Usual short break. Next Management chapter in 2 weeks instead of next. · 6:13am Sep 6th, 2018
So, we've come to the end of the old castle chapter in Exercise in Management, and as usual I'll take a week's break from writing to recover, de-stress from the deadlines, and everything else fanfics-related. This time I feel like I need it, because the last round of comments were… concerning. Don't worry, I love you all engaging, saying what you think, like, dislike, and calling out possible mistakes. It makes it way more fun to write, easier to avoid bullshit, and I can add details and content which don't exactly belong to the story itself (paladin power level comes to mind from the recent one).
HOWEVER, last chapter made me realize that there's a growing disconnect between what I see, what I think I'm writing, and what you're reading in the end, and that's a huge problem. I've always known that I lose majority of the life within the scene inside my head as soon as I sit down in front of the screen to write, but comments to the 3 alicorn chapters made it clear that I screwed up a lot somewhere. I (don't laugh) believe that from Imbalanced onwards I've never used a deus ex machina solution to any problem, only built up existing potential (yes, even Blaze's perpetual resurrections make sense), and that the decisions of my characters were true to their personality. There were hiccups from time to time, but those came mostly out of misunderstandings (my failure to write them properly) or ins few instances even the reader straight up missing written bits (too much not catchy test - my failure as well. Well, who else's it would be, right?).
This disconnect has been getting worse, I feel, over the second half of the castle chapter. I noticed it first when someone commented that I was trying to make the paladins look like the bad guys, which was EXACTLY the other way around. In terms of the story they ARE the bad guys, but in terms of the world and canon events, they were actually doing what was smart, necessary, and good to protect Equestria (Star Trail's toxic hatred aside for a second, but we know even his reasons make sense). Last chapter it kind of blew up when I had to explain in the comments that the point is that the situation came to be because everyone kept fucking up ever since changelings were created (my canon, not the grown from a tree tree shit from the semi-official comics. I still think my version is better), but THAT'S THE PROBLEM, THAT should be the content of the story, not my comments (they could add side-details, flavor text, but not main content), and if it's not there, if I can't convey that idea, then I've got a big problem, my writing is the problem. The good thing about all this is that I can have a fun discussion in the comments which I enjoy immensely, and it helps me identify the mistakes I make exactly like now.
Anyway, rant about me sucking is over. Thank you for all the comments and engaging in the story once more, and see you with the final chapter (some 6-9 parts it looks like at the moment) in 2 weeks.
Getting it from your head to paper is always difficult, especially when you write the scene to reach a particular conclusion and someone points out that it's possible to draw a completely DIFFERENT conclusion to that scene's meaning.
From the Chengeling POV, the Paladins are relentlessly evil, killing the helpless and innocent as well as warriors. From the Pony POV, the Paladins are heroes, saving them from the inherently-evil monster Changelings! Presenting the opposing POVs in a scene to convey that reality is not easy.
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It's more than just the paladin motivation thing, that was just the first one that came to mind as I wrote this. It's everyone's decisions, acting in perceived character, and so on. It boils to a simple point - I need to suck less. The real question is how.
The only solution is more words describing POVs, which can make the story read more like exposition if not handled properly. A difficult proposition when you can't really show the other POV without breaking consistency (i.e., you POV is the Changeling King, suddenly switching to, say, one of the paladins would be jarring -- unless you make that particular POV a recurring character, which would be a bit late in the story. But doable if it's a brand-new character to the scene that could not have been introduced earlier).
Still. Complicated.
Good luck.
P.S. You don't suck as a writer. You are already better than 99.99% of all the people who try to write stories (I used to be a slush-pile reader for a Science Fiction magazine -- you would not believe some of the stuff that people sent in and thought was a "good" story. Sentences without verbs, page-long sentences, punctuation that would make you cry, piling adjectives on a sentence to make it "descriptive," et cetera. Sometimes the submitted stories even had a PLOT -- usually taken straight off that popular SF series that was currently showing on TV, or movie!)
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Heh, good grammar. History textbooks are full of good grammar. I'd sacrifice some legibility to gain readability any day .