Making of: Deceptive Appearances

In this short story, nothing is as it seems at first. Is the count of the Dark Castle a vampire who murdered poor Mariana, or isn’t he? Is Florica the nice waitress, or does she have a dark secret? Is Miray really the tough woman who doesn’t let anything get her down, or does she have a weakness?

In this story, I play with expectations and clichés. But it also serves another purpose: it develops the story-arc that extends across the short stories. We get to know Miray from a new side and bring the two protagonists closer together.

Origin

The starting point of the concept was the idea of writing a vampire story. A young woman has disappeared, and all the villagers naturally consider the count to be guilty, making further investigation unnecessary. But the scene in the inn had also been in my head for a long time, where Dian steps out of the heated but stuffy taproom into the cold hallway and takes a deep breath of the fresh air.

Every story I’ve written so far has been constructed around a very central scene. Apparently, this is my way of building stories. Hopefully, this experience will help me when I’m planning future stories.

Writing style

I was also able to gain another experience while writing this short story. Actually, I had already finished it at the end of October, proofread it several times and refined it. It was ready for the public, or so I thought.

Then I made a big mistake: I read the book “Deutsch für junge Profis” (German for young professionals) by Wolf Schneider. His tips on good language style and sentence structure were a real eye-opener for me. Where I had previously only felt that something was wrong with a sentence, I now understood what the problem was and how I could fix it. (Unfortunately, the book is also a poorly written polemic about blogging, which makes large parts of it difficult to enjoy. It’s a shame that the author felt the need for this.)

As a result, I completely rewrote the entire story. I improved the sentence structure, expanded the scene transitions and took care to better describe the actions of the characters. This extensive revision took me two months. But it increased the story from 8,000 to over 10,000 words, which also read much more smoothly. I think the result was worth the effort.

I can see that my writing style is currently undergoing a major change. On the one hand, this unsettles me because I now have to rethink a lot of things that I previously just wrote down and thought to be good. It feels like a step backwards on the way to finding and perfecting my personal writing style. On the other hand, there is nothing wrong with taking a step backwards if it leads to a better path forward.