WARNING: Contains violence.

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Oh, boy. I don't know if I should post this or not. It's a response to a comment by mlpfyi on that persistently troublesome story "All the Pretty Pony Princesses", and it's too long to post there, so I'm going to direct her here. Please, everybody, be nice.

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We’ve been kicking around show vs. tell a lot lately, so I want to keep a list of all the reasonable-sounding theories on what’s good about showing or telling. I’m just trying to organize my thoughts here. I have no doubt that you, my alarmingly clever readers, will immediately poke them full of holes.

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I’ve been thinking about what makes a story complete since writing “All the Pretty Pony Princesses”. It occurred to me that that story would be considered complete if it were a song. Stories, songs, and poems can all be recognized as being complete or incomplete, but the standards for them are very different.

Is this sensible, or merely convention?

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I’ve been trying to figure out why I wrote this terrible story “All the Pretty Pony Princesses”, and how I should have ended it. My problem is that, as Ghost said, there's no point to the story--no explication of character, no lesson learned, just hopelessness.

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