A chance encounter with the regal princesses gives Sweetie Belle the opportunity of a lifetime. To be a princess, even if only for a day. What does she want to do? Maybe rule Ponyville, or enjoy a fancy dinner with important ponies. Nope, all she wants to do is help her friends and herself get the one thing they most covet, a cutie mark! Of course, just because your a princess doesn't mean your unstoppable, or know how to fly right away.
I'd like to thank and credit rainbowdash1 for both the idea and helping me on the writing process.
Chapters (1)
I've been taking some time to read some CMC stories because I'm currently writing one of my own.
As a typical Cinderella story, there wasn't really anything that can surprise or offend. The narrative is largely delivered through exposition, which in and of itself is not bad, but it lacks a certain level of 'show don't tell, and requires a mastery of the rules of dialogue not delivered upon here. Most of the failings in that arena are something that can be easily fixed by an editor, but in the year this story has been posted, no such effort seems to have been applied.
I don't consider the technical writing to be the greatest problem this story has, but rather the talking head syndrome it quickly delves into. Through long stretches of conversation there are even points where no effort is put into distinguishing who is speaking what line.
One of the most important things to remember when crafting any dialogue is that what we say is only about 10% of communication. In reality, when we think, speak, and enact dialogue we do so with emotive indicators that were completely stripped from the dialogue of this story. Our tone of voice, the body language, and other indicators of a pony's character. Indicators that were were conspicuously missing from this story.
The lack of emotive dialogue is a criminal lack of expressiveness of the characters, and a failure of character development by creating flat, emotionless caricatures of the characters.
Now, I didn't down vote this story because these things are all easy to fix, and that would be unfair if you took the time to fix them. However, without them, the story doesn't warrant an up vote either.
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I'm really glad that you commented, because well no one else has. I also do really appreciate the feedback, not only does it give me insight on this story, but looking at my other works it shows my major weaknesses as a writer as well. To be one hundred percent honest I'm almost completely certain that I won't make any changes to this story due to long ago I wrote it and that I'm going to put my previously works behind to focus this summer on new stories and improving my writing.
If you decide to downvote the story because I'm most likely not going to fix it, I'd say that would be perfectly fair. I will be looking at your advice carefully though to work on myself and avoid falling into what holds back my writing.