Description

After reading so many great and funny stories, Pinkie Pie decides to get into creative writing and start writing her own great story.

However, she suffers from a bad case of writer's block and decides to enlist help from Twilight, who guides her through the process of story writing.

Initial Thoughts

Perhaps ironically, though I love writing and talking about craft, I’m wary of stories that write about writing. As Stephen King once put it, “All books about writing are bullshit.” Funnily enough, he wrote that in his book, On Writing, so perhaps he was well aware of the strange relationships between the writer and the act. 

Let me present my main reason for being wary. The idea that a writer knows enough about writing to write about it is a weird kind of arrogance. The truth is, nobody knows what writing really is. We can present theories and ideas and formulas, we can teach, we can lecture, we can even review, but there remains something intrinsically unknown about the nature of writing that helps define it.

And stories about writing, and about writers, are a dime a dozen. We think it is a cool idea because, hey, we’re writers, too! But there is now the extensive threat of the story being too bland and plain, of presenting narratively a tumblr or Twitter post about the woes and misfortunes of the writer in practice. It may be a cute idea, but very rarely do we find one that actually has substance beyond the premise. 

That said, I’ve written a fair share of stories where characters are writers. And I had immense fun with those. But that’s because them being writers meant I was writing still about characters who were merely some kind of profession; I was not writing about how to write, just of people who, incidentally, do write. Plot arose out of other things besides the craft.

But enough of my fears. Let’s jump right in; and though it bears no repeating, spoilers lie ahead. 

Summary

Inspired by a funny story, Pinkie sets out to write her own. But soon she finds herself unable to get the words out, so she goes to Twilight for some advice.

Plot

The plot of this story is very simple: Pinkie wants to write a story, finds herself unable to, goes for help, gets some advice, and is able to. Such simplicity has its merits. The story, for one, is easily digestible, so access to it is readily made.

However, that’s speaking of, really, the story’s premise. Such a premise is highly predictable, and formulaic, and so the story doesn’t really do anything surprising or interesting with it. It plays it safe, which, on one hand, means it works on the surface-level. But in terms of development and/or substantial material, there isn’t much there to see. 

By that, I mean that as one story beat followed after the other, it felt like I wasn’t reading a story. It felt more like I was seeing an outline take form before my eyes. Little time is actually spent in the narrative, in terms of development of tension, plot, surprise, etc.—words we use to describe how we are able to order the same words together to form different stories, more or less. This is both the fault of the story and separate from it, since, again, we have only a single chapter, a short exercise in storytelling, to work with. 

But this is the main problem with the story—it’s too simple. Simplicity is good in craft, but it can come at the cost of doing something more with what amounts to an otherwise cliche story. This is a story about the process of story writing, but where’s the nuance in the story itself? 

Supposedly it should be in the conflict, but… what is the conflict? That Pinkie wants to write a story? Fine, but how does that unfold? A bit too easily, honestly. 

How so? Well, consider: Pinkie wants to write a story. How she learns how to write a story is by talking to Twilight. Twilight offers a few suggestions. Pinkie accepts then all. She leaves, having learned how to write the story. 

But that’s it. There’s no actual conflict because there are no hiccups or issues with the progression. The story wraps itself up way too neatly and nicely. There’s no “tension” in the conflict, which, incidentally, is how you sell even the most simple of conflicts. There’s no sense of, “Oh, no, Pinkie isn’t going to be able to write this story!” which would have allowed the author to write a bit more about why she can’t write this. Is it as simple as writer’s block? That’s a weak explanation, contrived, and hardly material enough for plot, hardly nuanced enough for a story about stories.

This is a hard thing to describe due to the inherent ambiguous nature of describing nuance, but the main takeaway is that this story doesn’t do quite enough to justify itself. For how short and simple it is, it also comes across as barebones and dry. It doesn’t really stand on its own, perhaps, is another way of saying it. It lives on the “advice” it supposes to share, but beyond that, there really is nothing else. 

Score - 5 / 10 

Characterization 

We’ve got some necessarily flat characters—flat in that they don’t have their own narrative arcs—but then we’ve got some characters who really don’t need to be flat. 

I’ll start with the first category. Mrs. Cake, Spike, and arguably Gummy all take the role of the flat tertiary character, which on one hand, is completely justifiable; the focus of a story ought to be on the primary characters, the ones who will experience “round” character development. That said, while Gummy works as a comedic “other” to Pinkie, Mrs. Cake just… feels like she’s there.

Mrs. Cake, especially, is a gross violator. She serves no purpose but to suddenly divert from the otherwise straightforward narrative path. What she does in the story is give Pinkie a binder to write on, but if she were not there, Pinkie would have gone to Twilight immediately. This is to say, her “role” serves no other purpose but to pad the narrative, and as such, it comes off as needlessly fluffy (especially since this mini “sub-plot” doesn’t matter, because it’s not the material on which Pinkie writes that affects her ability to write, but something else). 

But let’s move onto the meat of the story’s character interaction, which is during Twilight’s lecture. Firstly, let me say: that’s a strange take on the character. Oh, sure, Twilight can lecture, but there are some issues with the premise that she’d know how to write a  story from an educational perspective, as well as with the overall execution of that entire conversation. 

Let’s attempt to tackle this one by one. The idea that Twilight, who, in Pinkie’s words, “knows all about books and writing essays.”, should probably be “full of great advice on story writing.”, is not necessarily a leap in logic, but it does suggest an easy-enough solution to an easy-enough problem. This sort of means that while she probably has manuals about storytelling craft, she may not really understand the, again, nuance of the craft. And indeed, the lecture she delivers, going over the infamous Plot Graph, fails to consider the fact that this is, at best, a very basic understanding of a contrived and inherently superficial attempt at standardizing the development of story. 

There’s also the fact that she delivers this as though it’s the one true way of writing stories. If Twilight really knew a lot about writing stories, she’d know that there is no one good way of structuring, planning, and ultimately writing. Most likely she’d have pulled out several books on craft as opposed to this one reference material. As such, the topic of this lecture feels contrived, too, and too simple, too easy. Plus, it’s dry as all hell. The beats are just there. The thing is dead, or sleeping; either way the lecture happens and all is resolved easily, too easily. 

And that’s really the main issue with the execution of Twilight’s lecture. It breaks Twilight down to a smarty-pants, know-it-all, without taking the time to establish any more conflict. If this is supposed to serve as an example of Twilight’s character, I’m afraid I’m not seeing much beyond the surface. Once again, I return to the problem with the plot, too: a lack of nuance. 

Finally, let me turn my attention to Pinkie. She’s probably the best written out of all the characters here, or at least the most “realized.” By that, I mean that her tone of voice comes through the most, and her bubbly and excitable nature is supported by the actions in the plot. But I find it a bit hard to believe she’d be this… clueless, as it were, about storytelling, and while I can almost believe it, it’s even harder to believe she’d take only Twilight’s explanation. Who’s to say that she’d agree with the non-random structuralized form of storytelling that Twilight espouses? I’d say, for a pony who rides on spontaneity, this would really grind her gears. 

Let me take a moment to speak into the hypothetical: how could we have kept this kind of lecture in the story and still let the story do more? In my view, one way would be to get Pinkie to go to an actual established author for advice on how they come to write their stories. The most obvious example would be Daring Do. Pinkie could have compared what Twilight said, with its formulaic bearings and undertones, to the more spontaneous, adventurous overture that is a Daring Do novel. At the very least this would have made Twilight’s lecture less of a “Here’s what you should do” kind of narrative point and more like an actual advancement of the plot without giving the solution so immediately to Pinkie’s face. 

Score - 5 / 10 

Syntax

I’m going to start this section off with an example:

Our story began at Sugar Cube Corner where we see Pinkie Pie in her room.

Why is there a first-person omniscient narrator starting the story? A narrator who disappears and is never seen again, as the rest of the story becomes a jump between third-person limited and third-person omniscient? What gives? 

This reads like a combination of a storybook narrator existing outside of the story itself, and some strange attempt at scene-placing, like in a screenplay. It was enough to make me just pause and re-consider what I was reading. 

It may be a small point, but knowing what your POV is and sticking to it as much as you can is vitally important to being able to make your story accessible and understandable to the reader. The easiest solution to the above mistake is to delete it, but I would revise it so that we establish the scene from Pinkie’s third-person limited perspective. 

That said, the rest of the story reads fine. There were no strong issues of grammar, though I did note the plainness of the language and some sentences straying for a bit too long. The ending, for example:

"Okay, good luck on your story," Twilight said as both she and Pinkie waved goodbye to each other while Pinkie Pie walked out of the castle library and closed the doors.

“As” and “while” are coordinating conjunctions, but writers have a habit of stringing these kinds of parts of speech together to create needlessly long sentences. Such sentences suggest simultaneous occurrence as opposed to sequential occurrence; here the sentence suggests that Twilight is both speaking and waving goodbye, and that Pinkie is both waving goodbye while walking out and closing the doors. 

This is a matter of grammatical nuance, but an easier way to understand it is to read the sentence out loud and see where your breath fails you. I’d personally stop the sentence after said. Then I’d separate the rest into maybe two sentences, maximum. 

Let me finish with a final point: there’s a prevalence of dialogue tags. Like, way too many. I’m going to quote a long series of passages to demonstrate this:

"There," Twilight said, placing the pencil back on the table near the paper of written words. "Let's look it over, shall we?"

"Okay," Pinkie Pie replied.

"The first one is called the 'Exposition'," Twilight explained. "It's where you introduce the characters, the setting, and the conflict of your story."

"Why would I want conflict in my story if it's going to be a happy one?" Pinkie Pie asked.

"Because it's a story, and even happy stories need to have some kind of conflict. That's what keeps your story interesting and believable." Twilight continued to explain.

"Ooooooh," Pinkie Pie responded.

Each dialogue, here, has its own tag. Understandably, we want tags to help us determine who is speaking, but written like this, the characters have left the room; they are but effigies of conversation as opposed to actors in the story. The conversation is boring, because nothing is happening; nothing to accentuate the scene, suggest movement or character. It’s just a long list of “he said / she said.” 

The best stories will juggle between dialogue tags and action when writing long bouts of dialogue. They will incorporate mannerisms, descriptions, actions, sequences, pauses, revelations, thoughts, feelings, and more, between certain beats of dialogue. This fleshes out the character and allows the reader to feel less like they’re watching a bunch of heads talk and more like they are in the room, watching these characters unfold. 

Score - 6.5 / 10 

Final Score - ( 5 + 5 + 6.5 ) / 3 = 5.5 / 10 

Final Thoughts

This story is trying to do something which has escaped the ability of all writers since the dawn of the craft: explaining what writing a story is. You will find that even in the most critically written books about the art of craft, there is always an element of ambiguity in the author’s ability; there is something hidden and magical about writing which makes writing about it somehow far harder than the imaginative worlds we play with. 

As an attempt at consolidating story points into a narrative, the story functions, but at the bare minimum. It suffers for want of nuance in an attempt to “check off” items in a list the “requirements” that go into a narrative. While, certainly, there is a plot, and there are characters, and at least one of these characters want something which the plot serves to explore, once we peel back those labels, we see that the story doesn’t actually explore to an adequate amount any of these components. And that seems to be the underlying issue with this story: a lack of nuance. 

Does nuance mean complicated language and plots? Far from it. Take a look at Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” and you’ll see that the nuance there isn’t from any of those, but in the tension between the two unnamed characters. Thus I would recommend the author of this story take some time to read several short story collections. I can name a few right off the top of my head: Manuel Muñoz’s The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, Lauren Groff’s Florida. In fact, I strongly urge the author to not read fanfiction stories and take some time to read published works. You’ll learn to write without the limits of fanfiction getting in the way. 

Thanks for the review, Jarvy Jared.

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I forgot to mention this at the end of the review, so I'll add it here: Let me know if you have any questions about what I've said, if you need clarification, or if you have an issue with the end scoring.

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Okay, thanks.