Writing: What Not To Do (Part 2)

As you studious younglings last remember, I promised to bring you an examination of the Draconic Ponies and their Land Before Time. Well, first off, there was no Land Before Time scenario. Character's in that beloved animation had a quality known as personality, which was skillfully separated from their abilities. Such is not the case here. Unlike the former critique, mostly for the stake of fairness and credibility, I'm going to do something more akin to a line-by-line critique. This will offer the reader a much clearer picture of why this is an example of bad writing. In fact, the first sentence is a good start.

"In a place unimaginably far from the Abyssal (capitalization error) ((At least I think it is)) home of the Dark Queen's brood, a different world took shape, gradually emerging from the chaos of Godly dreams."

This sentence is confusing. The beginning isn't problematic, but it isn't clear in the final parts of this sentence whether the dreams in question are the dreams of the Gods (Giving us the impression that this novel is going to take a philosophical turn, giving us the impression that reality is just a dream of some God or Gods). Of course, one could infer that the author was trying to go subjective experience on us, being that our subjects are the cutest little firebreathing monsters on the planet. Now, give me a moment to browse over the text...

The author pretty much throws more "GOOD V.S EVIL" crapola in my face for a good few sentances, assuming that I am five years old, and have difficulty distinguishing between a hellish underworld (our first setting) and what seems like a Garden of Eden, or to be more accurate, a Grotto of Eden. (Why do I keep on thinking Ghetto, these dragons are many things, Gangsta is NOT one of them)

Do any of you know what it means for something to have "Gleamed in the colors of precious metals"? I don't think it's an explicit grammar violation (You should have an easy time locating the text I'm referencing in the excerpt) but it doesn't sound right.

Do any of you know what it means for movement to stir? (I'm detecting a pattern)

"metallic shells rupturing to allow scaly wyrmlings to emerge" Now here's the problem, eggs aren't metallic. They may have a metallic sheen, but to BE metallic would make hatching impossible, and we wouldn't have any characters, as they would have died. Also, the shells do not rupture under their own power, as the author seems to suggest, the hatchlings rupture them.

Next we get a description of these cute bundles of flaming joy (or in this case flaming, shocking, freezing and other such elemental joys) have an aura of peace sheltering them (at this point, I vomited on the keyboard, so do forgive me. This took several minutes to clean up, and delayed my lesson). The description surrounding isn't actually that problematic, yet. It's very romantic, which was the intention of the author. I had no problems with this.

"All were vigorus, active, and strong." This is all redundant, these words are very close synonyms, and when used together in this context, are nearly the same thing.

"Still there was never any question but that Darlantan and Aurican would vie for mastery within their nest." Now this is interesting. There is a non "Good v.s Evil" difference between Crematorium's upbringing and our goody four claw's, other than being ruled by an evil matriarch and all. Here we have some conflict, whereas Crematorium dominates everyone. Fairly soon, we see two distinct behavioral patters, although rather cliche, emerge. (THere is nothing wrong with cliche in and of itself, so long as you don't depend on it.) We have our strong skilled type, and our quick, clever type. These two, through their constant competition, developed games, and were the intrepid explorers of the nest.

I will take a moment to give my views on Cliche. The general trend in modern literature is to avoid any cliche like the plague. This is because they view cliche as a plague anyway. It is not merely an adjective that can be applied to an element of a story, but it is an infectious quality, it spreads and destroy's everything around it, eating away at the very fabric of not just the individual story, but the entire literary world. Quarantine is needed, vaccination must be mandatory, young authors must have protection against cliche, they cannot write without protection, the risk of cliche is too great.

However, I take a much more liberal view of cliche. Personally, I like stories of knights going off to slay the dragon (Which is so cliche it might actually be original now) I like the nostalgic affect of a well done cliche, the feeling of familiarity it brings to a story. Intrepid youngsters, specifically a competing pair of such individuals, is very common in stories. Yet I still enjoy it. And I am sure that a majority of the audience can too.

Now... back to the chapter. One problem this story has a priori is the fact that it covers VAST spans of time. Hundreds of years pass between chapters, sometimes thousands (When we get into generations shifts). This makes writing difficult. Epic time spans have to be done very well to work (much like playing the queen's pawn first in chess), it requires skill and experience to learn how to display such a vast change in time. However, when it is achieved, the result is very powerful (at least to me). The author has put himself in a corner here, the manner in which he writes makes it impossible for him to show the evidence of any meaningful passage of time (an isolated nest) and he has to resort to telling us, and telling us alone (which is the problem).

Also, other "personalities" begin to emerge. Smelt is said to be an inquisitive chatterbox, although this is told to us through the narrator (this is a character type I sympathize with for obvious reasons) and not shown or proven (the latter assuming he already told us) by any latter encounters. It is a fact mentioned, by the narrator, and then regurgitated by the characters. (The personalities are predictable by a chart such as this



Although the author fails to create highly expressive personalities, which is a problem. He bases characters on stereotypes (fine) but doesn't even develop the characters TO the stereotype, much less characterize beyond (which is optimal).

Actually, the author does some implied characterization with Darlantan and Aurican, so these character's aren't complete cutouts. Although they derive most persona from they're "subspecies".

Our two friends, Darl and Auri go into the darkness, dun dun dun.