Everyday, it is a constant struggle. We battle the thoughts in our mind. We wrestle with the decisions of life. Are we brave enough to face them alone? Within the confines of the Golden Oak Library, Twilight Sparkle encounters a similar situation. Without the use of her magic, she must fight an unknown source of power and find out his true identity.
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Oooooo, nice as always.
...Well it's not bad. Certainly it's superior to a lot of the grammatically-challenged, unoriginal messes I inevitably encounter.
However, I cannot say that it is the best that it could be. There are still flaws in it; flaws that are, unfortunately, difficult to address. At least with spelling and grammar the answer is cut and dry; here, things are more complex, so I may end up ranting at length in some detail. Bear with me, if you will.
First, though, I will congratulate you on what you have done very right. The actual content and themes of this one-shot certainly stand out from the crowd. There's a lot of love here, I can see that, and congratulations are due.
Now, with that said, I will move on to addressing what could be improved.
Now, this is about style, so a disclaimer: my word is not law on this topic. In fact, some of the things I will point out here are quite possibly things you've done intentionally. Even if they aren't, they may be part of your own personal style, and you have a right to that. None of it is technically wrong; I simply think it detracts from the piece and could be improved upon.
Mostly it comes down to word choice. I can see, while reading this, that you wrote this with one hand on a thesaurus and no hesitation to use it. And that's okay. However, I find that the frequent and unrestrained use of adjectives and qualifiers and such weighs down the text. The sentences become unwieldy and don't flow as nicely into one another. And in some cases, the wrong word was used when another was certainly intended ("Unphased" comes to mind).
The structure of the sentences was also, in my opinion, a bit clunky. They seemed very clipped and self-contained. This is a hard thing to explain, because It's mostly a "feeling" I get from the text. I'll put it this way: each phrase fits within a bigger structure; sentences should feel like they lead naturally from one to the other. Again, however, my word is not law; take my advice as you will.
These are areas I think you could improve in. Again, though, I can see that a lot of work and a lot of love went into this, and kudos are well-deserved in that respect. Keep writing; clearly it's something you enjoy a lot.
1304520 With this piece, I was experimenting with narration. I definitely wanted to try using new words and avoid repetition. Refrain from using the words 'was' for example. I do love telling stories and complex issues, but I've always had a hard time communicating them. It is like after every sentence I write, my brain needs a breather. I pay way too much attention to proper syntax and paragraph format.
But, in a sense, I don't like writing stories informally, especially when they are open in the public to share. Whenever I write blog posts or comments, I don't care about commas or feel as if I'm being graded. Yet, something distracts me from writing professionally. That 'breakage' in my sentence structure is where my brain runs, and I can't form the right words.
I haven't figured out a workaround. Just something I grew up with. Farewell Scroll was a piece I threw together in 30minutes, if you want to see something quick and dirty. I was being careful with this one.
About the repetition.
Don't worry so hard about it!
Trust me, I had the same problem (except I was too lazy to open a thesaurus). I had a problem with the word "said". I got tired of seeing it. I started trying my best not to use it.
The thing is, words like "said" and "was"...in general, they are invisible. You'd have to overuse them quite a bit to bring the problem to light. Read a book carefully sometime, and see how many times you actually notice such words.
So don't worry so hard about it, but don't do a "quick and dirty" job either. It's best to find a happy middle between the two. You'll figure it out eventually.
I am intrigued by this story, but at the same time confused, and usually that doesn't happen when I read stories that are 'like this one'. Was she dreaming, or was this all a very real confrontation in her library? If it was a dream, was she sort of fighting against Nightmare Moon, or was she facing her own negative side, coming to terms with her doubts and self-hatred?
That's mostly what I'm confused about.
Otherwise, I greatly enjoyed this, it's very well-written and properly detailed.
1354262 My intentions were to setup a realistic confrontation and slowly have it fade to a more surreal atmosphere. I wanted to generate a mystery to keep the reader interested until the breaking point at the very end. The story is a representation of Twilight's personality. She is the type of pony that would imagine worst-case scenarios so greatly that they play out as real as can be in her mind.
But yeah, she was facing her own fear in the form of a waking dream that kept her up all night.