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No. 101218
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TL:DR: Main thing, writing wise, is your commas, particularly when making sentence and dialogue (which there we many instances of being done wrong, but it looks more like carelessness rather than ignorance). I want to suggest you do a little bit or reorganization of the text for both ease of reading and more compact message, right now the text stutters rather than flows, so I’ll comment on paragraphs and on your current breaks. Story wise, I hated your beginning, I greatly disliked your sudden introduction of some elements, I want to make a note about originality, and in general just state how the concept is solid and generally well written (despite my objections).
Greetings, welcome to your review Dublio, I can only hope you find something helpful. As always, let us begin with the written portion, shall we?
The very first thing I want to deal with is your dialogue punctuation, or rather your carelessness with it. This is but a small sample of all the errors in dialogue I found, with just the general families of errors in each. Please keep this in mind and check them in this in all future works.
>“Wow. My hero.” A voice Said from behind Derpy. If I were an alien who just acquired the basic rules of the purpose of the comma and quotations, I would wonder what the voice said and who said that just before a voice said something. It doesn’t matter if one doesn’t know who spoke, all dialogue is either attributed or free hanging. You cannot use a description of dialogue in this manner, because this is not a description of the dialogue but rather an action of said dialogue that, by the normal rules of dialogues, must be joined to the speech-verb in other for them to actually make sense. Right now, and in mnay other occasions, you are making the voice not be connected to the dialogue and thus it is a mistake. I suggest you revise this and make sure that, if you are making someone say something, it is connected by a comma to the saying verb. In other words, write it like this and all similar ones: “Wow. My hero,” a voice said from behind Derpy.
>”I’m not so sure.” Bon-Bon said, tilting her head. This, multiple times, across the whole text, where nothing short of carelessness can be said to be the culprit. You know the rules of dialogue, you did it correctly multiple times, but here I found various mistakes with a hit and miss routine which should not occur. Be careful with your dialogues, if not attributed properly you can, and most likely will, confuse your reader. At the end, you already know this, but you simply didn’t carry it out, put a bit more attention to this and it will come naturally.
Additionally, I leave you with this sentence: > Now encased with flour, she shook herself vigorously, like a dog until all of the offending substance dispersed.
There is something very, very, very, very wrong with the commas and clauses here (and this isn’t the only one). There are currently six ways I can imagine fixing this, but all of them have different connotations and I can’t seriously attempt to fix it that considered. So, read this again, slowly, and you should noticed what I speak of and then fix this and its brethren. If not, feel free to ask.
Now, there are two issues I want to deal with which aren’t actual corrections but rather some opinions about writing and how they should work. Feel free to listen or to ignore them, but I rather mention them right away. So now, onward:
>"Okay, two eggs." Carrot Top picked up both of the eggs and held them over the counter. She gently cracked them open before pouring them into the mixing bowl. As she read the cookbook, she flung the eggshells into the trashcan.
Punctuation marks, paragraphs, and all major separations in language have a similar origin: speech. Whenever we speak to someone, the emphasis, the tone, and the lengthening or shortening of phrases, words, or mere onomatopoeias arise naturally from the rate which they are spoken. Why does this matter? Because the control of how actions are perceived by one person or another connects directly to how we organize them in text and the timing between them will be guided by those. If we are not careful with these, the actions lose the message we are trying to convey. I take this particular example (would add the section which follows it as well) because it shows this in one of the clearest manners possible. The paragraph is a self-contain unit that attempts to make a single thing out of various smaller concepts (the sentences) and thus will not necessarily make things concurrent, but unless you do something about it the whole set of actions will be seen as a sequence and the notion of internal time of the reader will be based upon this. This considered, look at the example; I want you to notice how the dialogue, despite not having any sort of direct connector involve with the action, because of the current position of that dialogue the action between the two has little option but to be done in haste with whatever happened before. It might seem odd that such thing would happen (shouldn’t readers be intelligent enough to figure that there is a pause?) but sadly the reader has only your written queues to know how and what is going to develop. Knowing the source of this story, and the way they were expressed there, the spoken section isn’t part of the sequence that it forms part of in this example but rather it is its own distinct action. Paragraphs, the linking tools they are, makes that dialogue not be a distinct action. Thus, separating it into paragraphs is most likely the best you can do to deliver the necessary sense of pause that is required. As always, this isn’t the only place where this same issue was seen (a longer pause than the one implied was probably needed) so be in the lookout and try to make sure the proper pauses (and paragraph separations they imply) are in their proper place.
Right on its heels, we have this: "Be careful. Don't let her innocent looks fool you. She'll do anything to get them. Despite what you may think, she's a clever pony." Slipping on her coat, Carrot Top headed towards the backdoor. "I'm serious. Don't let your guard down, not even for a second." Carrot Top glared at Derpy one last time before trotting out the door.
"How hard could it be?" Lyra asked, shrugging. “If we work together, it’ll be as easy as pie.”
"I'm not so sure." Bon-Bon said, tilting her head.
Lyra walked over and smelled the muffins. "Wow, these smell delicious. No wonder Derpy keeps going crazy over them." As Lyra and Bon-Bon waited for Carrot Top to get back, they prepared for Derpy to make the first move.
*****
Carrot Top did her best to leave quietly, not wanting Derpy to know she left. She even went so far as to leave through the back door. As she walked outside, she tripped and flew face-first into a tree, causing a cluster of pinecones to rain down upon her. She got up and brushed herself off, but when she tried to take another step, she stepped on a particularly jagged pinecone.
Now, do remember my eternal warning that all my examples are but one in a group of them, as my aim is to let you see them and then make you find them so that you actually can identify them without having me on your neck all the time trying to tell you why it is wrong. There are others like this and I want you to keep this in mind as you read with the question: is this seriously needed? The question has quite a lot of importance in this context, because right here we have sixty-six words that do nothing to advance the plot, further characterization, or deliver a joke. Now, for the sake of it, imagine we eliminate those words and just continue as from that point without any pause of any kind. Does it still make sense? Does the sequence advance the plot? Does the focus keep on a character long enough for us to care? Will it make for a stronger narrative? In my mind, the answer to all of these is yes, the elimination of that section and the joining of those two into a longer and far more solid one fulfills all of those, which are generally positives things one should be aiming for. What’s the theory behind it however? For starters, writing must not contain anything superfluous, meaning that those words have their first strike against them from a mere writing perspective. Secondly, flow of a story depends upon the ability of the different sections of a story to follow each other without pause, which ever pauses do exist not seriously hampering with the ability of a story to follow logically. This means that, if possible, all sequences must follow each other rather than zig-zag their way back and forth without a good reason because otherwise the rhythm (and the flow that comes with said rhythm) will be lost to repetition, backtracking, and just outright stuttering on which nothing happens in a particular scene. Other issues will vary with the purpose of each scene, but the general rules behind keeping a clean narrative go with those two above, and you want a clean narrative for your story to be understood. Play around with this, try to join as many section as you can if you feel it will make the narrative stronger, and above all make sure there is nothing superfluous to the story as they will inevitably bring it down with weight.
Let us talk about story, and there are three things I want to touch upon: originality, the need of a making a beginning which delivers the whole background and the folly of thinking a person will know, and some leaps of logic which I personally wasn’t too willing to make. In my traditional matter, I employ your largesse and ask you to dive in.
Let us be frank: this isn’t something new. As a matter of fact, I just had to read the very beginning in order to know where you had taken this from and knew from that instance I would be enjoying myself. I enjoyed myself then, I enjoyed myself here, and there was very little that could go wrong as long as you didn’t try to get too off the formula, which didn’t occur of course and thus everything more or less fell into its right place. Why do I bring this up? Because the question of “why should I bother reading your story if I can have the original instead in a far shorter amount of time?” does crop up, and it crops up because it is in fact a valid question that you must justify to the reader as to why is this the best usage of his time. People will most likely speak of lack of originality, they will make fuss about how you didn’t add anything to the formula, and they will mostly be the first one to say, “This is just cut and paste of x.” I wanted to use this paragraph at least to say bollocks, what you have written is no less original than all the Greek dramatist works which were little more than rehash of multiple plays and myths which they wrote to their image, to their impressions of what a work should be. That, I found here, that voice which is utter unequivocally when a person decides to make an idea his own, was what I enjoyed the most, because it didn’t feel like some sort of bad exchange, you actually took the time to make sure that the ones presented belong where they did and I will only praise you for it. True originality in writing comes only in shape of what voice you give to your characters and how you construct the world (which includes past history, interpersonal relation, etc.) which the characters interact; the words “all stories have been told” is not just a catchphrase, tell me a story and I will find you a book that has dealt with it before, a myth which has tried to explain it one way or another, or a local legend which uses it as its motive force. And if there is any doubt, look up “El Brujo Postergado” and “Lo que sucedió a un deán de Santiago con don Illán, el mago de Toledo”, in English if Spanish is not your strong point or simply read the Canterbury Tales and then the Il Decameron (in English, for the same reason as above), and many other examples too.
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