Kat likes unicorns

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...

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...

I don’t know any writer who hasn’t been in this situation at one point. You sit down, finally having some free time to write, and then - nothing. No matter how hard you try, you can’t even manage to write one word without being very unhappy with it. It’s like a massive blockade inside of your head, keeping you from creating sentences. This phenomenon is called writer’s block, and it happens to all of us at times. But how can we get rid of it? There’s two forms of writer’s block. With the first form, you can’t bring a sentence to paper despite having an idea, and with the second form, you can’t even figure out an idea. If there is an idea in your head but you just can’t figure out how to put it into words, go and plan out your story. Create a detailed scene plan, add ideas as you go along. Simply write down all of the ideas you have. Simply working around the ideas might help you get the words flowing again. If the problem is rather that you’re unhappy with every single phr...

If you’ve been reading fanfiction or prose online, you know that almost every author provides a little summary for their stories for you to read before you dive into the story. But what should that summary actually contain, and when can it be considered a good summary? The purpose of those summaries is obvious - they’re created to grab the reader’s attention and to make them click the story. They give an insight into what awaits the reader, what characters the story is focused on and whatever the author feels like telling the reader. It is there to generate clicks, basically. However, it should never be clickbait. If a reader is interested in a story and starts reading it, looking forward to reading something they’re really excited about, and then finds out that the story tells a completely different tale, you might just have lost a reader forever. As a rule of thumb, it’s always best to give an overview over the general idea you based the story on. Everything more than that...

Listening to music while studying isn’t for everyone, and it definitely isn’t for me, however, I do listen to music while writing fiction. I feel like it does help getting into the mood your characters are in, thus helping you to describe their emotions in much more detail, but that’s just on a side note. Music can help us feel so many things. It can make us feel happy, sad, or just overly emotional. Music can add so much to our lives, and it can also help us focus. Even if it’s just to block out background noises - music does the job. It can make us feel more alert, or even more awake at times. But which music is ideal to help us focus? I created a playlist with my recommendations for you to check out. If you’d like to see it over on spotify and listen right away, click here . I’ll add to this over time, so make sure to check it out every now and then if you’re looking for more songs for your very own studying playlist. Music that I find helps me focusing usually only meets ...

When reading a story, there’s always one thing that makes us keep reading, however, we mostly don’t really notice it - it’s the style an author writes in, the way they play around with words. Skilled authors know how to write in many different styles, but for the beginning it’s often easier to at first find one style that suits you. Today we’re looking at different forms of writing practice that will help to develop and improve our very own style. Style doesn’t come from nowhere, it needs to be practiced as much as any other aspect of story writing - in fact it’s one of the most time-consuming things to get right. There are, generally speaking, two ways to improve your style. The first is rather simple, just read a lot of quality literature. That doesn’t always only mean books but also works you found on the internet that have a style you really like. Try figuring out how exactly those texts are written and what draws you to that style. Is it the frequent use of adjectives, the ...

Let’s create the perfect character. Or rather, let’s not. Perfect characters are one of the most annoying things to read about. What is the point of a story about someone who overcomes every problem in the blink of an eye? As soon as we realize that this certain character seems to be perfect, we already know how the story ends - that character will save the day - and perhaps even the whole planet - without even struggling once. Characters like that are often referred to as Mary Sues or, for male characters, Gary Stues, even though a Mary Sue could be also male. I’m not really sure on why the name Gary Stue even exists as I only ever read it in terminology sections but never really saw it as a tag on a story, but we’re not here to talk about names but about the thing hiding behind those. A Mary Sue is a character who doesn’t struggle with anything. They get dragged into a street fight but never fought in their entire life? Of course they’re going to be the one to beat their att...