Posts

plan with me - quoteception

If you don’t know what quoteception is - it’s a project you can participate in if you want to improve your writing skills or simply are looking for an idea to write about. Basically, you’re writing a story around a quote you chose. This post will guide you through the basic planning process of the project. If you haven’t looked at the project thread yet, you can check it out here . Also, to fully understand the planning process I chose to display here, you’ll need to know what a fanfiction is. If you don’t want to google for yourself, you can check out my post on fanfictions right here . So with all of that out of the way, let’s get planning! The quote This is quoteception, so you’ll obviously have to figure out which quote you want to be using for your story. I chose a quote from Sherlock Holmes (BBC) - one of my very favourite things on the planet. Just how can you not love Sherlock? This one is from A Study In Pink . "Dear God, what is it like in your

quoteception

Welcome back to yet another writing project! This one is similar to mix and match , but based on quotes. Yet again you can create your very own pool of words, quotes and characters - or you can use the one I have provided for you right here. So what do we do? We’re taking a quote - and believe you me, there are TONS of quotes out there that you can make SO much out of - and we’re writing a short story around it. There is only one very simple rule to this - the quote has to be part of the story at one point. It can be said by a character, but it doesn’t have to. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? So here are the quotes! By the way - if you’re having trouble planning for quoteception, you can check out this blog post here which guides you through the planning process of this project! It’s rather short, but hopefully somewhat helpful for you! “You want weapons? We’re in a library! Books! The best weapons in the world!” -The Doctor (Doctor Who, S02 EP02) “When you’re a kid

budgeting as a student

This summer is, for many of us, the time where we leave our home and move - to go to college or university in another city, to spend a year abroad, to stay on our own feet. Living on your own is great - whether that’d be alone or with friends. It grants you so much more freedom than living with your parents, but it also includes some burdens that might be hard to overcome at first sight. One of those is money. When living with our parents, we mostly don’t even notice all of the things our parents pay for for us. We get our pocket money, and whenever we need something but can’t afford it, we always know where we can go and ask for it. But the second we move out, there are so many things we probably didn’t even think about paying. Rent, insurances, fees, food, cleaning equipment, furniture, simply everything. And due to those rather new circumstances it’s no wonder that at one point or another we might not be having enough money anymore. So here’s my tips on saving for everyone who mi

30 days, 30 letters - the 30 day letter challenge

This project was around since at least 2011, and I participated in 2013, however, I never uploaded and I probably never will upload those letters as they are brutally honest and, to be fair, quite embarrassing. I don’t know who originally invented this, but I have seen it on tumblr and DeviantART before it reached the fanfiction community to which I was uploading my fanfictions at the time. But what exactly is the 30 letter challenge? For 30 days, you will write one letter every day. It can be short, it can be long. It can be written from your perspective, or from the perspective of a character you invented, or even a character you like, making a fanfiction out of it. You can use it to tell people what you always wanted to tell them, or to just be honest to yourself about how you feel about these people. I personally loved the project. It didn’t only help me learn how to phrase things more nicely, but it also opened my eyes and made me realise a lot about the relations I h

mix and match

This project is something I used to get back to whenever I needed ideas for the next chapter of the book I was trying to write (yes, I finished it, and no, I’ll not post it anywhere), but it’s also a great way to figure out what to put into a short story you want to write for practicing purposes - or even for publishing, who knows? What you’ll need are a bunch of small pieces of paper (preferably not sticky notes as the sticky part will get in the way) and three different boxes. I went with 60 pieces of paper, but you could do more or less, depending on what you’re looking for, however, the number must be dividable by 4. Divide your pieces of paper into four equal parts and put two of those back together, so that you’ll end up with three piles - one holding half of your papers and the other two one quarter each. You’re now going to write character names on each of the pieces of paper from the bigger pile. Those characters can be your very own ones or characters from TV shows,

descriptions

Descriptions can be tricky to get right. They shouldn’t be overdone, they also shouldn’t be absent, but how do you create a perfect description? Descriptions themselves have to do a lot with style. The style you’re writing in does influence the way your descriptions are built up and defines how descriptive the story is going to be on a whole. For me, I always try to use descriptions to create an atmosphere. I focus on what I want to make the reader feel and look at what I have to describe to achieve that feeling, thus creating an atmosphere. Atmosphere is what fuels your reader’s imagination. If the atmosphere is right, your reader will imagine many things you didn’t even describe. Let’s say we’re looking at an apartment. We could describe it as modern, open, with only a few flecks of colour in a rather black and white scenery. Or we could say that the kitchen and living room aren’t separated, that the furniture is mostly white while the flooring is made from dark wood, that t