A young gamer/brony sets his eyes to Equestria... online. Deciding to purchase the game leads him to a world of excitement, a world of adventure, and a world of complete and total... satisfaction.
Hey, if you like this story, and/or want it to have improved quality, then you're in luck! My current project, my most ambitious yet, is to improve my writing technique by re-writing this story. It will feature an almost entirely new plot, not that this one had much of that anyways.
I'm not doing this because this story is worth it, I'm doing this because I had so much fun writing this story that it holds a special place in my heart... not that my others don't. SO, I will be moving this story to DA (to stay with good standing in regards to the rules) when I finish this "project 2.0," And I will be posting it here. This is going to talk a LONG time, and the dominance of my writing time, so... don't expect much until it's done.
Also, I could use some cover art, and editors, so if anyone wants to do that, details on my blog post.
I couldn't bring myself to look past the spelling errors to find out if this is a good story!
Complete, not compleat.
Immersion, not emersion.
This needs to be spellchecked.
6496253 I: agree. This is really hard to read.
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.
Others can (and probably will) critique your grammar and spelling, but I didn't consider it a big issue. My big issue, looking at just the first chapter (Which is what's going to sell your story) is that the entire chapter should be scrapped. 1,000+ words tells me almost nothing I couldn't have learnt from the synopsis. Here is what I now know:
Your protagonist's favourite pony is Twilight Sparkle.
Your protagonist is a reasonably casual gamer, evidenced by the use of walkthroughs.
That is basically all that matters. If either of these facts matter later in the story (I imagine the first one will not, but the second one might) you can always insert them when needed. We know that your protagonist is going to be playing Equestria Online, and we've already seen the pony-pad acquisition process in other fics. There's no need to recount it here. Just skip straight to the good stuff.
I'm going to go on to Chapter 2 at this stage.
Again ignoring the spelling/grammar, it simply looks like very little is happening. The protagonist does not have a unique way of looking at this game that would make it enjoyable to read so far. In fact, the most interesting thing the protagonist has done (Experimented to try and find out how big the world is) hasn't even been shown! How would a unicorn who knows no magic know that the world genuinely is this large? This is an interesting question, and is completely skimmed over.
Rule of thumb; in fanfiction (even fanfiction of fanfiction) if something has already been done to the point where most readers of your fic will have seen it before, it needs to be very interesting, or be skipped. So far, everything the protagonist has done, up to and including meeting Star, simply hasn't been all that original, and the one original thing he thought of has been skipped. (I think I remember reading a pegasus trying to explore the map, but obviously that's much easier than doing it as a unicorn)
A small nitpick compared to the larger structural problems, but the Arena aside is too long, as well. The important point (EQO is big) can be said much more succinctly.
I'll go on to Chapter 3.
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.
This...is a bit of...
This needs work. While posting your stories takes bravery and I do think you have done a good thing by putting yourself out there, I heartily recommend taking the first 100,000 words you write and setting fire to them. They will be terrible.
-Chessie
6555477
will keep that in mind the next time I post.
And thank you for not being negative! Even neutral criticism is better than negative criticism.
6555991 Honestly, don't worry about the early efforts. My story...ugh, those early segments were hideously bad. The entire first half was re-written completely to get it worth putting online.
-Chessie
6556126
I wrote some bad stories before doing good ones. Then I wrote a novel and threw away most of the first act.
Not only does this need a spell check. It sorta needs one of everything. I could help you if you want, mostly because you have a good thing going on here, just not that good execution
The first thought that went through my head when I saw the title was LLLLLLET'S PLAY!
images4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130417190519/roosterteeth/images/2/25/Let%27s_Play.png
6612593
Thanks for the offer! I need it, badly.
6499204 Nuclear Pony is pretty good at this. I would take his advice to heart. I read a couple of chapters a while back and left the story. I came back now to see if there were any improvements. I love the Optimalverse setting and there are very few new stories set in it.
6721467
I know right! I'm going to check out Nuclear pony, and do that.
But...
Do you mind linking what words you're talking about? I don't think I'll find them.
6722299 Just read his post in here.
This one. 6503872 That has quite a bit of information that will help you improve.
I will give you my honest critique to your story so far.
First of all, everything feels a bit rushed, the Star and Night Light ship sat sails way to quickly.
The story feels cluttered with ideas, but is missing some progression and character development.
It's a tad hard to read and some grammatical choices are hinting that english is not your first language.
Nevertheless, everyone has to start somewhere when painting Landscapes and Events with words.
The inside jokes are good, but often poorly executed, because they are bat jokes. Get it ? Bat like in Bad Joke ...
Ok I will let myself out.
Also an Hero -> Suicide implied by Imigration ?
You'd think even in Equestria proper you wouldn't need fluids and stuff for childbirth. Just have the babies phase through the womb.
7043281
... that's kinda what happens. That's what was implied...
7043281
7043483
... oh wait, you meant the REAL Equestria...
I give you a 1
7214843
...
is that a good thing?
... or a bad... you were a little vague
man this story is really good :D
7368481
Wow... Thanks! I really don't think to much of my stories, I just write them because it's fun, and let me say: this was one of the most fun stories I've written! Thanks a lot.
6555991 To tack on to this, sometimes the first 100k should be burned...but the ideas kept.
I can't read this story. Bland. Very bland. However, since this was written over a year ago, I'll read one of your newer stories.
7936708
I'm working on a "revamped" version of this story. Hopefully it will be better...
While you need to do some editing, this was pretty good for a story with almost no conflict. I figured not all FIO upload stories main characters would have conflict though. Nice to see at least one that doesn't follow the "existential crisis" formula.
Plane, not plain.
Not the worst thing I've ever read, that designation belongs to my very first story, which will never be seen by anyone but the author. It took over ten years before i wrote anything that could be considered 'good' and even then I go back and read those stories and laugh at how horrible they are. None are here since I haven't written anything pony... yet.
You have potential. Most important of all, you finished what you started which is extremely rare in fanfiction. Don't stop writing, like any skill, it gets better with practice. Even professional writers have upwards of ten or more 'dead' stories for every one that they publish.
Good luck with future works!
Breaking the forth wall pinkie!!!
9239159
note to self, add "Pinkie Pie" insurance to my fourth wall for the next one...
9243402
You better!