The beginning
It was a cold, windy night in Ponyville, and I wandered through the snow-laden town centre, fighting through the chilly blasts of snow and seeking cover. I was beginning to think that I would just have to rough it out for another night when a door opened. “Get in here before you freeze,” a mare shouted towards me.
I quickly rushed to the door and dived into the house, not knowing who the mare was until I was inside the house and looked around. She was a white unicorn with a spiky blue mane, wearing headphones around her neck and a concerned expression on her face. Adorning the walls were plenty of photos of an alabaster mare. “What were you doing out in this weather?” the mare questioned. Her words snapped me out of my daydream and I quickly tried to think of a reason, any reason.
“I got lost,” I stuttered out. I clenched my jaw, trying to stop my teeth from chattering as I shivered violently.
She looked at me quizzically. “So where do you live?”
“I live near Sweet Apple Acres,” I quickly responded, hoping she wouldn’t question me again.
“I don’t know of many houses around there,” she briskly countered.
“Well it’s not exactly a house,” I muttered.
“What do you mean?” she responded. Oops, I hadn’t meant for that to slip out. I opened my mouth, trying to cook up some lame excuse, but nothing was coming to me and I realized that I didn’t have much choice but to tell her the truth.
“I live in a treehouse,” I declared, looking down sadly.
“Why do you live in a treehouse? Where are your parents?” she asked me.
“I don’t have parents.” No parents, no real home… Honestly, I didn’t like admitting these sorts of things freely, but it was getting to the point where I pitied myself enough to let other people pity me. Anything to get me out of the cold.
“Well let’s just get you warmed up and then you can tell me more. My name is Vinyl by the way.” She led me into the lounge where a fire was roaring.
"My name is Scootaloo,” I responded. I watched her head towards the kitchen and retrieve a tub from the cupboard. She measured out some of the powder in the tub and began making me cocoa. I was mesmerized as I watched her magic at work; it was like a fine art, the way she moved things gracefully with just the tendrils of magic from her horn. Once she had finished, she brought the cocoa over and hoofed it to me. “T-thank you,” I said sheepishly.
“Now tell me why you were out in this snowstorm,” she asked tenderly.
“It’s a long story,” I informed her. I swirled my mug around, watching the lone marshmallow slowly dissolve in the warmth of the drink.
“Well we have a long time,” she countered whilst looking out at the still-raging snowstorm.
“Okay. Basically, I was making my way back to the treehouse when this storm hit. I wasn’t quick enough to beat it.”
“Well you can stay here for the night and we can get your situation sorted tomorrow,” she stated caringly.
“Thank you,” I said slightly tearfully. She just smiled at me.
“I’ll go make a bed for you,” she said, disappearing out of the room, whilst I sipped the cocoa. As she set up the bed I peered around the room, noticing pictures of her and a grey mare plastered around the room.
She returned a little while later. “We should get you to bed,” she said.
“Okay, but who’s the mare in the pictures with you?” I asked inquisitively, whilst getting up from the sofa.
“That’s Tavi—she’s my marefriend,” she said whilst smiling and leading me to a bedroom, which was rather plain aside from a few photos of Canterlot so I assumed it must have been a guest room.
“Where is she?” I tilted my head slightly in confusion.
“She’s a musician, so she’s currently playing for the orchestra. Now, you should get into bed.” She tapped the bed. “You need to sleep.”
“Okay,” I replied, yawning as I climbed into the bed, pulling the covers over myself and nuzzling into the pillow as I slowly drifted off to sleep.
I slowly blinked my eyes awake, looking around the foreign room before getting out of bed. I made a beeline towards the door sleepily, then slowly I opened the door and headed towards the lounge. “Good morning, Scootaloo. Did you sleep well?” I heard from behind me, and I turned around to see Vinyl.
“Yes, thank you, Vinyl. Did you?” I responded sleepily.
“Yes, thanks. Would you like some breakfast?” she asked. “Though I will say I’m not a good cook,” she added, laughing.
“Yes please, Vinyl,” I responded. She then walked toward the kitchen and I followed her, looking around as I did.
“You have a very nice house, Vinyl,” I remarked whilst following, looking at all the pictures of what I assumed to be musical symbols. One of the pictures looked like her cutie mark and there were many more photos of Vinyl with Tavi in different locations, some I recognised to be Canterlot.
“Thanks, but most of the decoration is done by Tavi.” She laughed and entered the kitchen. “So what do you like?”
“Uhh, I usually just have apples from the apple trees,” I admitted, looking down. She placed a hoof on my wither.
“I’ll make you some toast, and then after breakfast we can try and find you somewhere to live,” she said caringly before going and to make some toast. I went and sat at the kitchen table, watching Vinyl silently as the tendrils of her magic took plates from the cupboard and butter from the fridge. It always amazed me to watch unicorn magic at work. Sweetie Belle in particular always looked cute when she tried. Vinyl then turned and faced me, smiling, before taking the toast out of the toaster and buttering it. Then, she floated it onto the table and in front of me.
“Thank you, Vinyl,” I said thankfully, and I then used my hoofs to pick up the toast and slowly ate it, savouring the buttery taste on the warm and crispy bread. “It’s delicious.”
“You’re welcome but it’s just toast, “ she said, laughing, which made me blush faintly.
“That doesn’t mean it’s not delicious,” I quickly remarked, smirking slightly.
“Heh, well thank you, Scootaloo. I’m glad you like it.” She smiled at me and proceeded to make herself some toast as well, sitting down once it was made and eating it slowly. That’s when I heard the front door open and close.
“Vinyl, I’m home,” a pony said with a Trottish accent. I looked towards the kitchen exit as a grey mare entered and locked eyes with me.
“...Who is this?”
Also LikedSimilarAuthor
- Ponealone · 6.5k words · 21 1 · 1k views
- Fircoal · 10k words · 31 3 · 1.9k views
- Nightlock106 · 1.8k words · 59 3 · 2k views
Stats
Page generated in 0.088 seconds
Total duration
911 users online
519,164 hits today, 2,280,440 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
Try to use the word "while" more often instead of "whilst". Story has much potential and will be watching for future updates.
Might one say that the night was... dark and stormy?
Since I know that this is your first foray into more serious stories, I'll try to go easy on you.
The first thing that sticks out to me is the lack of characterization displayed so far. This is a complaint that I often have about stories from newer authors, and it pretty much boils down to this: if you take a bit of dialogue from the story, out of context, would it be possible for someone to guess who said it? In other words, I'm saying that all the dialogue in this story feels exactly the same, instead of feeling like each character's dialogue belongs to them, and them alone.
This lack of characterization stretches a bit deeper when we consider the actions of our characters. So far, we know that Scootaloo is homeless, polite, and she spent the night at Vinyl's house. As for Vinyl, we know that she'll take in a filly with few questions, she's polite, and she has a marefriend. There's not much I can say about either of their characters at this point, which is a bad thing for me. Normally I'd stop reading a story here, because I like reading about strong characters. A story is (typically) about what happens to or is done by the characters, but the thing that makes me care about the story is how the characters feel about what's happening. If the characters don't feel like living, breathing people (ponies), then it's much harder to empathize with them. It is only the first chapter, so there's still tons of time to give these ponies character, but I think that as an introduction to the story, there's not much to grab a reader's attention. And I'm saying that as someone who loves Scootadoption stories.
Now that we've talked about one of my more common complaints, let's talk about one that I've never come across before: point of view. This story is written in a style that I've never encountered before, what I might call first-person extra-limited. Although your story is ostensibly written in first person, not once do we get to see what's going on in Scootaloo's mind. Being able to immediately comprehend what's happening in the protagonist's mind is one of the purposes behind the first-person limited point of view, so by not using that, you've basically written your story in third-person objective point of view. This is the most limited point of view there is for a story, forcing a reader to interpret what a character is feeling or thinking entirely from their actions or speech. Now, I'm not sure if the objective POV must necessarily be third-person, but I can't find any mention of a first-person objective POV being a thing in the searches I've done, so at the very least, you've chosen an extremely rare point of view.
To see what I mean by all this, let's look at this line:
First, let's add the missing comma after "I said." Now, let's change "I" to "Scootaloo" and the "me" to "her," to see how this looks in third-person objective:
This reads exactly the same as what you wrote. Every case of "I said" or "I did" in this story could easily be replaced with "she said" or "she did," meaning that other than the pronouns, it really was written in the (third-person) objective POV. That might be okay, but as a warning, because you don't have access to the thoughts of any characters with this POV, it's much harder to make a reader understand what a character is thinking or feeling. Instead, let's see what could have been written if this chapter were to take full advantage of the first-person POV:
Because dialogue doesn't appear to be one of your strengths as a writer, I'd write the future chapters in this way, taking full advantage of the window into Scootaloo's mind that the first-person perspective gives. If you continue writing the story the way you have for this chapter, you'll need to communicate every character's feelings simply by what they do and say. This isn't an easy task to do well, so by embracing the first person perspective, you can at least tell the reader directly how Scootaloo is feeling, or how she's thinking.
That was a longer bit of critique than I thought it would be! I hope you find it useful. Just by writing it I learnt more about the role of the point of view than I knew before! Now, normally I'd give this a thumbs-down and then continue on my way, but I'd like to see what you can do to improve it. So, I'll be sticking around for awhile. Cheers!
Your story is off to a good start. But, you have a minor punctuation error in this sentence:
Please put a comma after said. Are you going to keep forgetting how to punctuate sentences? Sorry if I'm being harsh, but, please be mindful of this sentence too:
Please put a comma after caringly, to me, it makes the sentence flow a little better. You should put a comma after caringly because the next thing your explaining is not related to what Scootaloo is saying in the dialogue. Please be wise on where you put your commas in a sentence
.
Wither. Don't you mean shoulder?
This sentence is very run on. Try saying it like this:
" I was beginning to think that I would just have to rough it out for another night, when a door opened".
But after all, this new story is pretty good. Keep going!
8185092
I shall try to improve it all for future chapters.
8185612
8185502 Thanks for all the constructive criticism. It helps a lot
Yaaaay!
So far, it's looking good. I'd not have chosen a first-person perspective, but that's up to you and what you intend to do with it.
Intriguing.
Uphoofed.
Well it's a start so I can't say much. Have yet to see the crazy adventures Scoots and Vinyl will have at the expense of poor Octavia. The possibilities are endless.
I believe NikkitaKitten has already mentioned any complaints I have so I'll not repeat.
8185612 Just on the wither bit.
Nice!
This reminds me of my first ever fanfiction, with all of it's pitfalls. What you have here is a thousand words of talking heads desperately trying to eke out every drop of sadness it can, like it's starved for emotion or something. Problem is, you're tapping a dry well. This does nothing to set itself apart from any of the other "scootaloo is an orphan and lives alone and cold in the treehouse" stories out there, in fact it actually settles into pretty much every cliche. And the very bland way that Vinyl just helps her out and the day is saved makes for a very uninviting story. Here, I'll wrap it up in a few words.
One day scootaloo was cold.
Then Vinyl Scratch gave her a blanket.
The end.
Obviously not the end, ere your [incomplete] tag, but it garners little interest to continue.
I hate to be harsh to what is clearly a fledgeling fic, but it reminds me of where I was, so I know you can come very far if you try. Work on it.
Its feels too convenient.
I support this story and look forward to its continuation...
So Vinyl and Tavi are faggots?
9232242
Same