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No. 109182
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continued from >>108969
Now, it's time to address some choices you've made which detract from the readability of your story.
First of all, numerals.
>just 1 day
>it was in ¾ time
>over 2 days
>Even after 5 months
>less than 12 hours later
It is widely considered poor style to use numerals in fiction when words will do. None of your uses of numerals are necessary, and they should all be replaced with words. Dates (June 29th, 2012) and times (9:46 PM) are examples of appropriate uses of numerals.
Using CANTERLOCK (pony slang for capslock, heh) to emphasize words is often seen as irritating, and should be avoided. Capslock has legitimate uses, such as in newspaper headlines, or when a character must shout something extremely loudly, but it comes across as lazy when it's used purely for emphasis. There are more effective means of emphasizing words, anyway—a properly structured sentence can put more weight on a single word than capslock ever can.
As an alternative to capslock for purposes of emphasis, italics can be used, but even they should be used sparingly.
One of the more irritating aspects of your prose is your insistence, which is common among inexperienced authors, upon using the ellipsis (...) at every opportunity. By my count, there exist at least 68 individual instances of "..." in your first chapter alone. Interestingly, you also use the dash (although you mistakenly use the hyphen instead of the dash) at least 45 times in that chapter, and the exclamation point (!) rears its head at least 33 times, which is at least 33 times too many. Much of the time you use your ellipses to give artifical weight to weak lines of dialogue or trite thoughts. Your dashes seem excessive, as if you're purposefully trying to avoid using commas for fear of overusing them. That's a bad policy. The eye glides right over commas. It's unusual forms of punctuation and lettering that tire the eye: ellipses, semicolons, dashes, colons, exclamation points, capslock, numerals....
Which brings me to an important point. Eyes don't really get tired, do they? (Well, maybe after 28 hours at a computer screen with no sleep, they do.) When people say that a certain formatting or design element hurts their eyes, generally what they really mean is that it hurts their brain.
See, our brains naturally focus more on what's different rather than on what's similar. In anything humans observe, differences are what stand out, and the largest source of difference in a given observation will attract the most attention.
The reason we have fonts, grammar, syntax, stylistic rules, and so on, is to ensure that our brains are able to focus on the most important differences in a work of literature: the differences between words. The more different forms of novel punctuation, textual flairs, and so on that appear in a work, the more distracted our brains will be from the words on the page.
This isn't to say that punctuation beyond periods and commas is verboten. But consider—it is impossible to communicate anything at all except through difference. If you could only ever say one word, any meaning you tried to convey through it would be indiscernible to anyone else. So, this point is very basic and very important: In communication, meaning is only achieved through difference.
Now, punctuation fails when it draws attention to itself, rather than to the words whose meaning it is intended to elucidate. How does punctuation most effectively bring out the meaning of words? Precisely by way of contrast—of difference—with the surrounding text. Attaching a punctuation mark to a set of words says, "Hey! These words are different! If you want to understand them, you need to know that they can only be understood in the very specific way indicated by the punctuation." So, if you use a certain punctuation mark too often, or if you use it to mean more than one thing, it loses its ability to convey any relevant information about the words to which it is connected. Once that happens, the mere visual fact of the punctuation's use becomes a more noticeable "difference" than the differences between the words of the text, and when that happens, the readability of the text suffers.
(By "punctuation", of course, I refer to everything which is a merely visual matter: italics, margins, justification, font, font size, font color, serifs, boldface, and so on. All of these choices are capable of conveying meaning: read Chromosome's "White Box" [the google docs version], for example, and see what wonderful meanings the author paints by utilizing colors.)
The point to take away here, I suppose, is that if something is noticeably different but its difference conveys little or no meaning, do away with that difference, because it distracts from the more important differences. (This is what's meant by the expression "increasing the signal-to-noise ratio.")
With a little thought, you can probably see how this rule has some far-reaching consequences. Words should be precisely chosen; they should be the right words, not the almost-right words. Sentences should have simple structures when they convey simple thoughts, and parallel structures when they convey parallel thoughts. When obscurity is required, they should crouch hidden in shadows; they should sprint in action scenes. All this because—why? Because: you don't have a choice whether or not to include different words or different sentence structures in a story. If you want to convey your meaning unobscured, then, your only option is to make every one of your words and every one of your sentences (and yes, every one of your paragraphs, scenes, and chapters) meaningful.
For an illustration of creating meaning through words and sentences, let's look at the opening lines of "Airshipping is Magic" by Blueshift, a raucous comedy as funny as it is short. Take careful notice of the sentence structures, the choice of words, and the overall pacing of the first paragraph:
>The morning air was crisp and cool with barely a breeze blowing. The sky was crystal blue, and the rays of the sun played lazily across the green countryside. It was the perfect day, thought Twilight Blimple, for a flight.
The first thing to notice is the simple sentences, which suggest simplicity of thought. Notice, too, the carefully chosen alliterations on C and B in the first sentence: "crisp and cool," "barely a breeze blowing". These are carried a little further in the second sentence, with "crystal blue", while an assonance on A forms when the "rays" play "lazily". The playfulness implied by these whimsical A-B-C constructions advances the feeling of simplicity, while also refining it; it's no longer mere simplicity, but a specifically naive simplicity, the kind that a child evinces when he looks up into the sky on a beautiful day and discovers amazing shapes in the clouds. It's a joyful simplicity, a sort of willful optimism, that characterizes many pleasantly boring people. It's a tone of thoughtfulness, of goodwill, of sincerity.
And with the third line, we have a character with whom to associate this tone, this mood: Twilight Blimple. The third line thus completes and renders useful the structure and tone of the previous two lines, by using them to characterize the protagonist. Notice what the author didn't do, in this regard: he didn't render Twilight's thoughts in first-person. He didn't write:
>The morning air was crisp and cool with barely a breeze blowing. The sky was crystal blue, and the rays of the sun played lazily across the green countryside. It's the perfect day, thought Twilight Blimple, for a flight.
What if he had? Well, it would have introduced a difference, a disconnect, between the tone of the words used to portray the scene, and the tone of Twilight Blimple's mood. It would have become impossible for the reader to understand the narrator's tone as referring to Twilight. The first two lines would thus have lost much of their impact and meaning, being crowded out by a meaningless difference inserted between the narrator's point of view and the focus character's point of view.
Notice what else the third line does, this time on a merely literal level. It completes the meaning of the previous two lines, by suggesting their relevance toward the plot. It's not for nothing that the author begins by telling us what sort of day it is; the sort of day is relevant to the story. The final line thus acts to complete all that came before, raises it up, unifies it, renders it intelligible and worthwhile, and causes it to become a source of joy.
Yet another level of meaning can be pulled from this opening: a satire on what are called "weather reports". So-called "weather reports" got their name from amateur writers' tendencies to begin their stories by describing the weather, even when the weather is completely irrelevant to the plot. Blueshift crafts his opening so that it bears a superficial resemblance to a "weather report", thus reinforcing even further the feeling of childish simplicity.
And look at the words used: "crystal", "green", "rays", "breeze". These are words that children know. The sun is even said to have "played" across the countryside.
Now consider the structure of the whole thing as a complete piece of humor writing. In humor, misdirection is key. The audience's expectations must be built carefully up in one direction and then sharply, suddenly subverted. Consider how commonplace, how boring, how ordinary the first two lines feel. The simplicity they evoke leads us to expect that the story itself will be simple. The ordinary descriptions of an ordinary day lead us to expect an ordinary tale about ordinary events. Then what happens? The psychedelic words "Twilight Blimple" appear, crashing our expectations and forcing us to quickly reinterpret all that we've just read. Of course the weather would seem important—to a blimp! we think. The feeling is that of a sudden enlightenment, and we express this feeling in laughter.
There would be no humor in this opening if the sentences were not paced as they are. If Blueshift had opened with "Twilight Blimple" in the first sentence, the pleasing effects of subversion, completion, and unification would all be lost. Even in the last sentence, "Twilight Blimple" is delayed until almost the end. Only three short words are left after its appearance, creating a short (and welcome) cool-down period following the climax. This paragraph, in fact, is a model of good pacing, and the rules of pacing apply at every level of storytelling: sentences, paragraphs, scenes, chapters, arcs, and entire plots.
With that long-winded exposition over, I'm now going to ask you a question. Can you say that you've put as much thought into the meaning your words and sentences convey as Blueshift has? If not, can you try to do so, starting now? I'm reviewing your story, sure, and maybe other people will too, but the story won't get any better unless you make good changes to it. To do that, though, you have to first open your eyes to see the world of possibilities that exist in writing any scene or any sentence. The number of forms of expression is without limit. You must always try to choose the form that best conveys the meaning of the content.
Ask yourself: What meaning does this convey?
>Early one morning, a morning that was seemingly like every other morning, Dinky woke up and was immediately shocked by a crisp, clean smell; unlike the normal, sweet smell of cooking muffins.
You say that the action begins "early". How early? Early could mean 4:00 am, or it could mean 9:00 am, depending on who you ask. The word "early" by itself is not meaningful enough, not singular enough, to be very informative.
You say that the morning was "seemingly like every other morning". But again, this is vague. Every morning in Alaska is different from every morning in Beirut. Additionally, the phrase "a morning that was... like every other morning" seems to me to suggest it was a boring morning. But you then go on to note that Dinky was "immediately" shocked by something upon waking up. So, going from what you've written, the morning seemed boring, but there was no time at which Dinky ever thought the morning was boring. The question then arises: to whom, exactly, does this morning seem like every other morning? The narrator? Ah, but if so, you've introduced a meaningless difference into the text. Because the narrator is now having feelings, but those feelings are meaningless as far as the story goes, I'm now in the position as a reader of having to figure out what feelings belong to the characters in the story, and what feelings belong to the narrator, and then make an effort to ignore the narrator's feelings in order to just pay attention to the story. So that's no good at all!
If, on the other hand, it was actually supposed to be Dinky who thought the morning was like every other morning, then your word choice "immediately" actually contradicts your intended meaning. And a writer's goal is to write precisely what they mean to say, not precisely what they don't mean to say.
You say that what shocked Dinky was a "crisp, clean smell." What is this smell? Where does it come from? You don't say. You say only that it was "unlike the normal, sweet smell of cooking muffins." Because of that, I'm inclined to think that what you meant to say was that Dinky didn't smell anything at all. But a "crisp, clean smell" is not the same as no smell at all.
You use a semicolon. As far as I can tell, this semicolon is not used in any of the ways in which semicolons are normally used in English, so it's impossible for me to understand what meaning you are trying to bring out of your words by using it.
Finally, look at the overall structure of this sentence. Does it build towards a climax? It seems to me that, given the subject, Dinky's "shock" ought to be the climax. But this shock actually occurs smack in the middle of the sentence, not towards the end like it should. The shock does rely on the other meanings conveyed by the sentence for its intelligibility, and it attempts to unify them, so there's a point.
Overall, this sentence fails, and not because of its intended meaning: it fails because of poor word choices and poor sentence structure, which obscure the intended meaning and distort it beyond recognition.
And here's the kicker: I could cite examples of bad sentences in "I'll Never Forget", worse sentences than this, all day long. Have a few:
>“F-friends? Oh, yes of course! Yeah! Let's get to it!” said Derpy with a renewed sense of happiness and a huge smile on her face that was as infectious as the plague, before she and Charity both split up the mail and sped out the door, with a determination unlike anything seen in pony history.
>Derpy, feeling like she was being watched, looked over at Charity, who blushed and looked away quickly, turning to the machine and pouring in a cup of flour, adding it to the bowl before adding a teaspoon of vanilla and a stick of butter, which had softened due to the warm temperature filling the room from his oven that they had preheated beforehand.
>As she said this, a scowl came across her face before she ran into a light yellow pegasis she recognized her as Fluttershy from Junior Speedsters Flight camp, as she was always getting teased as well as Derpy.
>Derpy woke up- mainly from the shifting pony still held in her arms, but also due to the fact that she wakes up early to go to her early job.
>While slightly annoyed by the comparison of Derpy Hooves, the love of his life, to a stone, he let it slide, simply nodding and saying “I've seen her ability to bounce back- I know she can take some thing better than others. That doesn't matter though, this is real. I won't let her go. Ever.” with renewed zeal, he simply stated “now if you'll excuse me, I have mail to deliver with Derpy.”
>It was several weeks later, and Derpy was slowly regaining her figure with the help of her job (which she returned to after the baby was born) and the long walks Charity, the baby and her took every day, much to the delight of their several friends and acquaintances around town, who loved seeing the new filly in her stroller.
I cannot emphasize enough how irritating it is, to me as a reader, to trudge through poorly-constructed sentences like these. This may be your biggest weakness as a writer.
And now, for a final note, on cliches. You know, expressions like these:
>her beloved mother
>lost in her thoughts
>Much to her surprise
>from ear to ear
>with every fiber of her being
>“Forgive you? For what? If anything, YOU should be the one mad at ME.”
>the most remarkable pony I had ever seen
>if you try anything I swear to Celestia it'll be the last thing you ever do. Mark my words.
>she was loving every minute of it
You didn't actually have too awful many of them, but it seemed like the ones you did have were stacked disproportionately in the most important scenes.
A cliche is bad because it's inaccurate. It conveys a vague, general notion, in comparison with which what you really mean is always going to be something more precise and concrete. There is almost no excuse for using cliches in creative writing. They should be hunted down and gutted in revision.
I'm still writing. More parts to come.
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