Writing your first story
Published in
1 min readMar 2, 2018
The theme is ‘A day in your life’.
- Write it exactly as you would in your native language. Only say what happened. Say what happens in chronological order. Don’t use feeling words. Don’t make an analysis or a summary.
- Edit the story for simplicity and clarity. Convert idiomatic statements. ‘I am as tired as a dog’ becomes ‘I am very tired’.
- Convert the story to the present tense (it may not be possible to write a story entirely in the present tense when you want to place events in chronological order, however write mainly in the present tense)
- Send your story to me. I’ll simplify it further (if necessary) so you will have an easier time translating it.
- I send you the story back
- You translate it. Do this paragraph for paragraph.
- When you’ve done your best then send it to me. I’ll correct it and make notes regarding the errors you are making.
- When you get it back you compare each corrected paragraph with your original paragraph and make notes as to the errors you are making.
- Make a copy of your original text and correct it yourself from the corrected story you have received back. (This may seem redundant, but it gives you a chance to understand better the corrections when you do them yourself)
- You can now convert the story into the past tense (Perfekt and Präteritum). You can now contrast the two past forms
- For reference: https://medium.com/fictionaufdeutsch/alltag-daily-routine-c35907f93e60