https://www.fimfiction.net/story/466364/the-many-lives-of-a-dead-moth

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Starlight Glimmer is embroiled in troubles in her love life with Trixie, Sunburst, and Twilight Sparkle and she meets a pony who remembers nothing with a broken heart for a cutie mark... what does he mean for her and the people she knows?

Is he what he seems?

And why does everything keep going sideways?

Between your title, cover art, and this long description, it seems to me that this OC you've created is the main focus of the story. Yet you don't have it tagged with the "OC" tag.

mark... what

This isn't how ellipses work. An error like this in the long description doesn't bode well for the story inside.

Before even cracking open the first chapter you've already given me several misgivings. I would not normally read this. I'm going to read the first chapter, simply for the purposes of having some material to review, 'cause I feel like doing a random review and you asked.

Author's Note:

This is actually my first fic on Fimfiction, for a good fandom. Good lord. I have the worst sense of timing.

Never strike while the iron is hot, apparently.

On the one hand, thank you for not putting this warning/plea in your long description. Too many folks beg for an easier standard of quality/critique due to "first time" writing. While you didn't put this in the long description, you still placed it prominently at the start of the chapter (instead of at the end, which is a thing you can do). You're not telling me to be forgiving of your story, you're asking me to stop reading because what I'm about to read is bad. There are many tens of thousands of stories on this site alone that I could be reading instead of your story. I could be watching TV or playing video games or something. You want to not only make the best and most interesting story you can make to entertain your readers, you also want to assure them that you've done so.

Instead of expecting me to not like it, leave it up to me to decide it was bad by reading it, not because you feel like making excuses. If I don't like it, I'll downvote it. If I'm particularly generous, I'll explain to you why I didn't like it. You can learn from that feedback. On the other hand, if you did happen to write something entertaining, you can get yourself an upvote. And, if I'm particularly generous, I'll explain to you why I liked it. You can learn from that feedback.

See how this works? Don't poison the well. Don't drive me away from even reading it by begging for sympathy. Stand by your work, good or bad, and let your readers respond honestly and naturally.

On to the actual first chapter, finally.

Starlight Glimmer stopped dead in the middle of the cobbled pathway, staring in front of her blankly.

It looked like a dead pony had collapsed in front of her. His pale mint coat was matted and he was covered in blood. His chest rose and fell shallowly. She galloped over and bent down to inspect him. His eyes were wide and unseeing, gazing up ...

Well, at least you didn't start with a weather report.

... into a stormy purple sky.

As if on cue, thunder rolled and lightning flashed.

Rain began pouring down.

To be honest, I probably wouldn't have paid much attention to the cliche of opening with the weather if I wasn't expecting it as a typical new-writer thing. It isn't really a bad thing, just part of the stereotype. See what I mean by poisoning the well? I'm expecting typical newbie behavior and looking for it instead of enjoying your story.

Small nitpick: how does this person look like "a dead pony" if the rise and fall of his chest is visible from a distance before Starlight gallops up to him? Breathing is a pretty important thing that dead bodies don't do.

Little details like this don't matter a huge amount, hence why it's a nitpick. We get it that this injured pony/whatever is laying on the ground, in the rain, covered in blood. Whether or not Starlight suspects him to be dead isn't that important. But things like this do help to build up the kind of atmosphere you're going for in the scene. That moment of worry, "is that person alive or dead? Do they need help?" can add to the tension. Your overall plot won't suffer for this tiny error, but it can keep a reader from really getting into your scene and immersing.

“I’m alive?” he repeated. “My name is Alive? Who ARE you?”

This was a little bit funny/amusing.

“I’m Glimmer and no, your name isn’t alive, silly!”

She put the pony down. He stared in confusion at his body, at the bruises and the injuries.

I don't see why this is split into two paragraphs.

Also, this seems like a good opportunity to comment on your naming convention. Starlight Glimmer doesn't refer to herself as "Glimmer." Her friends don't either. If they do nickname her, it's usually "Starlight."

Her name isn't:
First name: Starlight
Last Name: Glimmer.

It's:
Name: Starlight Glimmer.

While some ponies (like the Pies, Cakes, and Apples) seem to follow a name+surname convention, not all ponies do. I realize it can be a bit confusing to understand things, but that's a thing to study up on. It's a somewhat nuanced topic, so I don't really hold it against you for not getting it as a new writer, but this is the kind of mistake that newbies often make.

When it comes to your narration, you should probably just use her full name each and every time you refer to her. You have several characters tagged as important to your story, so I anticipate you'll have scenes with multiple named ponies interacting. Don't use nicknames or shortcuts. Just use their names in your narration. The only time you'll use a shortened name or nickname is if a character is speaking and would call her that.

“My name is Alive? Who ARE you?”

...

“Oh, boy,” Glimmer said, swallowing and taken a deep breath. “Well, I don’t know. And we’re about to go see my gi- GOOD friend Trixie.”

Another rookie mistake. You only get one level of emphasis. You can italicize some text to indicate forceful speech. That's it. Don't bold text nor all-caps. I get it that you're trying to show lots of force in the words. Shouting and the like. This isn't how you indicate that. You don't get to rely on formatting to tell your story. You have to use your actual words.

“My name is Alive? Who are you?”
This indicates exactly what you're going for. When I read this, he's speaking relatively normally. Perhaps a bit weakly, considering the injuries you've told me about. A bit of emphasis on the word "are."

In contrast, you could do it this way:
“My name is Alive? Who are you?!”

Rather than trying to indicate an emphasis on one particular word, you're instead conveying exclamatory emphasis on his whole second sentence. This gives a more panicked sort of tone to his speech.

A third option would be to give him some narration along with his speech. Include some body language. You've set the perspective of this scene to Starlight Glimmer's point of view, so what does she see him doing alongside how he's speaking? How does she hear him?
“My name is Alive? Who are you?” His voice came out as a labored exhale unexpectedly sharp towards the end.

When you're playing around with emphasis like this, ask yourself what it is exactly you're trying to convey with that emphasis? If your response is, "I don't know I just know sometimes they do this kind of thing in movies/video games," then you're probably doing it wrong. If, instead, you're suggesting this amnesiac character is fairly accepting of being named "Alive" but is more concerned with who this unicorn lifting him in the air is, then perhaps some level of panic or fear while asking that second question is warranted. Trying to lay on MAXIMUM VOLUME on particular words doesn't actually convey that. You'll need to narrate how Starlight is interpreting his tone.

Things like emphasis and tone are complicated things that new writers often won't get. It's easy to do them wrong. You're falling into the trap many new writers do, as they see it a lot in other bad writers, of not using the correct tools (like italics or exclamations) for the job, or of trying to get super high levels of emphasis without thinking about what that actually means.

“Oh, boy,” Glimmer said, swallowing and taken a deep breath. “Well, I don’t know. And we’re about to go see my gi- GOOD friend Trixie.”

The other example in a short span of the scene is this one. I'm imagining Starlight almost said, "my girlfriend." She then stops herself and corrects to "good friend." I don't know why she'd not want to explain her relationship to this perfect stranger. While I ship the two, I am not really sold so far on your attempts to characterize Starlight Glimmer. Your use of all caps is again wrong, as described above. As Starlight is your POV character in the scene, you don't really have much room to narrate how Starlight heard what she said. Instead, you'd probably want to convey to us how Starlight feels about almost letting slip this apparent secret. Something like:

"... my gi-good friend Trixie." Starlight Glimmer studied his face for an awkward moment, then sighed in relief as he gave no indication of noticing her near-slipup.

This ends your first scene.

Setting aside the various errors I noticed, in summary, Starlight Glimmer finds an injured dude, checks to see if he's OK, and has a short conversation with him. As he doesn't know who he is, we know he's an amnesiac. We don't really need a lot of hints for this, as you explained to us there'd be a dude like this in your long description.

Not much at all happens in this scene. It's a fairly boring intro, all things said. We'll see what happens in the next scene.

Trixie squinted her eyes, walking around their new friend. He stood rooted to the spot like his hooves weighed a thousand pounds and he was afraid to lift them.

One of the things about starting up a new scene is that you're going to have to give us some info. Who's here, where are we, and so on. While you don't necessarily have to do all of this in the very first paragraph, keep in mind that your readers are going to be searching for these cues. Another thing to note is that you're allowed to switch POVs when you start a new scene. A lot of new writers do this a lot, often to the detriment of their story. When you start up your scene here with Trixie, I'm expecting this to mean you're shifting POV to her. I get the feeling from the later narration that this isn't the case and that instead, we're still in Starlight's POV.

Starlight retorted dryly. She brushed her violet mane with Trixie’s hairbrush.

As you eventually indicate that Starlight is the POV character still, it seems like it might have been best to indicate Starlight is brushing her mane as the first thing to happen in the new scene. It would clear things up quite a bit.

She was trying to ignore the feelings this was giving her. She had someone to take care of, after all!

Keep in mind that it isn't clear yet if Trixie or Starlight is the POV character. This line of narration could easily be attributed to either of them. Since, up to this point, I'm thinking Trixie is the POV, this has me leaning towards assuming Trixie is feeling this.

Tentatively, she tried using a mind-reading spell. Startled, she found that it reflected itself back at her and she was reading her own thoughts of how to use magic. She canceled the spell.

“Well, that’s weird,” she said outloud.

It's at this point that some dissonance is starting to build up. While Trixie is also a unicorn and a capable spellcaster in her own right, this kind of magic feels like something out of Starlight's spellbook. But, as I mentioned, I'm working under the impression that Trixie is the POV character. So I'm trying to square this depiction with Trixie.

Also, "out loud" is two words, not one.

“Well, that’s weird,” she said outloud.

“What is?” Trixie snapped.

It's only really at this point that that dissonance snaps. Your POV character is pretty firmly established as Starlight Glimmer now. Your narration is biased towards Starlight and your use of pronouns instead of her name are fine. Specifying that Trixie "snapped" that line of dialogue is fine as well. As I said above about your first line of text being Starlight brushing her mane, you'd get from the start to here without generating that dissonance.

“Oh, nothing. I’ll tell you later… when our guest isn’t here.”

That's not how ellipses work.

"Oh, nothing. I'll tell you later. When our guest isn't here." This reads just fine. If you want to really point out some kind of noticeable and meaningful pause there, do it like this. "Oh, nothing. I'll tell you later." She glanced meaningfully at him, then back to Trixie. "When our guest isn't here."

I don't care what badly-translated manga or video games have taught you, that isn't how you use ellipses. As with emphasis, you have to do the actual work and convey what meaning you're trying to communicate to your readers. You can't just slap some dots in there and call it good.

A short explanation followed.

Now, this is just plain lazy.

“An asshole and a bitch,” Trixie replied, without missing a beat.

Well, your story is earning that teen rating for language finally, I guess.

So, I'm not going to go through and pick out every error for you. You continue to do the above things several times over.

As for the scene. Starlight brought Cryptic to Trixie's wagon and gets him cleaned up. Some of their conversation is about him, trying to learn more about him. But since he's an amnesiac, you conveniently don't have to show us or tell us much of anything. Instead, they explain things to him and name him.

Another portion is about Sunburst and Twilight. You're presenting the romance problems that exist prior to the start of your story. Tentatively, this is fine.

This scene was much larger and longer than the first one. It was still pretty heavily focused on the dialogue with very little happening.

I'd like to point out a few things that happened but you didn't include in your story. Starlight, carrying Cryptic in her magic, runs to Trixie's wagon. She gets in, probably by shouting for Trixie to let her in or pounding on her door, or something. Trixie lets them in. Starlight (and Trixie maybe) perform some level of first aid to make sure this blood-covered dude isn't gonna just bleed out and die. Some kind of explanation from Starlight is given to Trixie.

I have to question why your story begins on the roadside instead of in Trixie's wagon. Why didn't you start with the pounding on the door shouting? Starlight could have explained how she found the dude to Trixie. You'd overall get the same explanation of the situation.

Another thing that happened is that Starlight was doing something before she encountered Cryptic on the road. Where was she going? Why was she out in the rain? While not important to the story you're trying to tell, keep in mind that in addition to the things you do tell us about, there are things going on between scenes, before your story begins, and after it ends. You have to keep in mind why you're starting your story at that particular moment. Why are you ending a scene where you end it, and why are you beginning the next where you begin it? Why are you not letting the camera record the stuff in between?

In general, scenes break up boring, unimportant stuff. Where was Starlight going in the rain? Not too important because whatever her plans were, they were dropped when she found a near-dead pony in the road. That's fine to omit. The initial, shocking introduction to Trixie seems like it would be at least as interesting as what we did get. So skipping that is less fine, to me. "Starlight ran through the rain to Trixie's wagon" is trivial enough to skip. "Starlight and Trixie administer first aid" seems less trivial.

I'm not really interested in reading more. As I said initially, this looks like a story I'd skip over and not bother to read. Your first chapter didn't really hook me and get me to want to keep reading. There is some stuff about how Trixie explained the Twilight and Sunburst stuff that could possibly serve to get some readers interested, but overall I'm just put off by all of the bad writing. I'd expect that whatever is in the next chapter probably belongs here in the first chapter anyway. Nothing really of importance happened. A chapter should at least convey some sense of story.

In your first chapter, you fail to introduce Cryptic to us. Maybe you managed to do something interesting with his amnesia later in the story, but I'm doubting it. You have a minimal, boring OC hanging out with two generally interesting mares. Where you should be presenting interesting things to draw me in, you instead have someone I don't know, don't care about injured and missing his memories. Neither of those makes me interested in him. What they tell me is that you plan to reveal the real character somewhere down the road when his amnesia eventually is cured/fixed. You're hoping that, by that point, I'm already invested in the story so that even if he's not that interesting of a character, I'll keep going anyway. How am I supposed to get that invested in your story to get to that point when you're doing so much to make sure I don't bother reading?

The thing that is most interesting in your story isn't Cryptic. Your story relies heavily on Starlight Glimmer and Trixie and their relationship to be interesting. That's what your story is about. Your long description should focus on that. Get people to come in for the StarTrix shipping. Do that well enough, and they won't mind the weird OC. Get them to stay and keep reading, then you can reveal whatever it is you're currently hiding behind his amnesia. Maybe it will be interesting when it happens.

What you did is try to sell us a story about some OC you came up with and tacked on some already popular characters for him to interact with. Then proceeded to not deliver on an interesting OC.

Figure out what the story you're trying to tell is, and focus on that. Sell that story. Grab people with that story. Skip past all the little literary tricks that you don't actually understand how to use yet.

Welcome to writing fanfic. It's harder than it looks. Hopefully, you're the sort of person to take in criticism and learn from it rather than get offended because you weren't showered with attention for doing a thing.

Between your title, cover art, and this long description, it seems to me that this OC you've created is the main focus of the story. Yet you don't have it tagged with the "OC" tag.

Yeah, you have 180 followers. I'm feeling intimidated already. This really is my first Fimfiction story, you know?

How do I tag it with the OC tag? And holy butternuts, you are very thorough. This is going to take me a bit to read all this. Wow.

Okay, a lot of these grievances are legitimate. I think I'll go through and fix them, but it'll take me a bit to make all the changes. Hell, I haven't even read the whole teardown yet, that's how thorough you were...

I'll just, uh, bookmark this into my Favourites toolbar and make the changes through-out the week. Ouch. Time to kill those darlings. My ego is definitely gone.

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How do I tag it with the OC tag?

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