Princess Luna was invited by Twilight Sparkle to tell the newly founded reading club a story that had been long forgotten by everypony. Luna decides to tell them the tale of the Dusk Blades, a story of a band of mercenaries who over the course of the first war in Equestrian discover the dark secrets and powers that have lain dormant and hidden underneath their very hooves. Along with the promise of hope in the form of the Elements of Harmony that drives them on through the many trails and battles they have to face.
Chapters (0)
Sounds rather interesting. Tracking.
not bad tracking
Due to my history with video games, Dual Blades automatically made me think of this:
images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20121122124950/maplestory/images/thumb/1/15/Dual_Blade_intro.png/200px-Dual_Blade_intro.png
This comment is in response to The Writers Group thread “Fic Reading Coordination Service,” and is going to be rather long. I apologize if the “negative” part of the review turns out a bit harsh without the vocal tones to back it up.
As far as I could tell, this is a good story with a well-paced opening and some okay characterization (especially Daring's, though that may be biased towards my love of the character), but dear Celestia, it needs some TLC in the editing department.
I'll begin with the first thing I noticed: tense trouble. Your story seems to have problems separating present and past tense, jumping from "The sun had set and a bright full moon had taken its place" to "Caster fills up a mug to the brim with a multicolored liquid and slides it across the table to Strong Wing while filling up a smaller glass for herself." Tense trouble is very confusing, especially when the tenses conflict in a single paragraph like these two examples.
This leads into the second problem: punctuation trouble. Quite often, I would read parts of your story in my head, and when I reached the end of a thought (not necessarily the end of a sentence), I wanted to take a breath. Unfortunately for my brain, I couldn't because there was no comma!
Besides the comma problems, other punctuation marks probably feel out because all that seems to get used are periods, quotation marks, commas (sometimes), and ellipses at one point. I saw multiple instances where instead of a question mark or exclamation point, there was a period, which made me reread the entire sentence to make sure I had read the sentence correctly! Also, capitalize the beginning of your sentences, even under quotes. Not doing so is off-putting and more importantly, grammatically incorrect.
Actually, capitalization in itself is a problem. You seem inconsistent on whether or not "pegasus" and multiple other terms should be capitalized (For the record, unless you are talking about the specific Pegasus of Greek mythology, it shouldn’t be).
Thirdly: showing vs. telling. There are debates raging on the internet over whether one should show all the time or if telling is completely normal and should be treated as such, the difference mainly being how you treat your reader and the point of narration. Here, you have a third person omniscient viewpoint, and while it’s great to show off your narrator’s knowledge of the events happening, you should also be aware that your reader feels better if they figure it out for themselves.
That said, one of the main ideas of fanfiction is writing for yourself. If you think a sentence conveys exactly what you want it to convey without the roundabouts that “showing” tells you to do, then by all means keep it in.
These problems can be fixed by a simple reread of your story. You say you haven't touched it in half a year, which is more than enough time away from it for you to have a more neutral read of your story. The next time you try and overcome your writer's block, instead go back and read the three chapters you've already written, preferably out loud. Anything that "sounds wrong" probably is, so you should edit that particular phrase until it doesn't "sound wrong" anymore.
Then send it to an editor in a googledoc format, where they can make comments as they please and catch any mistakes you might have missed.
Now that we've gotten that frightening "your story is terrible" sounding spiel out of the way, let's talk about where your story shines.
Again, the story behind the text is very good, especially just about everything in chapter two onwards. When I read any story, I try and picture it in my head as I go along. If I cannot, it must not be a very well-written story. Here, I can picture exactly what's going on.
The pacing is clean enough, transitioning between the tense moments that make up an adventure story with ease. This is helped by the characterization, which matches up with what I would expect each character to be.
It seems like you put a lot more work into chapter three, which makes it my favorite of the three you've written so far, a decision based on simple interactions between characters, the fact that most of the conflict is introduced in this chapter, and the fact that the required edits stated above are less necessary in this chapter (though still necessary, don’t get any ideas).
To conclude, I reiterate what I said at the beginning: The story itself is a fine story, but it is hidden behind a thick wall of errors that makes it nigh-impossible to determine what's going on at times. I would really like to see this story fixed and given a great appearance to match its great premise and pace.
Now let's talk about the non-error related problem. Your writer's block.
I was once reading Treasure Island (That's right, I still read books) when I came across an interesting tidbit. Apparently, Robert Louis Stevenson had the same problem you have right now. After wracking his brains for a bit, he decided to change perspectives. Instead of writing from the perspective of the young cabin boy, he wrote from the perspective of the ship's doctor, which allowed him to forward the story, eventually writing the cabin boy back into the main plot, at which point Mr. Stevenson immediately resumed the cabin-boy's narration and write off any plot discrepancies. You can do the same with Daring Do. How did she get sent back into the past? What are her opinions on the ponies that surround her? How would she react in certain situations? Once you get your creative juices back on track, you can jump back to your main character.
The other option I can think of is to remember your premise. How did Princess Luna find out about this story? How are the Mane Six reacting to Luna's retelling of these events? This story seems pretty intense for Fluttershy, how is she holding up? This will, of course require possibly adding the Mane Six + Luna to the character tags, but you have room for that. Unless, of course, the plan is to introduce her at the end or some other such scenario, in which case you should probably disregard this altogether.
I apologize for the extremely long comment. In short (not a tl;dnr, because you should definitely read the above), this story needs a remake to announce its return from a six month hiatus, and what I've outlined should (I think) put you well on your way.
Best of luck on the editing process,
-radio414
Okay, so I came here from the “Fic Reading Coordination Service". And, apparently, so has the person who commented just before me.
Funnily enough, I share many of his criticisms of your story's writing. I've found:
- Tense changes between sentences, or within a sentence.
- Run-on sentences throughout.
- Capitalization and punctuation issues.
- Multiple speakers within the same paragraph - you must start a new paragraph with every new speaker!
And... I think you put a stage direction in the middle of a line of dialogue.
Please, before you look for other help on this fic, fix the problems that have already been pointed out. That way, you make progress, instead of forcing people to point out the same problems over and over.
Now, as for other issues, you said this in your post:
The problem is that some of these are intimately tied up with HOW the fic is written. I can't really talk about the flow as a separate entity, because the run-on sentences and such stall/break it up so often. Similarly, it's hard to say anything about your writing style.
As for characterization... well, you do an okay job with the Mane 6, and Princess Luna is fairly close to canon. But I can't figure out the personalities of your original characters at all - partially because, as mentioned before, you don't change paragraphs for a new speaker. Frankly, though, they don't seem to have much personality to them. Caster is the 'sympathetic innkeeper', the rest are 'generic soldiers' - but none stands out as anything other than an archetype. Who are they? Where are they from? What's their family, motivations, likes and dislikes?
One last thing: What is the point of the frame story? You've got the storytelling group, Luna gets brought in to tell a story, she starts doing so... and the Mane 6, Luna, and every other trapping of the present day are never referred to again. Like radio414 said, if you've got the frame story you might as well, for instance, show some reactions from the in-story audience.
So, overall... fix your grammar. I cannot stress this enough. Then, and only then, can you begin work on the other parts of the story.
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Well I've learned my lesson to stay off the internet when I'm sleep deprived cause I do stupid things. Anyways thanks for the additional feedback on what needs to be fixed. Radio414's idea of involving the mane six more often was something I was planning to apply at the end of the next chapter, but my plans for this story changed. Upon further reflection there are a lot of things I want to change many of which were mentioned by you two, so I'm going to rework the whole thing. Once again thanks for your helpful comments!