So Awful You Keep Reading
Normally she could look on the bright side of the story, but this was just… bad.
Cheerilee slumped forward, hooves cramming into her cheeks, perplexed eyes staring into the middle distance. The pencil twirling aimlessly in her mouth escaped and clattered against the writing desk, where it rolled desperately to the edge of the cliff and leapt.
Bad. There really wasn’t any other way to describe it.
Oh, no, she knocked a forehoof to her head. Apparently, it was possible for writing to be so terrible it made her forget everything she knew about the art. There are many ways to describe this. An ignoble attack against somepony’s unsuspecting mind, for one.
She sighed. With weary determination, Ponyville’s greatest literary critic fetched her weapon off the floor.
The first paragraph to meet her eyes read, "It was a regular day in Ponyville. The sun was shining, and all the animals were happy. Ponies played games outside in the nice weather, smiling and laughing. Rainbow Dash napped on a cloud. Nopony had a care in Equestria because everything was so perfect."
Cheerilee stuck her tongue out, gagging the way her students did at the first sign of an overzealous romance. It wasn’t the subject matter that irritated her (tales about the Elements of Harmony had been in vogue ever since Nightmare Moon), but rather the completely irrelevant start to the story. She crossed it out effortlessly. It wasn’t as if the author needed a certain amount of words before the work of fiction saw daylight.
Not to mention that if it truly were a regular day in Ponyville, she would be able to hear a certain confectionery culinarian squealing as some monster rampaged through town. Also, the day would only be moderately sunny, unless something provoked Rainbow Dash to get her job done early. The schoolteacher sniffed.
Unacceptable writing awakened her over-analytical side, but she’d learned to use that fault to her advantage. Besides, when you spent most of your day with a herd of young, energetic ponies, it was necessary to have some way to unwind.
Her gaze slid over the page. "Twilight Sparkle walked down the path to the library, not paying attention to where she was going because she was so busy reading a book about making love potions. The purple unicorn looked up just in time to avoid running into Rarity. Rarity’s white fur was very beautiful, as always."
Cheerilee penciled a note in the margin about not being afraid to take risks with creative descriptions. The deeply colored eraser blended in with the mare’s coat as she pressed it to her mouth, thoughtful. No, I’ll leave that comment there and hope they consider it.
The next few paragraphs filling the first page were a hopeless pony train wreck of coincidental meetings, obvious foreshadowing, shallow and predictable behavior, and drab conversation. The dialogue spindled into thin, single lines across the next page. Dear Luna, what would it take to get some variety around this place!
Soon the generous pony’s scrawling script had etched the white space on the paper into oblivion. Prime among her suggestions was replacing all the foreshadowing (underlined) with something less obvious. Something that would introduce a seed of doubt in the reader. Imagine a normal conversation between Twilight and her friends, but instead of, "Rarity was acting strange," the problem was only stated briefly, and then left alone: "Rarity’s eyes glinted green."
That’d make them wonder.
Cheerilee stretched, getting into the spirit of things. There was something almost carnal about critiquing a stranger’s work. She grinned, feeling the stress of the day pour into unbidden words.
The pencil flew over the page, no longer handled in her hoof but in her mouth. The plot wasn’t intriguing; it had no sense of mystery. The title revealed right away what was going to happen. What if you added this here and moved this other section here? What if your characters had unexpected depth? Even better – how about smashing the defenseless reader’s expectations into tiny grains of sugar with a new angle on the character? Yes, of course Twilight loves books, but what if there was one book she wouldn’t touch? What if Pinkie Pie didn’t suggest a party for every single inconsequential event? What if Rainbow Dash wasn’t a shallow pony who cared only about going fast and hooking up, but a pegasus with real complexity?
A single laugh snuck its way into the unwritten present. I suppose I have the edge here because I actually know them, so I’m aware they are more than the stereotypes say.
The graphite on Cheerilee’s pencil wore down, grating at the unshaved wood. The challenge, she wrote, was to add these things without sacrificing the true personality of the character. If you wanted to make a good story, you wrote in character. If you wanted to make it great, you built character.
“Ha!” she shouted at nopony, leaping to her feet, spitting the pencil into her hoof, and driving its angry remains across a tangential chunk of text.
She sat down vindictively and twisted the pencil in a sharpener. What’s next?
“Mmm. Ah! AH!” Rarity moaned as Twilight
The pencil tried to commit suicide again, but this time Cheerilee’s hoof was waiting before it could reach the floor. She caught it expertly. Once, she was hit in the head with a chalky eraser. It never happened again, and it wasn’t because the students stopped throwing them.
Her wandering mind returned to the task at hoof: evaluating the steamy but unemotionally attached relationship between Twilight and nearly every pony in the ‘ville. Cheerilee allowed herself a smirk at the horrible pun that came to mind involving the word “horn”. In truth, she felt a little bit of a stabbing pain every time she read this sort of story because she knew the librarian quite well. It was hard to fathom her wonderful friend was the type to sleep with so many ponies so recklessly, especially because the only thing Twilight was likely to sleep with was books – whether in bed or falling flat-faced into the open pages from staying up all night. That unicorn did love research.
Cheerilee’s eyes peeled through the layers of hot and heavy text. Were the Elements even aware these kinds of stories existed? Cheerilee deeply hoped for the quiet yellow pegasus’ sake they were not.
When she got down to the real point of the story, it was more or less the increasingly dripping, juicy displays here. There had been no real buildup to the first instance of senseless passion. Sarcastically she thought, Yes, because sudden, forced romance is the most wonderful form of love.
Sometimes it was difficult to put aside personal peeves when editing. She did it anyway, and recommended to the author that if they were interested in pure clop, they should consider submitting the story to a different magazine. She suggested a few. Otherwise, they should figure out how to build real attachment between the characters or an interesting back story that led them to have a fling.
Honestly, if you took an actual pony’s life and cut out all of the, well, life and left nothing but a certain sort of intercourse, no matter how descriptive it was, scene after scene of that was… boring. It was boring. She thought so. Maybe not everypony else was of the same mind.
Having vented all of her vitriolic frustrations out on paper, Cheerilee gave a deep, satisfied sigh. She left her writing desk and found a cozier spot to read something with more substance.
~~~
Twilight stared at the few sheets of paper covered in pencil. “Trefiori? You’re telling me you got THE Trefiori to read this?” The papers shuffled, suspended in front of Twilight’s face. “But it’s just so,” she searched for a word, “awful.”
There was a moment of silence before the expected happened. “Ohmygosh I did what? Rainbow Dash, that’s disgusting! How did you even – oh, gross! Oh, this is so so so so wrong.” Twilight’s face looked like she’d just eaten a baked bad. She stopped reading and shoved the papers at Rainbow Dash, who was on the floor howling with laughter. “I’m never letting you borrow anything from the romance section ever again.”
“Isn’t it the greatest prank ever? Trefiori probably had the biggest headache after reading that.”
“Why did you have to write about me? Why couldn’t you pick on someone like, I dunno, Soarin’ or Spitfire or something.”
“Well I was going to write about Fluttershy, but I didn’t want to hurt her. Whoever said that thing about sticks and stones was an idiot.”
Twilight did the ‘I have exasperating friends’ sigh. “Well, I hope you learned a valuable lesson from this.”
“Nope. Betcha if I read all these comments I would, though. You sure you don’t want them?”
“Yes, I’m sure."
