Star and my pony stepped into the castle. Star took the last slurp of her cup of coffee (wich we stopped and got from starebucks on the way, LOL) and threw it into a nearby trash can. A unicorn mare in the poofey tie thing the Mayor Mare wears trotted over.
"Can I help you?" She asked.
"Yeah, I'm new in Equestria and I came to get my pony name," I replied.
"Then you'll want to speak to the princess," She said. "The throne room is down the hall, to the left, and through the hall of memories." She pointed down a hall.
"Thanks." I nodded as we walked down the hall she pointed out. I dragged my pony's hoof up and did a little wave. It didn't follow the exact pattern my finger drew, but it still looked pretty real, for its scenario. I mean, what cartoon looked real?
... I feel like I'm going to eat those words...
"I love the hall of memories!" Star exclaimed. "It's so pretty, all the stained glass windows, I love them, and I hope to have one of me someday." I then put the pieces together.
"Oh! The hall of memories is that hall of windows! Yeah, I've seen it." I said. Star gave me a funny look.
"You said that you were new, how have you seen the hall of memories?" She asked. Crap, I thought my pony wouldn't say anything!
"I... had a vision." I wasn't technically lying, because visions don't necessarily have to do with the future, and watching the show is technically a vision, at least by this world's standards. Wait, maybe I can work with this! "It's actually why I came to Equestria in the first place," I explained. OK, this defiantly isn't lying, because now I'm role playing... also the only reason I picked up this game was because it had the My Little Pony logo on it.
"REALLY?!?" Star exclaimed, her pupils becoming Stars themselves. OK, the person on the other end of that pony is reeeeeaaaly good at RP... of course, that could just be the pony pad. "Visions are suuuuper rare! Only the most powerful of unicorns can have them! You didn't tell me you were powerful! You should apply to Celestia's School for gifted youngsters- I mean unicorns!" Star began to ramble. Me and my pony smiled and we both rolled our eyes. Star tended to ramble, but it was kinda cute. She talked for about 2 minutes straight, (we walked slowly) with me making the occasional comment before she realized what she was doing. "Aaaand I'm rambling again aren't I?" She asked sheepishly, blushing.
"It's fine, I need all the help I can get! I know almost nothing about Equestria, plus it's kinda cute." I said.
"Wait- what?" She asked flatly staring at me. Crap didn't mean to say that last part out loud, I have a poor internal monologue.
"Hey look! The hall of memories!" I diverted. Star rolled her eyes. Oh, thank Celestia she... Man am I getting into this Role Playing thing. We walked into the hall of memories, and (as I guessed) it was that hall of stained glass windows. I paced through the hall, I'd seen it already. But it was A lot cooler to be "inside" it. I stifled a laugh as Star "oohed" and "aaaahhhed" at the stained glass windows. I stopped at the door at the end of the hall.
"You coming?" I asked because she had stopped to look through one of the blank windows. She turned to me,
"Nah. This is a kind of personal thing, I'll let you do it alone." Star yawned. Her eyes looked slightly glossy, and I could tell she was tired as hay!
"OK, just don't fall asleep." I joked. I dragged my pony's hoof up to the door and knocked on the sun picture on the door. It opened, and I dragged my pony inside. Sitting on the throne, was Celestia.
"Hello, Princess! Nice to finally meet in the flesh." I bowed my pony. Huh, I was sure that the pony pad would censor that.
"I agree," She replied. "It is nice to finally meet. If I am correct, then I believe your OC is named... 'Dark Mane'?" Celestia asked.
"Yes... how did you know that?" I asked.
"Simple really, I've done harder. I hacked your google drive password and found the picture on your drive. I chose this character because you can't choose alicorn. It would satisfy some people's values, but the people it would not greatly out-weigh the number of those it would. But I also remember you saying something about... wanting to change its name?"
"Yeah, but you know that from monitoring the chat rooms... am I right?" I asked, leaning back in my chair, folding my arms.
"You are correct," She replied. Something was strange about the way she spoke, it was motherly (as to be expected from Celestia) but also soothing and calming. It was strange, I... trusted her. Every word she said, and (not only had we just met) but she may not even be real. "How about the name... Night Light." Celestia said.
"Night Light..." I said, bobbing my head. "I like it."
"I believe, that Star lives on the outskirts of Ponyville. Would you like to live there?" Celestia asked.
"Oh more than you know," I replied, smiling.
"So it's settled then," Celestia smiled. "You will go to live in Ponyville. Here is a train ticket." Celestia said, levitating me a golden ticket.
"Thank you." I said to Celestia, bowing my pony Night Light again.
"Farewell, and best of luck," Celestia said not raising excitement, but I knew it was there. I turned to the the door, and exited the room.
Would a critique of this story be welcome? I'd be willing to offer some pointers but I realize most folks don't appreciate unsolicited advice so I felt it prudent to ask first.
So my final advice, while harsh, I think will improve the story overall. The best course of action, in my opinion, is scrapping the story and restarting from scratch. We're over three thousand words in, and basically nothing has happened that I haven't seen before. How about a story of someone who decides to do a Let's Play after his first few days in Equestria? The only important developments that have happened so far is the introduction of Star, Night Light's name, and Night Light's home location. All of which could be easily put into the first chapter of a new story idea. All of what you've just written can be canon to the fic, it should just happen before the story begins. The stuff you've written is not a waste. However, the story would be much stronger if all of this stuff was simply in the background, to be drawn up if and when you require it. We don't need to see it.
The problem is, we don't really have a reason to care about your protagonist yet. He's shown almost no personality traits at all. He's a brony and a gamer; those traits are so broad in this subculture that they essentially mean nothing. Either your character genuinely HAS no interesting personality traits, or your narrative has given him no chance to reveal what's interesting about him. In either case, the story needs a major overhaul.
Spelling and grammar is a mere trifle compared to this, though you'll want to fix that as well. I'd be happy to act as a beta reader if you decide to redo the story. As it is, I'm afraid that I simply have no reason to want to continue reading. If the story doesn't interest me in the first 3,000 words, the odds of it doing so in the next 3, 30, or 300,000 aren't good. Hence, if you do have an interesting story to tell, show us! Show us as early and as powerfully as possible why we should keep reading. Ideally, from the very first sentence. If you open up a published fiction book and look at the first sentence, better than even odds it's one that's designed to immediately hook you in. Try this with a few books you own. "It gets better later" is not going to convince people to read it. You have to show at least some of your best stuff first, and since the current story structure can't do this, you need a structure that can.
If you do decide to do this, please let me know; we could use more good Optimalverse material, but this needs some serious planning to meet the requirements.
6496253
Have you tried grammarly? it sucks.
6496964
Yes, yes it would. Very much actually!
One of the best pieces of writing advice I ever received was that the first paragraph of a story is by far the most important thing to get right in a story. The vast majority of people will reject a story entirely based on the impression they get in the first paragraph and people can become hooked too a story within the very first sentence if the author is really good.
A good way to practice this is to always try and start with a quotation mark, so that right off the bat you are immersing the reader in a conversation that is under way, hopefully an interesting one.
Opening with dialogue also helps you to avoid a common pitfall where in you bore the reader with setting description.
I proceeded to the counter to purchase the new game. Some guy and his kid were in front of me. They were buying a 3DS and a copy of "Luigi's Mansion, Dark Moon." I had played... I dont caaarre, nobody cares about what the people ahead of you in the checkout line are buying
Part of the appeal of fiction is that it can be dramatically more exciting than our real lives, noone needs to be reminded of the experience of buying a game at a game shop the vast majority of your readers will likely have done it themselves and would be bored while doing it in real life. If something is boring in real life its more than twice as boring to read about.
So lets take the qoutation mark advice and look at what the earliest piece of interesting dialogue is in your story.
"Let me guess, it's for you sister?" Now that's interesting because I can immediately picture it as being the lead in to some very basic character conflict where in we would get to see how the main character of this story reacts to derision and jeering right at the start of the story, making us sympathize for them and giving us insight into our heroes social skills and level of confidence.
Or... we could have there be no adversity, no reply to this statement and only learn our main characters name through his internal monologue. In which case all I can really say about this opening scene is that someone went too a gameshop and purchased a game without any problems. Our main character could literally be almost anyone at this point.
If you want to write a story about a character you need to start by getting us to feel some kind of emotion towards that character, preferably an emotion besides boredom. However you do not necessarily need to write about a character, you could instead have chosen to write about the game itself and what about it would interest you, in which case you should have tried to describe the game as though describing it to someone who has never heard of equestria, rainbow dash or bronies.
Erf, this is turning out a lot longer than I wanted. Okay lets rapid fire through some other pointers, really the beggining is the most important part because thinking about that will help you think about why readers are supposed to be interested in reading your story.
Next thing I would recommend would be spelling and grammar. Read back over what you have written and say it out loud, if it sounds clunky and unnatural when you say it it will seem off to your reader when they read it.
Paragraph breaks...
"Maybe those AI rumors aren't compleat crap." I said to myself, as I tapped on the "OK" button on the character creator. But something about the ponies face seemed... familiar. More than just the "my OC" part, no... it was something else. The screen immediately cut to a scene of my pony walking down a road, saddle bags on it's back. Then my pony stopped moving, queuing me to take control. "Alrighty then! Let's get going!" I said. My pony's mouth moved, but I wasn't sure what he said. It was a bright sunny day, with flowery fields surrounding me. I smiled, and my pony smiled too, looking around. "They put a lot of effort into this game! It looks like the freaking show!" My pony mouthed as I spoke. "Wait, is it? Nooo... but it is! My pony's mouthing what I'm saying! That is cool." I said. I also noticed that My voice sounded different, "And are the speakers... canceling what I'm saying? OH, THAT IS COOL!!!" I could barely hear myself talking! Ohhhhh that is COOL!!! Sorry, I just love admiring technology. It's just amazing!!! Alright, enough admiring this game, time to get to work... playing this game. I slowly tapped and dragged my pony a little from where it was standing, and my pony tentatively took a step. I dragged again, and my pony began to walk. And thus, my adventure for... I froze when I realized I had no idea where I was going or why I was going. That is a big no-no for a game that relies on emersion. I tapped a saddle bag, and it was levitated open. I waited a moment for an inventory GUI, but nothing appeared. So, I tried zooming in on the bag. The inside was visible. Inside, I saw a quill, a bottle of ink, some rolls of paper, and a leather bound book. I tapped on the book, and it opened. It was a journal, my journal. It said:
Sweet Celestia on a diet that is LONG.
Remember the advice to speak what you are writing out loud? Well a paragraph should hopefully never take so long to read out loud that you need to pause for breath before you are halfway through it. Lets butcher this thing down into pieces that are more bite sized:
"Maybe those AI rumors aren't compleat crap." I said to myself, as I tapped on the "OK" button on the character creator. But something about the ponies face seemed... familiar. More than just the "my OC" part, no... it was something else. The screen immediately cut to a scene of my pony walking down a road, saddle bags on it's back. Then my pony stopped moving, queuing me to take control. "Alrighty then! Let's get going!" I said. My pony's mouth moved, but I wasn't sure what he said.
It was a bright sunny day, with flowery fields surrounding me. I smiled, and my pony smiled too, looking around. "They put a lot of effort into this game! It looks like the freaking show!" My pony mouthed as I spoke. "Wait, is it? Nooo... but it is! My pony's mouthing what I'm saying! That is cool." I said. I also noticed that My voice sounded different, "And are the speakers... canceling what I'm saying? OH, THAT IS COOL!!!" I could barely hear myself talking! Ohhhhh that is COOL!!! Sorry, I just love admiring technology. It's just amazing!!! Alright, enough admiring this game, time to get to work... playing this game.
I slowly tapped and dragged my pony a little from where it was standing, and my pony tentatively took a step. I dragged again, and my pony began to walk. And thus, my adventure for... I froze when I realized I had no idea where I was going or why I was going. That is a big no-no for a game that relies on emersion. I tapped a saddle bag, and it was levitated open. I waited a moment for an inventory GUI, but nothing appeared. So, I tried zooming in on the bag. The inside was visible. Inside, I saw a quill, a bottle of ink, some rolls of paper, and a leather bound book. I tapped on the book, and it opened. It was a journal, my journal. It said:
There is a LOT more that I could have cut out of all of those paragraphs but I didn't cut a single word out of them. Just by breaking that monster paragraph into three smaller ones you can see that how much easier it is on the eyes than a monster sized wall of text that makes the readers eyes glaze.
The reason you break things down into small paragraphs is so that if a person has to look away from the screen for a moment they can easily find where they left off at instead of staring at a massive blob of words with no easy visual reference points.
And because this is getting on longer than I would like I'll close by saying that your third chapter is by far the most readable of the whole bang. Take a look at that and notice how much dialogue there is compared to the other two chapters and how much better it flows in comparison.
Far too many prospective authors fall into the trap of describing the most boring shit possible with the aim of trying to make their work feel 'lived in' or 'realistic'. Shopping and game unboxing is already dreadfully boring in real life, I dont need to read about that when I could instead be reading your third chapter about touring a grand castle with a bat pony companion while on your way to meet a princess. That is NOT a common experience in real life and is almost never boring.
6503872
I pretty much second these comments.
Besides the grammar, which needs work, let's look at the fourth paragraph of chapter one:
1) Typically, when one character speaks, all of that dialog is continuous (one set of quote marks) or broken in two. Eg. one of these:
-"Sandvich! Perfect fuel for killing tiny cowards," he said.
-"Sandvich!" he said. "Perfect fuel for killing tiny cowards." (The period after "said" here depends on whether the first bit is the end of a sentence.)
Above, there are three distinct blocks of speech by one character, which is not wrong exactly but abnormal. It's also broken up by several quoted terms like "smooth" that aren't dialog, which makes the use of quote marks confusing. So, try condensing the text into one or two blocks.
2) There's a significant number of words devoted to the clerk's appearance. Does it matter at all? No? Then don't bother. You can give him one adjective if it's purely decorative. A tabletop RPG system I like, Fate, explicitly defines characters in terms of "aspect" phrases, and background characters only get one or two. This guy is a "Pimple-Faced Gamestop Clerk" and there's no more to say about him unless he shows up later.
3) "punching a few numbers into the cash register": We know how a standard shopping experience goes, so there's no need to describe it unless something weird happens. In fact, the conversation and the story could open with the clerk handing over the change (transaction already complete) and mockingly saying "For your sister?" while looking at the purple game pad.
4) "brony", "MLP FIM": Think about your intended audience. Are you writing for the Optimalverse reader community? The FiMFiction community? Readers who aren't into this insanely popular cartoon at all? If the audience is either of the first two, then you don't really need to explain, and if it's the last one, shorthand like "brony" need more explanation.
5) Mentioning details of unrelated things like "Horse Game" and the "Legends of Equestria" servers only rarely having open server weekends are not relevant to your story. (The "Luigi's Mansion" reference earlier is even less relevant. The discussion of exactly which parts of "Luigi's Mansion" the main character looked up an FAQ for are even less relevant.) Imagine I'm promising to tell you about an awesome thing that happened to me, but then I get sidetracked talking about lunch. Pinkie would make that entertaining, but even she can be frustrating. So, focus on the awesome thing and mercilessly cut out the other stuff.
6) "I, am Gabe": When I first saw this, I thought maybe this was a reference to Valve the gaming company, because of all the gaming references (and a probable overdose of TF2 on my part). Then I realized this was the main character's name, at the end of the fourth paragraph, coming suddenly after a long digression about which fan-made pony video games he's played. When would you introduce yourself if you were telling this story to me as the narrator? Probably up front with an interesting line like "I'm Gabe, and X happened to me..." or more naturally by having the name come up in conversation. Eg. by Celestia using it and the narrator saying "How do you know my real name?"
So, hopefully that will be helpful for things to consider when revising/rewriting. You certainly don't need to start with speech, though it can be useful as a way of introducing conflict or mood. A friend's favorite example of an opening line is, "Aw, Mom!" which defines two characters' relationship and a conflict between them, in five letters. Where is the conflict in this story going to be? Zoom in on it.