To the Ones Who Dream by Mikleo
Alternate Universe Drama Slice of Life
9,908 words total

Technical: 8/20 - The technical aspects — spelling, grammar, punctuation, consistency, tags.

For starters, the tags make me a bit apprehensive about the quality of the story. Although only three, which is unusually small given the tag cancer that infests the site, two of them are contradictory. A story is either a drama or slice of life, it can't really be both; especially not a one-shot like this. In this case, it's clearly a drama, not slice of life.

My first observation is that this story suffers from a problem which is all too common to stories here, excessive paragraphs. Some consisting of only a single short sentence, with no change to speaker, perspective, or thought. It breaks the story up, making it more difficult to read, and impacts pacing. And it's not just the paragraphs that are too short, sentences are also consistently too short, given the story a choppy feel, and further impacting the flow. Many of these could be combined into longer, more complex sentences that would not only flow better, but convey images and feelings more clearly and coherently.

Spelling is good overall, no issues noted there. Unfortunately, there are quite a number of grammatical errors and strange or wrong word choices. Example:

Rainbow Dash stumbled her way straight into my face, knocking me over into the ground.

That doesn't quite work, as the action doesn't entirely fit the object receiving it.
Another example:

Maybe it was the fact leaving my house didn’t mean bombardment by nosy ponies who wanted to invade both me and Celestia’s personal lives.

There are several errors in this sentence alone. "Bombardment" doesn't work here, and the correct construction for the latter part should be "Celestia's and my personal lives". The errors aren't egregious, most of them are minor to moderate; but the rate of errors is fairly frequent and consistent throughout the story. There is no editor credited, and the story could have used one. The author also needs to learn the difference between "your" and "you're".

Capitalization is also inconsistently used, and incorrect in places.

Tense shifts oddly from past to present a few times as well.

Punctuation is good overall, but there are a few bad spots, and it's not as consistent as it should be, with a hooffull of mis-used marks scattered throughout. Such as this example:

“Oh, Twilight-” she yawned - “why're you out so early?”

This is not how dashes work. Commas are correct here, dashes are not.

The biggest problem starts to occur about a third of the way through the story. The narrative shifts back and forth between Twilight and Princess Luna; and is handled in a particularly clumsy way. The shift is indicated not by a chapter or page break, but by a double-dash and an announcement of the name of the character whose perspective the story is changing to. This not only breaks up the flow and pacing of the story, but is also immersion-breaking and confusing. The entire story is written in first-person perspective, and shifting that perspective to a different character is a very tricky device to handle without either of the two noted flaws occurring. The best way to handle it is to use a chapter break where the new character perspective can be introduced. Unfortunately, here the changes happen too fast for that. A third-person perspective is preferable for these sorts of stories, in short first-person stories it is best to stick with a single perspective. Particularly in this case where Luna's perspective is entirely superfluous. This problem is made worse by the double-dash being used for time skips as well as perspective changes. Time skips are, again, best relegated to chapter breaks. If they need to be in the same chapter, that's what the "horizontal rule" bbcode is for.

Canon Characterization: 12/20 - Handling of canon main and secondary characters, and alternate character interpretations.

The story has the AU tag, so some deviation from the canon characterization is expected. The problem is, it's not enough to justify the tag, but too much that the characters feel wrong. Mostly, however, the characters are fairly flat, and characterization clumsy and inconsistent. Their dialog is also prone to strange pauses and shifts that really don't make sense. There's nothing overtly OOC, however, so it's not as bad as I'm use to seeing for AU stories. In short, characterization isn't bad per se, there simply isn't anywhere near enough of it, nor is it consistent enough, to really call it characterization.

World: 10/20 - Handling of show canon or alternate universe worldbuilding.

The entire story seems to be focused on Twilight becoming an "esper", which is never adequately defined. According to Luna in the story, her magic has "transformed" through the Elements of Harmony, into "esper" powers. In the real world, "esper" is jargon for someone who ostensibly has "extrasensory perception", that is, they are able to sense things beyond the realm of normal human senses. Having Twilight's magic somehow change into this makes no sense, and the portrayal in the story makes even less, since it's just shown to function as another sort of magic, which doesn't match the terminology used. This seems to be the source of the AU justification for this story. In this case, the AU is appropriately used, but that doesn't really make the rest of it any better.

And for some utterly bizarre reason that makes no sense I've been able to puzzle out, Twilight's magic focus shifted from her horn to her hooves.

Even weirder, apparently the Elements of Harmony are "charged" by absorbing bits of a person's or animal's soul (not explicitly called that, but that's what it amounts to) when they die, which the characters refer to as "ghosts". The Elements are powered by ghosts. And the ghosts can be harmful if they escape, so Twilight needs to be exorcised. Sure, why not.

Story: 5/20 - Concept, coherence, internal consistency, story structure, pacing, flow.

As noted earlier, the flow is badly broken up by excessive paragraphs and choppy sentence construction. Overall, the pacing of the narrative isn't bad, it's deliberate but not slow; however it is inconsistent, with a tendency to drag at times, mainly during Twilight's internal monologues and Luna's expository conversations.

The biggest problem is that the story is simply too short for what it is trying to do. At less than 10k words, it simply doesn't have enough time to develop the alternative world, or explain things that are non-canon and introduced for the purposes of this story. The author seems to take for granted that the reader will just understand and accept the concepts, without giving a reasonable explanation of what they are or why they exist in the form they do. Made worse by the fact that the terminology is linked to real-world jargon which carries dramatically different meanings.

A large part of the problem is that there is very little development of the powers or other qualities of the world through interaction with the characters. Twilight does interact with them to a small degree; but the overwhelming majority of what little is known about them is provided in exposition dumps from Princess Luna. And when she does interact with them, she masters them far too quickly, given Luna's explanation that they're completely different from ordinary pony magic.

And then, out of nowhere, Twilight and Luna end up in bed together, or rather, curled up together on the floor, which Twilight freaks out about. Okay, sure, nothing else has made sense so far, no reason why this should either.

And all throughout the story, Twilight keeps going off on weird internal monologues wondering if she's being a friend, and what kind of pony she is, a good one or bad one, and her confusion about the nature of friendship. It felt like there were two entirely unrelated stories mashed up here, neither of which were developed enough to make the slightest bit of sense.

And the, at the end, Twilight's nightmares, which she's been dealing with the entire story, are offhandedly banished without any kind of real resolution. In fact, absolutely nothing in this story is resolved. It doesn't feel like the author tried to leave the story with an ambiguous ending, but like the author simply couldn't think of one, or just gave up on writing it without caring about the ending.

Total Score: 35/80 for a score of 44%

Conclusion - Final thoughts and recommendations.

This story is simply too incoherent, lacks any real character or world development (critical for an Alternative Universe story), and is generally inconsistent. Too many different concepts are introduced without adequate explanation or development. The story suffers from excessive exposition and monologue-ing; unnecessary, confusing, and immersion-breaking perspective shifts; and effectively random events and scenes. The ending felt badly rushed, lacking either a clear resolution, or thought-provoking ambiguity. All of that exacerbated by a large number of bad word choices, clumsy and bad grammar, and punctuation and capitalization errors.

The concept could have been workable had the author spent the time and effort needed to develop it, which would have required at least two more chapters of similar length, and a lot more attention paid to explaining the world through the characters rather than through info-dumps (show, don't tell). Not to mention needing a competent editor or three. In the end, nothing made me care the slightest about Twilight's dilemma, and when the story stopped, there was no feeling that anything noteworthy had been said or done.

5847139 I know the difference between 'your' and 'you're', but I'll mix them up from time to time and won't notice them. I try to search for an editor but I can never seem to find one so I've given up for the time being. I know this idea was lacking in a lot of ways, and I'm happy you reviewed it so I can improve with my next story. Thank you!

5847159 have you tried The Proofreader Group? They're pretty good, I like their Gdoc list.

5847385 The editors I contacted all had something preventing them from editing my story. I could try there again.

5847600
You could also try Overly Extensive Editors; although my experiences with them are mixed at best. Struggling Writers may also be a good resource.

The problem I've found with editors is that too many who offer their services do so as an ego trip, and most of the rest simply don't have a particularly good grasp of the language themselves. Good editors are harder to find than good writers. Proofreaders are a little easier to find, but again, finding someone with a strong grasp of the language can be difficult.

You're better off finding someone whose writing, either stories or blogs, show a strong grasp of language, and ask them for help. Likewise hanging around some of the better review groups for a while to get the feel of the various contributors, then asking some of them directly for help.

It's also a good idea to get multiple inputs, the more the better, really.