What’s that sound? Why is there sound? The last thing Trixie could remember was the roar of the timberwolf, signaling it was right next to her. Is Trixie… Dead? She had never given much thought to the idea of an afterlife, or how it might feel to be dead.
There was still a pounding in her head, drowning out her other senses. She was dimly aware that her body was in pain, but it did not seem important anymore if she was dead anyway. She could sense she was laying on something warm and soft, her ragged cloak acting as a blanket.
This is not so bad… Maybe Trixie should not have been so scared of dying.
She perked up her ears listening to the strange noise, the sound was familiar to her. Somepony was crying and talking in between sobs, it sounded like her own thoughts repeated back to her out loud. Maybe that was what people meant when they said you could see your life flash by when you died? Trixie had imagined it a little flashier.
“I-I screwed it up again… Why does everything I try backfire?”
That’s right… Everything Trixie’s tried failed, or made it worse. Like with her show, her escape, the animals, this forest trip, or… Fluttershy.
“I never should have hurt her, I’m a terrible pony.”
Or Rainbow Dash... She was only trying give Trixie someone to talk too, and Trixie just chased her away.
“I try so hard to make it better, but I just mess it up. I nearly got her killed.”
Trixie was so busy catching up she never noticed the timberwolf. Trixie led Fluttershy right into danger.
“I’m sorry, I really really am. I’m sorry for everything.”
Maybe Trixie should have said that when the Ursa attacked… It’s too late now.
"And I know I should be actually telling you this, but I just can't.... This is my only chance to get it off my chest. You'll never hear it with the mute spell thing around here."
Trixie should te—Wait. What?
Trixie’s eyes opened, the bright sunlight greeted her. It took her a moment to get used to the light, all of the trees that had been shielding it were gone. She could see the sky, sun, clouds, and cyan fur. Her eyes lifted up slowly, a feeling of dread spread through as she began to realize where she was. The prismatic mane came into view next, cementing her fear. She trembled noticeably while she brought her eyes up just a bit more, looking right at Rainbow Dash’s face.
Her first instinct was to scream and scramble away, but the scream died in her throat when she noticed something she’d never seen before, Rainbow Dash was crying? Her mind was racing, she tried to figure out what was going on. This was the same strong and confident pegasus that she’d been afraid off?
Somehow she did not look quite as scary now. The voice Trixie had heard played through her mind again. If that was not Trixie, then… Rainbow Dash felt like this too? She had realized already that the cyan pegasus felt guilty, given her reaction when she threw her near death experience in her face, but not that it had been effecting her this much all along.
She was not even sure how she ended up here, but slowly the memories came back to her. All about her last moments of terror with the timberwolf then getting snatched up off the ground. She might have passed out after that, thinking the timberwolf grabbed her. But from the looks of it, somehow she had her vain hopes granted. She was alive, saved by the prismatic pegasus.
“One second later, and I really would have finished you off by bringing you here…” Rainbow Dash mumbled, her magenta eyes staring up at the sky. She was clearly unaware Trixie was awake, and by the sound of it unaware of how the silence effect actually worked.
She felt a painful stab of guilt in her chest. She did not truly know how to deal with this. Normally she would humiliate any pony that wronged her, but that did not feel right anymore. Maybe… Trixie could try like with Fluttershy?
It took her a moment to actually work up the courage. Rainbow Dash had gone quiet and all Trixie could hear anymore were her breathing and heartbeat, as she had been laying with her head on the pegasus’ chest. Perhaps this is not such a good idea. Should Trixie stay quiet, act like she is asleep? No! This is what Trixie tried to find her for in the first place, don’t be such a coward! Finally she pulled her hooves around Rainbow Dash in a hug, it felt strange to have her hooves dig so easily through the cloud that was carrying both their weights.
“Woah what’s this? Maybe she woke up?” Rainbow Dash blinked the tears out of her eyes quickly and put on a goofy grin as she stared down at Trixie. She motioned towards a cloud lower down with her head.
Trixie followed the motion and smiled widely once she found what Rainbow Dash was trying to show her, Fluttershy was sound asleep on a cloud below them. Good, she made it. Her attention turned back to her supposed tormentor. “You know, sound still works in a few hoof radius.”
Rainbow Dash paled immediately. “I-Is that so? Well that’s erm… convenient I guess. So did you errr have a nice nap?”
“Trixie heard all of it.” She was tempted to let Rainbow Dash squirm with that knowledge for a while, but pulled tighter instead. “It’s okay… Trixie… Trixie is sorry. Sorry for saying those things, for everything... She thought of you as just a monster, you aren’t. You saved Trixie… Saved me… Thank you, thank you so much. T-Trixie thought she was ready, she was wrong.” She broke into tears and averted her gaze quickly. Of course she would snap right in the middle of her little speech, why did she ever think otherwise? “T-Trixie can’t do a-anything right, it’s pathetic.”
Rainbow Dash stared down at Trixie in disbelief for a moment, then shifted one hoof up from Trixie’s back to stroke her mane. ”H-hey uhm uh… S-shhh it’s okay,” she spoke awkwardly, trying to mimic Fluttershy’s tone. It did not last very long. “Ugh I can’t do this! It’s not cool. Trixie, if you failing all the time also made you fail to get yourself killed then I’m glad! Keep failing!”
Trixie shrunk as Rainbow Dash’s went from the almost mock soothing voice to straight up scolding her. She was about to push herself away, but then she felt Rainbow’s Dash tighten her grip on her, warm wings wrapping around her.
“You’re such a foal. You failed to beat my dare, so you beat me. You failed to leave Fluttershy’s care, so you stayed and got better. You failed to take it easy, so you helped around the house. You failed to beat the Ursa, so you stalled until Twilight came. You failed , and you apologized. You failed to beat the timberwolf, so you risked yourself and send that signal. You failed to die twice, so you can keep on failing. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing! It’s not how many times you fail, it’s what you do after. And every time I’ve seen you fail, you immediately adapt! And do the best you can, even if it’s maybe not the right thing, you never gave up, and I think that’s pretty awesome!” Rainbow Dash voice rose in strength, taking deep breaths as she finished her rant.
Trixie looked up into the pure magenta eyes of the pegasus, not a hint of dishonesty to be found in them. She felt soft cyan feathers sweep along her muzzle wiping her tears away. “You… really think so?”
“Hey I may not have gotten the Element of Honesty, but you can trust me to be honest and loyal to my friends.” Rainbow Dash gave a cheesy grin at Trixie. “And I suppose there is enough of my awesome to go around for one more, what do you say?”
Trixie blinked slowly as she let the words sink in, repeating one phrase back to the pegasus almost sure she misheard. “Friends?”
Rainbow Dash grinned at the unicorn on top of her. “Sounds good to me, Friends. Now get off me will you?” She laughed, it was not as if Trixie could even if she wanted.
Friends
Damn it, I wanted them to make out!
4123643
Me too!
Who know's it might still happen.
Hey there, I’m alexmagnet, of WRITE, and I’m here to give my review of your story. Just as a preface, I’ll be separating this review into three sections: Grammar, Style, and Story. I’ll discuss each aspect individually, and probably have some subsections in each as well. I’ll do my best to not just point out errors or mistakes, but explain why they’re errors, and also how to fix them. To that end, I won’t be pointing out every mistake, but rather take a few examples of each, and explain how to fix them. The hope is that rather than just telling you how to fix everything, I’ll get you started, and then you’ll be able to fix it yourself, and thus not run into the same problems in the future since you’ll know what to look for. It’s just like the old “teach a man to fish” adage.
Anywho, without further adieu, let’s get started.
GRAMMAR
As I said, this section will be divided into subsections, indicated by the italicized titles. Also, please note that these sections are in no particular order.
Hyphens (and their many uses… but also ways they shouldn’t be used)
>She recognized that voice as the loud multi colored filly she'd shown up earlier
>That foolish foal outwitted by the Great and Powerful Tri-OOf!
>"...Twilight Sugar-cube."
>“T-that's right... Trixie is not in ponyville.”
All right, so hyphens are a useful tool, when used properly. They can be used to combine two adjectives into a compound adjective, make a compound number, avoid confusion with awkwardly written words, and also show a stutter in speech. However, there are also several things they are not used for, such as creating a break in dialogue. So, let’s look at each example that I pulled.
>She recognized that voice as the loud multi colored filly she'd shown up earlier
In the first one, the compound modifier “multi colored” should be hyphenated. Now, things get a tiny bit complicated here, because it’s not always hyphenated. See, when a compound modifier, such as “multi colored” comes before a noun (in this case “filly), it needs a hyphen, and this is to clarify what exactly is being modified and how.
See, if you were to leave out the hyphen, it becomes unclear what exactly is being said. Is she a multi “colored-filly”? Well, no, that wouldn’t make much sense. So, you use the hyphen to avoid confusion. By writing it as “multi-colored” it becomes clear what you’re saying. However, if RD were described like this: “The filly was multi colored” you wouldn’t use a hyphen since it’s clear what’s modifying what. You only need a hyphen when the compound modifier comes before a noun.
Now, for the second example.
>That foolish foal outwitted by the Great and Powerful Tri-OOf!
What you’ve got here can be done, but it needs to be done with a dash, not a hyphen. I’ll get into dashes more in their own section, but for now, just know that when you have dialogue interruption, like you have here “Tri-oof”, it needs to be interrupted by a dash, not a hyphen. Hyphens are only used for the things I talked about in the first example. Also, there’s some issues here with using onomatopoeias, but I’ll get into that in the style portion of the review.
>"...Twilight Sugar-cube."
This one is just inexplicable. You don’t hyphenate “sugarcube” anywhere else, so I can’t fathom why you did here. Regardless, it’s not a compound modifier, so it shouldn’t be hyphenated. Again, there’s some other issues here (not grammar related), but I’ll talk about those later.
>“T-that's right... Trixie is not in ponyville.”
Okay, now this example I specifically pulled because here you used a hyphen correctly. When you have a stutter in dialogue, you use a hyphen to indicate that. Oh, and I’d say the missed capitalization of “Ponyville” was a typo, but you seem to miss capitalizing several things, so I’ll talk about those in their own section as well. For now, we’ll move on past hyphens.
Commas and Comma Splices
>her head held up high and a victorious gleeful smile upon her face
>Twilight Sugarcube merely put a baby to sleep, The great and Powerful Trixie
>A moist dripple of drool landing on her head from the massive Ursa above her, apparently it was enjoying her strokes a bit too much.
>and oddly colored but somewhat soft pink mosses on the tree roots.
Commas are an important grammatical tool, and knowing how to use them correctly is even more important. For the sake of clarity, I will try to outline all the uses for commas (the relevant uses anyway) and give short examples. Then, when that’s done, I’ll go ahead and talk about the examples I pulled from your story, and explain what’s wrong, and how to fix it.
Commas are used to separate two independent clauses when they are joined by a coordinating conjunction such as: but, for, and, so, nor, or, yet.
>Trixie may not be the most competent magician, but she’s confident to a fault.
Commas are used after introductory clauses and phrases (except in the case that a dependent clause follows the introductory clause, as in the second example).
>However, that’s not to say that Trixie wasn’t also brave.
>Trixie still fought the Ursa, even though she knew she couldn’t beat it. (Incorrect)
Commas are used to set apart words, or phrases that are not essential to the understanding of the sentence: parenthetical elements.
>Trixie, even though she was brave, could still be considered foolish for her actions.
>Knowing, however, that she couldn’t lose to Twilight, Trixie tried her best.
Commas are used to separate two or more coordinate adjectives that describe the same noun. However, make sure you don’t put a comma between the final adjective and the noun, or between non-coordinate adjectives. There are two easy questions you can ask yourself to see if adjectives are coordinate or not. 1) Do they work in reverse order? 2) Do they work with and between them? If you answered yes to both questions, then you need a comma.
>Trixie’s starry purple cape fluttered in the breeze. (Correct)
>The strong, muscular Ursa Major was an intimidating sight. (Correct)
>Trixie couldn’t help but marvel at the vast star-filled night sky. (Incorrect)
Commas are not used to separate the subject from the verb.
>Trixie, ran to the forest for cover. (Incorrect)
Commas are not used to separate two verbs or verb phrases in a compound predicate, and likewise for compound subjects/objects with nouns/noun phrases.
>Trixie took off her cape, and used it as a blanket. (Incorrect)
>Trixie could be described as a fraud, and a charlatan. (Incorrect)
All right, so that about covers all the relatively common uses of commas. Though, if in later sections I come across an issue, I’ll address it there. Anyway, let’s look at your examples.
>her head held up high and a victorious gleeful smile upon her face
The adjectives “victorious” and “gleeful” are coordinate, so they should be separated by a comma. But, to be sure, let’s try asking those questions I just talked about.
1) Does it work in reverse order?
>her head held up high and a gleeful, victorious smile upon her face
Yep.
2) Does it work with and in the middle?
>her head held up high and a victorious and gleeful smile upon her face
Yep, although it’s a bit awkward (due to the “and” already being used right before it), so you probably wouldn’t want to do that.
>Twilight Sugarcube merely put a baby to sleep, The great and Powerful Trixie
Setting aside the fact that “Twilight Sugarcube” is silly, and unnecessary, let’s just focus on the comma there in the middle. This is what we call a comma splice, and it’s what happens when you separate two independent clauses with a comma, but no coordinating conjunction.
>Twilight Sugarcube merely put a baby to sleep. The Great and Powerful Trixie
Also, since you capitalize both “great” and “powerful” in every other instance like this, you should be consistent.
>A moist dripple of drool landing on her head from the massive Ursa above her, apparently it was enjoying her strokes a bit too much.
This is basically just another example of a comma splice. But while I’m here, “dripple” isn’t technically a word, though it’s somewhat acceptable if a bit awkward sounding.
>A moist dripple of drool landing on her head from the massive Ursa above her. Apparently it was enjoying her strokes a bit too much.
Oh yeah, and there’s another issue illustrated here that I’ll talk about later. You keep switching back and forth between present and past tense.
>and oddly colored but somewhat soft pink mosses on the tree roots.
The phrase “but somewhat soft” is a parenthetical element, and as such should be separated by commas (you could also use dashes or parentheses, but I’ll talk about those in another section).
>and oddly colored, but somewhat soft, pink mosses on the tree roots.
Then vs. Than
>If Trixie hit the tree here than that means Trixie came from..
(There are likely some more instances of this issue later on, but I don’t want to spend a bunch of time combing through every chapter looking for it, so for brevity’s sake, I’ll just use my own examples)
>Trixie is much more clever then Twilight.
It seems you’ve got a pretty good grasp on this concept, but for the sake of clarity I’ll explain it real quick anyway. It’s pretty easy, actually. Then is temporal. Than is comparative.
>Trixie boasted, then got busted.
>Trixie is tougher than she looks.
So the one example I pulled from you is a pretty simple fix then. Just change it to “then”, since it’s relating to time, and you’re good.
Ellipses
>“Really... Does Celestia have it out for the Great and Powerful Trixie?
>Trixie only claimed to be more powerful than her once!... Okay per performance... But still!”
>Humiliating Trixie by rescu...” She froze when the word rolls past her lips.
>'So it is day then…?'
Ellipses, man… Lemme tell you about ellipses, and how friggin’ awesome they are. You see, ellipses, being a rather overused bit of punctuation, have started to receive a lot of hate recently, or maybe not that recently. Either way, people don’t like ‘em. And, given how I frequently see them used, I can understand the hate. That being said, there’s a few simple rules for using ellipses that should keep you safe from the ire of ellipses haters. 1) Ellipses replace periods or commas, not dashes. This also means you don’t also use a period or comma after an ellipsis, and you certainly don’t use any other punctuation after it. 2) Ellipses are used to indicate pauses in dialogue, or trailing off (also they are less frequently used to indicate these things in narration). That’s it. That’s all you can use ellipses for, and they’re great at doing their job, just don’t abuse them. Anyway, let’s look at the examples I pulled.
>“Really... Does Celestia have it out for the Great and Powerful Trixie?
This one is technically acceptable, although it’s gratuitous since neither the dialogue nor the actions seem to suggest a pause is necessary. As a general rule, you want to use ellipses only when necessary, and that should be fairly rarely.
>Trixie only claimed to be more powerful than her once!... Okay per performance... But still!”
Remember how I said you don’t put further punctuation after an ellipsis? Right, well that also goes for punctuation before one as well. Second, if you have more than one ellipsis in a single line, then you need to reevaluate whether they’re necessary or not. Here, they certainly don’t seem to be.
>Humiliating Trixie by rescu...” She froze when the word rolls past her lips.
So this is a pretty big pet peeve of mine. Ellipses, as I said, are to be used for pauses, and trailing off, nothing else. If you’re giong to interrupt dialogue in the middle like this, then you need a hard break, not an ellipsis. You’d be better served using a dash here, but I’ll get to dashes in a later section.
>'So it is day then…?'
At the risk of repeating myself, don’t put additional punctuation after an ellipsis.
Direct Address
>A loud angry voice rose up behind her. "Why that little!"
Direct address is pretty self-explanatory. See, it occurs when, in dialogue, someone addresses someone else directly. For example:
>”What are you playing at, Trixie?”
>”Twilight, I’m trying to help you.”
>”Maybe, Trixie, you should go somewhere else.”
Basically what you do is put commas around the name (or title, or phrase describing a person, as in the above example where “that little” is directly addressing Trixie, though not by name) of the person being addressed. If the addressee appears at the beginning of end of the sentence, then, as I’ve show, you only have one comma, but otherwise you use two. The reason this is done is to avoid confusion. For example, if you had:
>”Trixie, Twilight is a magician too.”
It would be confusing if you didn’t have the comma to make it clear the speaker was talking to Trixie. But anyway, this rule is pretty simple, and from what I saw you seem to be decent at. But, much like “then vs. than”, it’s better to be clear.
Verb and Tense Confusion
>She glanced back just long enough to spot the winged mare take to the skies and flying in her direction.
>There was not a single cloud in the sky and the stars light up her enchanting white mane and tail like a beacon.
>A moist dripple of drool landing on her head from the massive Ursa above her
>Spinning around in fright and redoubling her efforts on igniting her horn [...] and turned left and right quickly certain this time it was not her imagination.
Okay, so this is a pretty major issue, and I’ve spotted many many times in just the first few chapters. Since I started reading this, you’ve posted almost a dozen new chapters, so I haven’t read those yet, but I’m willing to be this might still be an issue. Regardless, it’s not too difficult to fix, but it may be somewhat more… annoying to spot going back through and reading for errors and such. Normally my suggestion is to read the sentences aloud, and see if they sound like something a normal human would say, but given that you’ve said in your bio that you’re not a native English speaker (not that that means you’re not a normal human) it may not work as well for you. For these errors, and perhaps some issues with awkward phrasing (which I will talk about a little in the Style section of this review, you may want to find yourself a competent editor to help you out. I know there’s plenty of groups out there that offer editing services. WRITE is not one of those, though depending on the reviewer, they may offer more editing advice than others. But anyway, let’s talk about tense confusion.
You see, you’re writing this story in the past tense, which is pretty standard and probably the easiest way to do it. The problem that I’ve noticed is that quite often you’ll change one verb, or perhaps two or three in a row, into their present tense forms, and I can only imagine this must come from your background in RP-ing. Anyway, like I’ve done with the rest of this review, I’ll go through the handful of examples I pulled from your fic and talk about them in brief.
>She glanced back just long enough to spot the winged mare take to the skies and flying in her direction.
Everything here is good except “flying”, which should be “fly” since that would be the correct tense.
>There was not a single cloud in the sky and the stars light up her enchanting white mane and tail like a beacon.
Two things here. First, there should be a comma after “sky”. Second, “light” should be “lit”, since you’ll want to stay in past tense.
>A moist dripple of drool landing on her head from the massive Ursa above her
So I’ve talked about this sentence once before, but I neglected to mention that you changed the tense of “land” here to “landing”. Change it to “landed” and you’ll be fine.
>Spinning around in fright and redoubling her efforts on igniting her horn [...] and turned left and right quickly certain this time it was not her imagination.
Okay, so a lot of problems here. First off, one the issues with this sentence is the same issue that plagues a lot of your other sentences, namely you often make lots of run-on sentences. On top of that, the sentence will often switch subjects or objects without warning and be talking about something completely different. This creates a lot of confusion, and makes it hard to read. As a rule, one sentence gets one thought. That’s it. But anyway, as for this sentence, you can fix it by taking the “and” after the [...] and replacing it with “She”. I say capitalized “she” because I think it’d be best if you started a new sentence here. Also, I’d remove the “quickly”, and you’ll need a comma before “certain”.
Began vs. Begun
>The light of her horn slowly begun a disconcerting flickering
I think this is probably the only instance, but I might as well talk about it real quick. This one is slightly tricky, but shouldn’t be too much trouble to memorize. See, “began” is a past tense verb, and it appears by itself. “Begun”, on the other hand, is a past participle, and thus appears after “have” (in one of its iterations). For example:
>Trixie had begun to believe that she was the best.
>Trixie began to believe that she was the best.
Of course, this is really just treating the symptom not the problem, and what I mean by that is this sentence, like many of the ones I’ve pulled thus far, is in a general state of clunkiness, and/or awkwardness. I’m trying to address as many grammatical issues as I can so that you can help yourself find them in the future, but issues with phrasing is a bit more difficult to fix. I’ll try to talk about it more in the style section, so for now just now that changing “begun” to “began” isn’t going to fix this sentence.
STYLE
All right, there’s quite a bit to talk about here, but I’m going to do my best to keep it somewhat short. This review’s getting a little long in the tooth already. Just as a disclaimer, there are a lot of problems with this story, grammatical, stylistic, dialogue, etc., but I don’t want the things I’m going to say to discourage you from writing. I think everyone has the ability to write, it’s just that you’re probably going to have to put some work into improving. Oh, and like I said earlier, you might want to find an editor, or a proofreader at least, to help you out some. From there, you should be able to hone your skills and get steadily better, at least that’s the hope. But anyway, let’s dive into this style section.
Awkward Phrasing/General Clunkiness/Incomplete Sentences
>Between being lost, the hunger, cold, rain, humiliation, loss of her possessions and outright terror of facing the Ursa It certainly had seemed to do it's best to punish the show mare for having the audacity to put up a performance.
>She braced herself for whatever came next, but the pattering of droplets around her was all she heard. After several moments of chilling silence [...]
>A slow trot through the forest while she bit by bit examined the various plants, bushes and roots, looking for any that she recognized as edible.
>Five minutes had passed, with the blue furred open muzzle still hovered over the pink moss then swayed towards the roots and each in turn.
These are just four examples out of the dozens I could’ve pulled just skimming through one chapter. This is pretty clearly a pervasive issue, and not one that’s easily fixed with a wave of your hand. See, learning to write clearly and coherently sounds like it should be simple enough, and sometimes it is, but it can be harder than you’d think. The best way I’ve ever found to improve your style is to read… a lot. And I don’t mean read fanfiction. I mean go out and find some books by authors you like and study their style. Look at how they write things, and then try to replicate that in your own writing. Obviously I’m not advocating plagiarism. I’m simply suggesting that you should try to emulate them in your own words. After some time, you’ll eventually develop your own distinct style, and it’ll only grow from there. Starting off is the hardest part though, and you’ve already taken that first step, so good on you. You’ve got nowhere else to go but up. Anyway, I’m going to do my best to attempt to rewrite the above sentences in such a way that they’re slightly more palatable. This should not be taken as the only way you can write these sentences, but rather as one of many options. I’m just trying to give you ideas here so you can decide for yourself how you want to do things.
>Between being lost, the hunger, cold, rain, humiliation, loss of her possessions and outright terror of facing the Ursa It certainly had seemed to do it's best to punish the show mare for having the audacity to put up a performance.
The main problem here is that the sentence is utterly confusing. The subject and object are unclear, and I’m not really sure what’s going on. So lemme try to fix that.
>Between being lost, hungry, cold, humiliated, shivering from the rain, reeling from the loss of her possessions, and fearful of facing the Ursa again, Trixie still found time to condemn the world for putting her through all this simply because she had the audacity to put on a performance.
>She braced herself for whatever came next, but the pattering of droplets around her was all she heard. After several moments of chilling silence [...]
This one doesn’t really need fixing, so I won’t bother, but I do want to point out that there shouldn’t be “chilling silence” if she hears rain splattering all around here. That is, in fact, a sound, and thus would break whatever silence existed.
>A slow trot through the forest while she bit by bit examined the various plants, bushes and roots, looking for any that she recognized as edible.
This sentence just lacks a subject, and the verb suffers from tense confusion. So, let’s take a look at a possible fix.
>Trixie trotted slowly through the forest, examining bit by bit the various plant, bushes, and roots for any that looked like they might be edible.
>Five minutes had passed, with the blue furred open muzzle still hovered over the pink moss then swayed towards the roots and each in turn.
Here we’ve got an issue with the passive voice. Passive voice is when you have something happening to the subject instead of the subject doing something. Generally you want to avoid this.
>Five minutes had passed, and Trixie, her mouth open, hovered back and forth between the moss and the roots, still unable to decide on which to eat.
Trixie Referring to Herself in Third Person… Constantly
I don’t think I really need to pull examples for this one. So look, I’ve always had a bit of an issue with people who have Trixie talk in third person exclusively. I mean, yes, she did talk like that in the show, but only in specific circumstances.
...Okay, well, I was going to show you a youtube clip with her speaking in first person, but apparently all the instances of the episode (minus all the friggin’ “blind commentaries”) were taken down, so you’ll just have to take my word on this. Trixie only spoke in third person while she was in her stage persona. When she was speaking down to other ponies, or showing off, she’d speak like that to put herself above them, or at the very least because she’s arrogant. However, when she was threatened, scared, or not on stage, she generally spoke like a normal
personpony. So really, I’ve always maintained that when writing Trixie, it’s better to stick to that style, and only have her refer to herself as “Trixie” or “The Great and Powerful Trixie” in specific circumstances. Of course, you’re free to do what you want, but personally I find it incredibly odd that she’d even think in third person. I mean, it’s somewhat annoying, and more than a little awkward to read.”Twilight Sugarcube/”Prism Crescent”
Again, no need to pull examples for this one, so let’s just jump right in.
The problem with calling Twilight “Twilight Sugarcube” is that it makes literally no sense. Not only does Applejack not call Twilight “sugarcube” in such a way that it could be misconstrued to be the second half of her name, I also find it hard to believe that Trixie would’ve even bothered to pay enough attention to notice that since apparently she can’t remember Rainbow’s name despite it being told to her face. As for “Prism Crescent”, well… I think it should be obvious why this is just illogical. First off, if Trixie remembered enough of Rainbow to recall that her name had something to do with what she did, then it begs the question of how she could get “Rainbow Dash” so wrong. I could buy it if she misremembered it as, say: “Rainbow Crash” or something phonetically similar, but a synonym of her name just doesn’t make any sense.
Thoughts vs. Dialogue
In general, dialogue goes in quotation marks, either single or double. Thoughts, on the other hand, pretty much never go inside quotes, since they’re not really being said. While there are many different ways of doing this, the most accepted is to put thoughts into italics, like this. This indicates to the reader that we’re hearing a character’s thoughts, and not just reading dialogue, which putting thoughts in single quotes might make them believe. On top of that, if you’re going to bother separating out thoughts in some way, then at least be consistent about it. There’s lots of times where Trixie will speak to herself, or we’ll see something she’s thinking, but it’ll be presented as regular narration. This is actually fine, and you can do it like this, but be consistent. Don’t have both thoughts either italicized or in quotes, and as part of the narration.
Lavender Unicorn Syndrome (LUS)
I doubt that you’ve never heard of this before, but you may not be totally clear on what it is, exactly. Lavender Unicorn Syndrome, often abbreviated to LUS, is what happens when you take a character, like Twilight, and refer to her as “the lavender unicorn”, or “the bookish mare”, “the librarian”, and so on and so forth. The idea is that you replace pronouns and proper nouns with descriptive phrases to avoid repetition. It’s an understandable goal, given that avoiding repeition is normally a good thing, but in the case of forgoing pronouns and proper nouns, it couldn’t be more annoying and unnecessary. Often I’ll see you refer to Rainbow Dash as “the prismatic pony” or, “the rainbow-maned mare”, and this is just not really something you want to do. Pronouns, like, “she”, “it”, “her”, etc. are your friends, and you should use them. The only time it’s acceptable to use a descriptive phrase instead is if you’re telling us something new about the character. For example, if you wanted to show that, say, Trixie was dragging her leg because she broke it or something, you could call her “the injured mare”, but only once. After that we already know she’s injured, so you don’t need to keep calling her that. Basically, as a general rule, you want to use pronouns and proper nouns as much as possible.
STORY
I honestly don’t even know how I’d separate this section into subsections, so I won’t. I’m just going to talk about it in a stream-of-consciousness sort of way. Full disclosure before I begin: I only read up to what had been posted when I started reading, so that’s around Chapter 14. So that’s all I’m going to talk about. I have enough problems with it that I don’t think not having read all of it is going to be an issues. There’s some basic stuff in the beginning that needs to be changed anyway. So, let’s get started.
There was one thing I’ve been meaning to mention for awhile now, and I suppose now’s a good a time as any. The title, “Trixie’s Forest Retreat”, is a little ambiguous. You see, at first I thought it was going to be about Trixie starting a B&B in the Everfree, which I would totally read by the way, but it was in fact about Trixie retreating into the forest. So yeah, this isn’t a colossal deal the grand scheme of things, but it’s maybe something you want to think about in the future. I’m sure there’s a million other titles you could come up with that might represent the story itself a bit better.
So, an issue I noticed while reading this is that each individual chapter seems to be arbitrarily separate from the others. Like, there’s no reason the first 4 or 5 chapters couldn’t all be together. They’re certainly short enough to allow that. The problem is that nothing really happens for the first five chapters, so you’re not exactly giving new readers a lot to go off of. The basic premise, while it’s been done many times, is still a good base to work from, but you have to do something interesting with it, and you have to do it pretty damn early on otherwise people aren’t going to stick around waiting for something to happen. Well, not most people anyway.
I do have to give you credit for switching perspectives to Rainbow Dash after awhile. It’s an interesting shift, and it means we get to see things from her perspective as well, which is pretty cool. The only issue I have with that is that you rehash a lot of the dialogue in the beginning of Chapter 5. I understand the urge to do that, but really it’s not necessary. You can pretty much pick up right after that and we’ll know where you are since we’ve all watched the show. But, really, this is a minor complaint. I’m actually pretty pleased with how this story is going so far, even if it could use some work to be more technically pleasing. You’ve got a fairly well-used set up, but you seem to be taking your own spin on it, like I suggested, so that’s good. Oh, but I do want to say that this shift in perspective, while welcome, only further makes me think that you’d be better off condensing the chapters into several longer chapters instead of tons of short ones.
Anyway, I’ve reviewed, and written, many many fics in my day, and I can certainly say that yours isn’t half bad when it comes to story. Your grammar and style could stand to be improved, but at least you’ve got a solid foundation to work from with the story, which is more than I could’ve said for a number of fics I’ve reviewed. Keep writing, and you’re bound to improve. Hopefully this review will have provided at least some useful advice and wasn’t just five and a half thousands words worth of me blathering on.
Until next time,
This is alexmagnet, WRITE’s resident Trixie fanboy, signing off...
4129745
*5348 words later*
Wow. I was not prepared for this, at all.
Imagine my surprise when I realize the reviewer is one of the three writers that actually inspired me to try writing.
Thank you for taking the considerable time to read the story, and the massive amount time it must have taken to write all that.
Every point you made on grammar was clear and well explained. I will try to improve upon them. I must admit some of them truly surprised me, and I am glad I am now aware of them. Some others make me cringe for having missed something so obvious in hindsight. I feel I have enough information on now to look further into these mistakes, thanks to you.
On style, I can definitely see that the examples of improvements you provide are much better than the originals. This does seem like a much more difficult area to improve in. I have been reading more fan-fiction but I see you suggest I should read actual published works, I can see why that would be better.
The terrible habit of swapping from past to present tense is in fact a remnant of RP-ing, I'm impressed you made the connection.
I do have one question. Relating to this:
I seem to be unable to understand this point, I fail to see how the sentence is incorrect. Could you perhaps elaborate? The others were all crystal clear.
With regards to Trixie obnoxiously using her 3rd person speech. There is a reason for it in this story.
But I can understand what you are saying. It might be somewhat confusing/annoying.
I will have to consider that trade off.
Thank you again.
I feel like I have learned a lot, and I'll try to implement it.
4130502
I'm glad I could help you out, and I'm pleasantly surprised that I was in some way responsible for you starting to write in the first place. You have no idea how happy that makes me. Anyway, as I said, I'm glad you felt you learned something, as that was the intent, and I'm sure you'll improve immensely if you keep up with writing. As for your question:
Sure, I can elaborate. Let's look at the sentence again:
>Trixie couldn’t help but marvel at the vast star-filled night sky.
Now, since there are two adjectives here, "vast" and "star-filled", you have to figure out whether they're coordinate or not. In this case, they are. If you switch "vast" and "star-filled", the meaning is changed, and you also lose the hyphen, which would cause confusion.
>Trixie couldn't help but marvel at the star filled vast night sky.
The reason you lose the hyphen is because "star-filled" no longer falls under the rules for compound adjectives because it isn't followed by a noun. So, by switching the order, you change the meaning of the sentence. Therefore, the two adjectives are coordinate and must be separated by a comma, like so:
>Trixie couldn't help but marvel at the vast, star-filled night sky.
4130571
Ah yes I understand, thank you.
I realize now that my confusion stemmed from misreading the segment, not from any unclear writing. My apologies.
In my defense it is 3AM.
You most certainly did, it was your Letters from a friend at the end of the world that initially got me hooked on reading on fimfiction,. And eventually interested in writing about Trixie.
I will do my best to proof you right. I have no intention of stopping to write any time soon. The thing I dread the most is the inevitable rewriting everything I've written prior though.
4130678
Well, to be honest, I picked your story to review because I remember you commenting on Letters. Getting comments is basically what keeps me going with that story (and also that I love writing it), so I wanted to give something back. I mean, just the fact that I not only got you into writing, but also ponyfiction in general... it makes me feel pretty great. Anyway, enough stroking my ego, heh.
I know this feeling quite well. I've been wanting to rewrite the first 20 or so chapters of Letters for awhile since I don't feel they're up to my standards now, but that sounds like way more work than I'm willing to put in. If you want my advice, I'd say that maybe you should try writing something else, a short one-shot perhaps, just to have something that you can easily read over and edit to your heart's content. Then, once you're satisfied with that, take that knowledge you just gained and start applying it to editing this fic. It may take awhile, but I can guarantee it'll be worth the effort. Writing can be a long, arduous process, but goddamn if it isn't fun as hell.
4130931
So in a sense I traded <50 words for >5000? Damn good deal.
Heh sorry. I was just excited about it. I cannot tell a lie, but i can hush the truth.
Writing a quick oneshot for practice does sound like a good idea.
The funny thing is though. This was supposed to be exactly that, and look what happened.
My fault for underestimating how many words I would need I suppose.
I do certainly like having a good excuse to give it another try though. I will put some thought into a nice short story I can repeatedly revise, maybe something involving . Or actually I might have a better idea.
4131050
Yet again I find myself in your shoes. Letters From a Friend was originally written as a contest entry, but I never finished it, so I released the first chapter, unfinished, and over the past year or so, it's grown into the monster it is now. So, I can tell you I know exactly how you feel. But yeah, just keep practicing, write a lot, and I'm sure you'll improve.
Anyway, I've taken up enough of your comment section already, heh. I look forward to seeing you around in the future.
'Roused?' Something tell me they'll soon add an 'a' to this word.
I've noticed a return of the 'magenta eyes.'
I liked these lines;
'drowning out her other senses'
and
'Trixie had imagined it a little flashier.'
Corrections;
'too' should be 'to' in 'She was only trying give Trixie someone to talk too'
I suggest changing the comma for 'and' in 'Trixie’s eyes opened, the bright sunlight greeted her.'
I also suggest changing 'saved by the prismatic pegasus.' to either 'saved by Rainbow Dash.' or something more fitting and less lavender, like 'saved by the last pony she expected.'
'her magenta eyes' isn't necessary in 'Rainbow Dash mumbled, her magenta eyes staring up at the sky.'
'Woah what’s this?' should be 'Whoa, what’s this?'
remove the space before the comma in 'You failed , and you apologized.'
and
'Rainbow Dash gave a cheesy grin at Trixie.' should be 'Rainbow Dash gave Trixie a cheesy grin.'
wow this was an awesome chapter. Just recently Hasbro has made a few comics based on Trixie. and in them Trixie laments over her past deeds, stumbles, completely fails and then adapts to the new situation, before saving the day. It was nice to see those comics, but it truly impresses me that you were able to incorporate that element into your story so well. I'm a little more than surprised to see that you wrote this way before the comics came out, and that's pretty awesome. Great job on the story. XD
5208590
Ohh that's right! I have to get my claws on those Trixie comics. I've been looking forward to seeing more of her and judging by what you just told me her appearance there is much more satisfying than it was in that crystal heart book.
(Seriously, how do you screwup a Trixie/Gilda teamup? It boggles the mind!)
Thanks. I'm glad you are enjoying the story. I can't believe you actually find the time to write and read that much.
Element
________________
I got to stop here for a while. Something for you to fix real quick in the chapters past this 'bearers of the elements' and refering the the Elements of Harmony as 'the elements' is okay to keep lower cased. But "Elements of X" get capped (Harmony or a specific element), Element Bearers, and Tree of Harmony get capped. Since they are both proper nouns, titles, and names all wrapped up in one.
So far this is wrapping quite nicely. I'll admit that I was miffed that the Ponyvillians dumped blame onto Trixie, but seeing Rainbow Dash's bit of dialog here, and how well you've been doing Trixie and her interaction with ponies. It makes me eager to read more. And I look forward to reading the future chapters leading up to and past the rant chapter. It's been building up for a while.
5358963
Thanks. I'll keep that in mind.
Sadly, thas was how the episode ended.
I'm glad to hear that. RD has nearly as hard a time catching a break as Trixie does, except in the reverse. Despite what it might look like in the story, I love RD.
I look forward to seeing you react to said chapter.
As you might have noticed, the story is in no hurry to get there.
5360627
Yeah that shows episode was messed up. It wasn't Trixie's fault that Equestria has horrible parenting skills and lets their children routinely run into a forest that is filled with things that can killl ponies easily ... or the many other forms of neglect abundant on the show. Seriously the Princesses need to do something about that Someday.
But yeah, I can see in this fic Dashie having it just as bad as Trixie in reverse. I edited in a reply to my last post. I'm seriously enjoying this fic so far.
Submitted for your consideration:
One thing I've always found strange when people do in stories, and that this story has been doing for quite a while now, is having Trixie need to consciously try to not speak about herself in the third person.
I suppose there's some room for interpretation, or simply the assumption that all fics are technically AU fics that just don't change enough for the tag, but every bit of evidence in the show suggests exactly the opposite. Her third-person speech seems to be a persona that she constantly tries to keep up. Ignoring the fact that she does occasionally use first-person pronouns even on the stage, she drops it entirely at one point in each of the two episodes she's in, both times at the most humbling moment in the story for her. First she does it when she's forced to admit that she can't defeat the Ursa Major Minor, the point where she's clearly lost any semblance of control over the situation. Then she does it again in Magic Duel when she's apologizing to Twilight, albeit only long enough to offer a sincere-sounding apology.
I feel like a story that's being honest about Trixie's character would acknowledge that Trixie only says "Trixie" when Trixie is in control. But again, I guess there's some degree of wiggle room.
6116061
I get where you are coming from. The Trixie that 'drops the act' when she's scared, vulnerable or serious is a good one, and probably the 'correct' interpretation of her character. I do enjoy that Trixie when I'm reading about her. It's all kinds of cute and endearing.
But... I am just pretty attached to her 3rd person speech. It just ended up so much cuter, probably due to my own connotations to it. So, since I was going to be writing her, I went with what made me happy to write.
Still, I value being consistent with the show as much as possible. Which is why this story is working with a different interpretation of what we're shown about her, that should still match up to what we see of her do in the show. It is touched on later in the story. It is not a major spoiler, but... Trixie recognizes that she will sound sincere or look vulnerable if she 'drops the act' and does so consciously if she's trying to garner sympathy and be manipulative. Basically, flip the script on which part is acting and which part isn't.
6116381
Trixie deserves a Luna Cookie.
cdn-img.fimfiction.net/story/2y6v-1432442861-43218-full
Rainbow Dash for being an adorable Tsundere this chapter deserves a Heartattack Cookie of Adorableness.
derpicdn.net/img/2013/6/11/346242/full.jpeg
Here's a second Adoracute Heartattack for good measure.
derpicdn.net/img/view/2016/4/16/1133169__safe_solo_smiling_cute_looking+at+you_trixie_filly_food_nom_cookie.jpg
Not to be "that guy" RD, but it's not the best way to start a "you're better than you think you are" speech. Especially since it doesn't count as her "beating you" but rather "cheating to back out of a challenge".
Sorry to be a downer in an otherwise heartwarming chapter. I just hate when stuff like that is overlooked.
7877682
I don't disagree with you. A wiser pony might have left that bit out.
Dash is trying as best she can here, however motivational speeches aren't exactly her forte. She's gonna make a few mistakes, but it's the thought that counts.