Scootaloo has been without a place to call home for a long time, and up until now, she's been relatively fine. But the winter is only getting colder, and her Crusader's cape isn't doing much to keep her warm at night in the unheated clubhouse, and she just hopes for a better life maybe, with a certain filly with a pastel pink and violet mane, but right now she just wants a home..
Edited by Sleepy Panda
Proofread by Rainbow FlutterDash and Sky Melody
Thanks to Sollace for help with the title and temporary cover art
Chapters (1)
Try to use the word "while" more often instead of "whilst". Story has much potential and will be watching for future updates.
Might one say that the night was... dark and stormy?
Since I know that this is your first foray into more serious stories, I'll try to go easy on you.
The first thing that sticks out to me is the lack of characterization displayed so far. This is a complaint that I often have about stories from newer authors, and it pretty much boils down to this: if you take a bit of dialogue from the story, out of context, would it be possible for someone to guess who said it? In other words, I'm saying that all the dialogue in this story feels exactly the same, instead of feeling like each character's dialogue belongs to them, and them alone.
This lack of characterization stretches a bit deeper when we consider the actions of our characters. So far, we know that Scootaloo is homeless, polite, and she spent the night at Vinyl's house. As for Vinyl, we know that she'll take in a filly with few questions, she's polite, and she has a marefriend. There's not much I can say about either of their characters at this point, which is a bad thing for me. Normally I'd stop reading a story here, because I like reading about strong characters. A story is (typically) about what happens to or is done by the characters, but the thing that makes me care about the story is how the characters feel about what's happening. If the characters don't feel like living, breathing people (ponies), then it's much harder to empathize with them. It is only the first chapter, so there's still tons of time to give these ponies character, but I think that as an introduction to the story, there's not much to grab a reader's attention. And I'm saying that as someone who loves Scootadoption stories.
Now that we've talked about one of my more common complaints, let's talk about one that I've never come across before: point of view. This story is written in a style that I've never encountered before, what I might call first-person extra-limited. Although your story is ostensibly written in first person, not once do we get to see what's going on in Scootaloo's mind. Being able to immediately comprehend what's happening in the protagonist's mind is one of the purposes behind the first-person limited point of view, so by not using that, you've basically written your story in third-person objective point of view. This is the most limited point of view there is for a story, forcing a reader to interpret what a character is feeling or thinking entirely from their actions or speech. Now, I'm not sure if the objective POV must necessarily be third-person, but I can't find any mention of a first-person objective POV being a thing in the searches I've done, so at the very least, you've chosen an extremely rare point of view.
To see what I mean by all this, let's look at this line:
First, let's add the missing comma after "I said." Now, let's change "I" to "Scootaloo" and the "me" to "her," to see how this looks in third-person objective:
This reads exactly the same as what you wrote. Every case of "I said" or "I did" in this story could easily be replaced with "she said" or "she did," meaning that other than the pronouns, it really was written in the (third-person) objective POV. That might be okay, but as a warning, because you don't have access to the thoughts of any characters with this POV, it's much harder to make a reader understand what a character is thinking or feeling. Instead, let's see what could have been written if this chapter were to take full advantage of the first-person POV:
Because dialogue doesn't appear to be one of your strengths as a writer, I'd write the future chapters in this way, taking full advantage of the window into Scootaloo's mind that the first-person perspective gives. If you continue writing the story the way you have for this chapter, you'll need to communicate every character's feelings simply by what they do and say. This isn't an easy task to do well, so by embracing the first person perspective, you can at least tell the reader directly how Scootaloo is feeling, or how she's thinking.
That was a longer bit of critique than I thought it would be! I hope you find it useful. Just by writing it I learnt more about the role of the point of view than I knew before! Now, normally I'd give this a thumbs-down and then continue on my way, but I'd like to see what you can do to improve it. So, I'll be sticking around for awhile. Cheers!
Your story is off to a good start. But, you have a minor punctuation error in this sentence:
Please put a comma after said. Are you going to keep forgetting how to punctuate sentences? Sorry if I'm being harsh, but, please be mindful of this sentence too:
Please put a comma after caringly, to me, it makes the sentence flow a little better. You should put a comma after caringly because the next thing your explaining is not related to what Scootaloo is saying in the dialogue. Please be wise on where you put your commas in a sentence
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Wither. Don't you mean shoulder?
This sentence is very run on. Try saying it like this:
" I was beginning to think that I would just have to rough it out for another night, when a door opened".
But after all, this new story is pretty good. Keep going!
8185092
I shall try to improve it all for future chapters.
8185612
8185502 Thanks for all the constructive criticism. It helps a lot
Yaaaay!
So far, it's looking good. I'd not have chosen a first-person perspective, but that's up to you and what you intend to do with it.
Intriguing.
Uphoofed.
Well it's a start so I can't say much. Have yet to see the crazy adventures Scoots and Vinyl will have at the expense of poor Octavia. The possibilities are endless.
I believe NikkitaKitten has already mentioned any complaints I have so I'll not repeat.
8185612 Just on the wither bit.
Nice!
This reminds me of my first ever fanfiction, with all of it's pitfalls. What you have here is a thousand words of talking heads desperately trying to eke out every drop of sadness it can, like it's starved for emotion or something. Problem is, you're tapping a dry well. This does nothing to set itself apart from any of the other "scootaloo is an orphan and lives alone and cold in the treehouse" stories out there, in fact it actually settles into pretty much every cliche. And the very bland way that Vinyl just helps her out and the day is saved makes for a very uninviting story. Here, I'll wrap it up in a few words.
One day scootaloo was cold.
Then Vinyl Scratch gave her a blanket.
The end.
Obviously not the end, ere your [incomplete] tag, but it garners little interest to continue.
I hate to be harsh to what is clearly a fledgeling fic, but it reminds me of where I was, so I know you can come very far if you try. Work on it.
Its feels too convenient.
I support this story and look forward to its continuation...
So Vinyl and Tavi are faggots?
9232242
Same