic slightly.

On the mechanics side too, there are some issues that I have. There’s the general “tell-y”-ness of the narration that I talked about above, which exacerbates the draggy feeling. Also, Schatten has this habit of not really respecting paragraphs or something, as most of them feel way too long. I’ll talk more about this in the Feedback.

Scores

Grammar and Use of Language: 6/10
Not really on the grammar side this time (though there were some errors and typos). Rather, the writing style made everything feel slightly disconnected, which huge chunks of exposition and lots of ‘tell’-ing.. Which yes, maybe you might like that for a surreal story, but for me, it just made everything less engaging in general.

Character and Characterisation: 5.5
Like I said in the main review: there’s not really enough time spent exploring Moonlight’s backstory and such to really tell a compelling story with her character. I really have little problem with the characterisation here, as all the characters act more or less believably — it’s the character that is the problem here.

Style and Effectiveness of Approach: 8/10
I had a hard time figuring out what I wanted to call this section, but basically it’s about how well the surreal thing works. And… it works pretty well! I’ve already said my part on it in the main review, though, so I won’t go into it here.

Plot and Story Substance: 4.5/10
There’s not much story here, which might not be that much of a problem in short stories. Though, Schatten seems to have tried to insert some bits of backstory here and there without really committing the time to really flesh out the story being told. Because of this, those elements just seem very out of place here.

Nice premise here, but the story really needs to figure out what it wants to focus on, and spend more time on telling a compelling story rather than just rely on the magical forest gimmick. Still, a fun one to read if you give it a try. 5/10 from me — it might be a little lower than the scores suggest, but that’s because I don’t really enjoy fics without a really solid story, and the surreal writing style didn’t really do it for me.

Feedback for Schatten

While I was reading through the story, I noticed something that seems to be a little habit of yours in your writing. It’s been popping up everywhere, in both your stories and your reviews, actually.

...

Okay, so, you’ve read the title, you’ve seen the topic. I don’t know why I’m trying to build up to anything, but yes, I want to talk about paragraphing, sentencing and rhythm in narration.

In your story, the thing that struck me when I was scanning through it was that all the paragraphs and sentences are, for the most part, the same length — long.

The only thing that was keeping her from fully appreciating what was surrounding her was the perfect silence that enveloped everything. Since she had entered the forest, the only sounds she had heard had been her own hoofsteps and breathing, as well as the occasional insect that would lazily fly past her ear. It was so quiet she had actually heard her heartbeat on one or two occasions. She was starting to figure out just how right the Deadwood’s name was.

After walking for what she felt was a good few kilometers, Moonlight heard something. It was extremely faint, but given the level of background noise, any sound seemed to be far more audible than they should have been. Moonlight stopped her walking and held her breath, doing everything she could to make as little noise as possible. After standing still like this and swiveling her ears around, Moonlight finally figured out the direction the sound was coming from. It almost sounded like a small fountain towards what she was considering the southeast.

Pay special attention to the second paragraph here. Something important is happening, but just by looking without reading the words, you’d never suspect that. I’ve noticed the same uniform paragraph length in your reviews as well, so let me offer you three pieces of advice.

One idea, one paragraph
If this one sounds familiar, it’s because I stole it from the Fimfiction Writing Guide, which is actually a very helpful resource on writing advice. I’ll leave it to you to read the source, but in essence, it’s exactly what it says on the tin.

Looking at the quote I stole from your story, the first paragraph fits this pretty well — it’s only talking about the silence in the forest.

The second paragraph, though, has many different ideas in it. 

After walking for what she felt was a good few kilometers, Moonlight heard something. It was extremely faint, but given the level of background noise, any sound seemed to be far more audible than they should have been. Moonlight stopped her walking and held her breath, doing everything she could to make as little noise as possible. After standing still like this and swiveling her ears around, Moonlight finally figured out the direction the sound was coming from. It almost sounded like a small fountain towards what she was considering the southeast.

Moonlight hears something, then she reacts to it, then she figures out where the sound is coming from. That’s three ideas, crammed into one paragraph. Now, I know that the exact definition of ‘idea’ is subjective, but this paragraph definitely has a few too many of them.

Contrast creates interest
This one is also something I stole, but this time from the general principle of visual design that says this exact thing. If you want something to attract attention, contrast is a great way to do so. And, aside from just drawing attention to important parts of the story, varying your paragraph and sentence length is just a good way to maintain people’s attention to your story as well.

Let’s take more quotes from your story, shall we?

As she walked, the sound progressively became louder, but never more than one would expect from a fountain. When she finally passed around a tree with bark almost completely covered in a glowing blue moss, the smile that had formed on her muzzle gave way to a look of defeat. She hadn't been totally wrong about the sound she was hearing though. In front of her was what appeared to be a freshwater spring that fed into a decent-sized inky black pond that reflected the many glowing sources of light that surrounded it.

As she walked, the sound became progressively louder, but never more than one would expect from a fountain. Passing around a tree which was almost completely covered in a glowing blue moss, she burst out into a clearing with a wide, expectant smile.

Her smile twitched, then gave way to a look of defeat.

There was no fountain. Instead, in front of her was what appeared to be a freshwater spring that fed into a decent-sized inky black pond that reflected the many glowing sources of light that surrounded it.

The point of note here is that there’s no fountain, contrary to Moonlight’s hopes. When you really want to draw attention to that, make it a short paragraph, or a short sentence. 

Contrast creates interest, after all.

Paragraphing implies timing
This one is something more specific to story-writing. Also, it’s something I’ve always found difficult to express.

Basically, paragraph and sentence breaks mark the time passing in between action beats. This is important to set the rhythm of a scene — is it fast and snappy? Slow and melancholic? A lot of this can be affected by the paragraphing and sentencing.

A quick, simple example before I go to your story.

We stand, arms tensed beside our pistols. Around us, the winds blow, the shifting sands and rolling tumbleweeds existing as silent spectators to our intense staring match.

At last, he sighs, and relaxes his arm. “Alright. I’ll trust you.”

We stand, arms tensed beside our pistols. 

Around us, the wind blows. The sand shifts, and the tumbleweeds roll by in the silence, spectators to our intense staring match.

At last, he sighs. His arm relaxes.

“Alright,” he says. “I’ll trust you.”

Does that second example feel longer to you? That’s what I mean by rhythm — the pace of an action is shown at least somewhat by how long the break is before the next action.

Now, on to your story:

As Moonlight was calming down and trying to collect her thoughts, a deep rumble resonated behind her. She froze and slowly began to turn around. When she was finally facing the thing that had announced its presence, she was staring at a timberwolf several times her size, and seemingly composed of vines. Its mass seemed to be bound together by the plants, while dozens of vines flicked behind it and along it's back, giving it the appearance of being part octopus..

All the action happens in one paragraph, and so no time seems to pass. Here’s the same paragraph, slightly corrected.

As Moonlight was calming down and trying to collect her thoughts, a deep rumble resonated behind her. She froze and slowly began to turn around. 

When she was finally facing the thing that had announced its presence, she was staring at a timberwolf several times her size, and seemingly composed of vines. Its mass seemed to be bound together by the plants, while dozens of vines flicked behind it and along it's back, giving it the appearance of being part octopus.

Did I mention slightly corrected? Yep, all I did was add a single paragraph break here. But now, her turning around actually feels like there’s weight to it. It actually feels, y’know, slow. And because of that, the reveal of the timberwolf hits much harder.

All in all, paragraph and sentence lengths actually have a surprising amount of impact on people reading. Try working on varying them up some, it’ll do wonders for improving engagement.

Right, I really really didn’t expect this one to turn out so long. I thought I’d just write a 1k word review or something, but it turned out to be like, the longest review I’ve written so far.

Well, at least no one can accuse me of slacking off. Hope you find this one useful, Schatten!

And as always, have a good week ahead, everyone!

7047049
Hey, thanks for the review. I'll make sure to fix up the issues in this and future works.

Well… maybe, but here’s where the issues I brought up with the side story elements come back to haunt us again. Because her internal issues are never really presented in a proper way, her internal struggles seem unimportant for the majority of the story.

How would you suggest fixing that? As you might have been able to tell, I wanted to make her insecurities around not having ever gained a cutie mark be one of the driving throughlines. How could this have been handled better?

Like I said in the main review: there’s not really enough time spent exploring Moonlight’s backstory and such to really tell a compelling story with her character. I really have little problem with the characterisation here, as all the characters act more or less believably — it’s the character that is the problem here.

How would you suggest improving this? Backstory is fine and all, but it needs to serve the narrative. What parts of the backstory need to be brought up to properly help here? Also, seeing I pride myself on at least being able to worldbuild and write decent characters, what do I need to improve on with characterization?

This issue gets the most obvious near the end of the first chapter, where Moonlight’s reflecting on her life in what’s basically an extended exposition segment.

How would you suggest improving this and having her go through a complete emotional break down where she calls her entire life path into question?

I will agree with you that the ending was rushed. I accidentally made a forest that was nigh inescapable except by luck as the unreliability of your memories and your movements makes escape a little difficult when you are going in completely blind (though I will give the 'tie a string onto every tree you pass on one of your sides as you go in' plan an A+ for how to easily get out, but then you wouldn't have a story), so I wrote myself into a bit of a corner for how to end things with Moonlight alive. I do have to ask though, since you are the first person to actually comment on the endings, what did you find I did well and what about them should I use to improve the base story?

7047108
First person comment on the ending? Pfff!!

7047679
Ok, first RELEVANT TO EVALUATION comment.

7048271
Pffff!²

7047108
Hey Schatten! Sorry for the kinda late reply, was busy today

"Well… maybe, but here’s where the issues I brought up with the side story elements come back to haunt us again. Because her internal issues are never really presented in a proper way, her internal struggles seem unimportant for the majority of the story."

How would you suggest fixing that? As you might have been able to tell, I wanted to make her insecurities around not having ever gained a cutie mark be one of the driving throughlines. How could this have been handled better?

The internal story usually has to be linked to the external one in some way. Here, the external story is Moonlight trying to escape the forest; the internal one is her struggling with her identity. The two are not linked in any obvious way, which is why your internal story feels so much like exposition at times.

You could try and find a better way to link them together. It's a magical forest, after all, I'm sure flashbacks or something could be a valid method

Also, there isn't a clear sense of progression in her internal struggle. Her 'before' state isn't really shown enough for us to appreciate the 'after' state.

"Like I said in the main review: there’s not really enough time spent exploring Moonlight’s backstory and such to really tell a compelling story with her character. I really have little problem with the characterisation here, as all the characters act more or less believably — it’s the character that is the problem here."

How would you suggest improving this? Backstory is fine and all, but it needs to serve the narrative. What parts of the backstory need to be brought up to properly help here? Also, seeing I pride myself on at least being able to worldbuild and write decent characters, what do I need to improve on with characterization?

Related to the point above! Moonlight's character is intrinsically linked to her internal struggle, and fixing the relationship between the external and internal stories would go a long way towards fixing this problem.

As for backstory... well, as much as is needed to understand the current story, and not a word more, nor any time before. The story you've presented here is of someone trying to escape a forest, which doesn't need much backstory at all.

...I should write a review with feedback for exposition some time, thanks for reminding me to look out for that

"This issue gets the most obvious near the end of the first chapter, where Moonlight’s reflecting on her life in what’s basically an extended exposition segment."

How would you suggest improving this and having her go through a complete emotional break down where she calls her entire life path into question?

Well... I dunno, flashbacks, probably xD

I do have to ask though, since you are the first person to actually comment on the endings, what did you find I did well and what about them should I use to improve the base story?

The endings! Well, first and foremost I appreciated the change of scenery from the rest of the story. But also, in the endings the goal is no longer as clear as "get out of the forest", which leaves more room to explore the internal story without distraction.

In summary your storytelling errors can be mostly fixed by making sure that the internal story lines up with and is at least relevant to the external story. Otherwise, the internal story just feels like useless exposition.

7048320
Without gutting the story, how would I go about linking them more strongly? If it would help, the Deadwoods are meant to be a forest that has two definitive answers to how it works and one unknowable, depending on which ending is considered to be the true ending. Ending 3 means that the forest creates dreams based on your most recent line of thinking (water might have organisms in it that requires purification=true+a stream and lake, wondering about the presence of timberwolves because last time in forest was nearly killed=attacked again by timberwolf, feelings of isolation and desire to have some personal contact=finding a friend) so you are always the architect of your own misfortune as any internal problems you have are just brought to the forefront. Ending 1 means the forest is just evil and wants to cause the most mental trauma imaginable by bringing out your insecurities and fears and using them to break you emotionally. Ending 2 means the rules of how the forest works is unknowable and there are so many logical holes there to look like swiss cheese. I want to make it so an argument could be made that any of the endings could be considered cannon. The original linking was just that she was trapped in a forest that was making her experience 'dreams' that called into question her sense of self and life path and she only escaped after she accepted that she had been lying to herself about these things and that she was isolating herself because of her decisions.

7048665
Is that what it was about? Because I definitely didn't catch that, it just felt like Moonlight constantly trying to escape the forest and it constantly just randomly playing with her. I also didn't see that the visions were directly related to her most recent thoughts. This is also probably a writing problem, or maybe it's just me, because my eyes just tend to glaze over when there's lots of exposition in a long paragraph.

But also, if you really want to link it more strongly, you could try making it so that it's clear she needs to confront her inner struggles to escape the forest. The way it is now, this is not very clear at all, just feels like she's getting some random visions from the forest.

Also what the heck is that massive paragraph didn't I just comment about that

7048947
It's probably due to two problems, how complex I wanted to make this story and my philosophy when it comes to writing.

The reason that you probably didn't catch how the visions work was because the story was intended to be read twice. I wanted to try my hand at writing a story that required a very observant reader that was adept at picking up extremely small details and recognizing a pattern or a second read-through. Absolutely every person I have asked about how they thought the forest worked didn't pick up on this detail until I mentioned this. I probably need to not do this in the future because this proves that when I go for subtle it becomes so subtle as to almost stop existing, and for things that need to be clear to the reader, this is not good.

I tend not to attribute values of good, evil, moral and immoral, it's one of the reasons that the feedback I have gotten about A Timberwold For Forrester (and this review to an extent) has been in regards to the characters feeling like real people. I tend to carry this over into every aspect of things when I tell a story. With the exception of ending 1, the forest is neither good nor evil, it simply is. This is also why I prefer more grounded stories that have no real message that only seek to say what happened. In the stories I write and prefer to read, the blue curtains tend to just be blue. This story was just about the only time I put in any kind of subtext, and it ended up being an accident as I didn't notice it until someone pointed it out when it was being edited.

As you might notice in my last comment, I wrote "and she only escaped after", and not "and she could only escape after". This was deliberate as I prefer to write about cold, unfeeling worlds that could not care less for your success or failure. Because of this, I am EXTREMELY hesitant to make it so sheneeds to confront her demons to escape as it comes across as preachy to me and I just want to tell stories, not give life lessons or teach people about anything other than what is demonstrably true.