This felt extremely rushed and the formatting makes it hard to read. I wish there was more to it then just us being told that the vocals were expressive or the melody was sweet. Or in terms of Lyra's performance, anything at all. Actually, it probably would've been better to focus on Lyra's performance than Sweetie Belle's, since Lyra was the main performance that we are supposed to care about (I think). This story concept would've been better for a short story comp than for a minific.

Writer, buried within this story is a good idea, one I find sweet and endearing. I like the notion of Lyra taking Sweetie Belle (and it is Sweetie Belle, by the by) under her wing and giving her the opportunity to show off her talents for a crowd. And the song she sings, it's an allusion to her rendition of "Hush Now, Quiet Now", yes? A charming choice, though it does imply that she doesn't have much else in her repertoire, which is unfortunate.

That said, the formatting of this story leaves a lot to be desired. Typically, if you aren't separating your paragraphs by a line, they need to be indented to help identify where one paragraph stops and another starts. Having a solid wall of text on the left makes it hard to tease apart where one idea stops and the next starts.

The cream colored mare broke them apart, her rose and navy mane falling over her eyes. “Okay, take it easy. You still have to go out there and perform.” Lyra replied by striking a pose on her hind legs. “I got this.”

One of the cardinal sins of dialogue is to have more than one speaker in the same paragraph; always separate different characters in a conversation by a line, or in the next paragraph, depending on which formatting style you use.

I thought it was odd that you never address Bon Bon by name. I mean, yes, recent episodes have called her actual name into question, but you go out of your way to avoid labeling her (and fall into the trap of Lavender Unicorn Syndrome because of it).

All told, I liked what you were trying to say here, Writer, but it needs a lot more polish to make it less of a chore to read.

Final Thought: There's Something Here, Buried Deep Beneath the Surface

Yikes. You’re going to want to use either more line breaks or indentation to prevent the wall of text effect on display here.

Others have already broken down the story’s issues: Rushed pacing, telling over showing, the inexplicable choice to never identify Bonbon, and so forth. Furthermore, Octavia is just kind of… there. She’s there to lend a semblance of conflict and tension that might work in a longer piece. Her dialogue near the end is forced and stilted to fit in another prompt drop in case the reader didn’t catch the first one.

Still, as has been said, there is a promising idea here. You just need to give it the space and time it needs to truly shine.

Everything goes smoothly with no unexpected occurrences, which is a bit boring. You need more conflict than this to make a story interesting. Ponies need flaws and problems, and the only flaw in anypony here is Octavia making the wrong judgment call.

For one possibility, it would have been more interesting if Sweetie Belle (there's an e on the end) hadn't done that well, but Lyra ended up not caring because she wanted to use it as an opportunity to showcase her talents. Think of the sort of conflicts that might pop up in the show, and try to add a little spice.

I think other people have already said what I want to say, here. This does need more 'show' of the conflict - something to get me invested.

I agree with everyone out here, so I’ve little else to offer.
The ‘purple alicorn’ syndrome stroke again without any good reason.
Sounds like Octavia is here only—well—to have her noun cited.

See >>Icenrose for essentially my thoughts. I think there is something here, but it needs to be developed.

I'd work in more conflict. even though it's a fluffy little piece, you can get more payoff at the end -- more cute heartwarming d'awwws -- if it doesn't feel like "well, that was too easy"

for example, if the point of view followed the singer, you could focus on her nervousness and self-doubts. if Octavia, perhaps the story would explore her pessimism, then her shock at being proven wrong. but since this story decided to follow Lyra and her overconfidence, you should try to challenge that confidence. maybe she watches the audience and mistakenly assumes they dislike the show, and she thinks she made a mistake. or let's say Lyra's performance afterwards is the one that turns out badly.

there's lots of possibilities. add the right kind of suspense, and the story will feel like it's moving forward, rather than standing still.

Others have pointed out the flaws here, so I'll just add to the expressions of support, author. There are a number of problems on display, but individually, all of those problems are pretty easy to fix! Issues like the LUS and the wall-of-text effect can be fixed in just a minute or two of editing, with some line breaks and adding a few names, and a careful edit pass (for things like Sweetie Belle's uncapitalized name in paragraph 4) will bring the surface polish up to much shinier levels. The sad fact is that that surface polish has an outsized effect on how readers view your story, but the flip side of that is that putting in that tiny extra bit of work will draw readers in much more.

No story is ever perfect -- witness every single feedback thread in this competition -- but keep giving it your all and you'll find yourself improving quickly. And I look forward to your writing once those basic issues are ironed out: the core idea here -- of taking a risk in concert booking -- is a creative application of the prompt.

Tier: Needs Work

One of the things I love about reviewing is that it gives me a chance to really think deeply about why I take certain approaches to writing, and why certain things might work or not work. Spending a good hour pouring over a minific and trying to justify all my thoughts about it is a really valuable exercise for me, and I've said elsewhere that I think it's probably the one thing that's taught me the most about writing beyond spending a decade of my childhood reading every last book I could get my hands on.

Yet still a lot of how I write is done on gut instinct and feeling learned (I hope) from all the reading I've done. And while reviews very often allow me to examine my instincts more closely, and give me some insight into why some things work and other things don't, every now and then I come across an issue that I can't figure out—at least, not in a reasonable time frame. Usually, I'd avoid mentioning those things, or mention them really briefly, but in this particular case one major point of this review is going to have to be based around unfounded, instinctive reactions to an aspect of writing that I can't wholly justify. For that reason, author, I apologise, and state unequivocally that this review is even more subjective than a review would usually be. I hope you still find this useful.

Oh, and a quick warning: this is long, even by my standards. It's also exceedingly focused on the negative, which is not intended as a slight on your story and something I often try to avoid doing. In all honesty, I think the story here is a fun, cute slice-of-life piece with an interesting (if flawed) structure, and I had fun reading it. That said, I found it to be a very useful platform to make some really interesting points about an aspect of writing I hadn't really explored properly before, so I went and did that instead. Again, my sincere apologies to you, author. I hope that my ramblings are still of use to you!

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Let's talk about beginnings and endings.

You know that really old bit of advice that goes "a story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end"? I'll be honest, before I started reading fanfiction I never really understood the purpose of that advice, because it seemed utterly intuitive—of course a story has a beginning, because it begins; and of course a story has an ending, because it ends. My twelve-year-old self, thankfully, was very wrong about this.

Beginning a story isn't easy, because in the space of a few sentences you need to establish at least some major details about the story itself whilst also trying to attract the reader's attention. One fantastic way to do that is to use the technique of in medias res, where you dive headfirst into a scene without pausing or letting the reader adjust—I've described this before as grabbing a reader's hand, yelling "run", and then running off without giving them time to think. When used properly, it's a great tool for helping to craft a good hook.

Here, you use this technique but it doesn't quite work, so let's spend a little while trying to figure out why:

“It’s your funeral,” and with those words, and a flick of her mane, Octavia flounced away. Lyra just smiled softly, confident that she had everything under control.

This is your first paragraph, but before we even start to talk about that I want to talk quickly about formatting. You know, by this point, that a lot of people have complained about formatting and paragraph spacing. I want to quickly add to that discussion that correct paragraph spacing is vital because it's the first thing a reader sees of your story: before we've even read a word, we've seen the mise-en-page of the piece, and if it looks like a badly-formatted story we're probably going to have bad expectations for the content as well. Getting paragraph formatting right could in many ways be considered a key part of setting up your hook!

Now let's talk about your opening dialogue. Opening with dialogue is a great idea, not only for starting in medias res but also for setting the tone and theme of your piece, and by starting with the right piece of dialogue you can immediately identify to the readers key ideas like:
• The main conflict of the story, if it's between two characters.
• The main theme of the story.
• The setting of the story, in some cases, through the dialect of the character speaking.
(There's probably a lot more that can be added to the list, but I think three is good enough for now. Bear in mind that you can do all three simultaneously!†)

Your opening dialogue is a prompt drop, and so gives the reader almost no new information about the story because we already know it's going to be based on the prompt! I'm generally not against prompt drops, but my advice would very rarely be to open a story with one because, for the most part, they make for terrible hooks. If you open a story with things a reader already knows, they're probably not going to feel particularly compelled to read on.

It doesn't help that your dialogue is immediately followed by a punctuation error (you have an action tag, not a speech tag, here, so you should really end your dialogue with a full stop(/period) and start the tag as a new sentence with capitalisation.) This further compounds the impressions the reader has had about the story from the paragraphing, and we're only one sentence in!

But "It's your funeral" is a poor opening for another reason, too: it's an ending. The phrase "it's your funeral" is typically used as a dismissal, as a way of bringing a discussion to an end, and as a concluding remark it feels to me like a terrible way to open a story. Now, if your story were all about toying with chronology or, in fact, the ambiguity of endings themselves (some corny message like "when one door closes, another opens" springs to mind as a good theme for this) then that would be a fantastic way to not only set up the theme, but to have the story's own structure mirror the theme by opening with an ending. So far as I can see, that's not really the purpose of this piece—you seem to just be opening with "it's your funeral" so you can end with a reversal of that. My advice, then, would be to end the first scene with "it's your funeral"—this fits better with the way that phrase tends to work, but also gives you a strong ending for your first scene.

Now let's talk about your ending. I'm going to quote two paragraphs this time, because the latter needs the former's context:

“I guess it was not your funeral after all. I apologize; I should have trusted your judgment.” Octavia looked appropriately dismayed and was surprised as Lyra nudged her comfortingly.
“I guess it wasn’t.”

That first sentence of dialogue feels awfully forced, to me. I think the main reason for this is that nobody is going to remember a throwaway expression like "It's your funeral", and certainly not feel the need to apologise using the exact same kind of phrasing. The line comes off as unnatural and clunky, which is a shame because you've built your entire story's structure around that response. It's also a shame, because I suspect it's a contributing factor to the weakness of your final line.

"I guess it wasn't" feels like an exceptionally weak ending to me (and this, incidentally, is the bit of the review I was talking about in that little preamble). I can't justify this opinion: I can name a whole bunch of factors that might lessen the impact of the line, but at the end of the day my response is simply: "That is not an ending." So instead I'm going to talk a little about two of the things I think about when trying to construct an ending (because I find the final sentence of a story, scene, or even sometimes paragraph needs far more attention than any of the sentences before it):

• Candence: Musical terminology is particularly useful here, because I'm quite literally talking about how the sentence sounds aloud. In beginner's music theory, cadences are described as being like the punctuation of music: a perfect cadence is a full stop, an imperfect cadence is a comma, etc. There's obviously a bit more to it than that, but the fact of the matter is that a perfect cadence sounds like an ending, and almost every other cadence sounds unfinished. For me, one thing I'm often focusing on is where the strongest stress falls—I want it to fall as near as possible to the end of the sentence. Again, I stress that I can't justify this, but the cadence of your ending doesn't quite sound like a conclusion to me.

• Strength: Some sentences use sharp, precise language; some sentences are less well-defined. For instance, pronouns tend to be a little less precise than proper nouns, because a pronoun is inherently ambiguous and depends on context for meaning. I try to avoid pronouns in my final sentences for this reason, as well as other words that rely on context, to allow the final sentence to stand alone. Obviously this isn't the only factor in a sentence's strength (which is again a difficult concept to define, and another one I can't properly justify), but I think the "it" in your final sentence is probably dragging you down a little. The sentence certainly feels weak, to me.

I know that these thoughts are mostly unjustified, but I hope that can give you a bit of insight into what might make a final sentence tick. I think writing this up has helped me start to identify what I really need to think about, too, so that's a nice bonus! If anyone has any thoughts on this matter, I know I'd appreciate hearing them.

There's a lot of work that this piece needs. But the good news is that the problems all lie in the way you've told the story to us, which is easy to fix (at least, compared to an underlying issue with the story itself). Follow the advice of the commenters above in editing, and give some special care and attention to your openings and your endings (not just the ones I've mentioned here! Scene openings and endings are just as important); I have no doubt that, with a bit of elbow grease, you can polish this up into a much more engaging slice-of-life tale, because you have the underlying story there and it's just waiting to shine.

†Also, I feel compelled to mention that I forgot the unicode for "•" momentarily there, and stumbled upon the unicode for "‣", which is pretty cool. Also "†", which would be really useful if I were writing about matrices or chess, but given I tend not to have too many footnotes is probably not very useful to me at all. Still, at least I can use it here, right?