Leah's Tutorials

Using Wordpress to Create a Portfolio

2008-10-08T09:52:00.005+02:00

In my article Using Wordpress to Create a Portfolio, published at BrightHub on October 7, I explain how you can create a good looking portfolio using a free Wordpress Blog.

This tutorial is geared towards people with at least some previous experience in the blogging world, and may be too concise for absolute novices.

My Tutorials at BrightHub

2008-10-06T13:52:00.004+02:00

It's been a while, but I promise to post more tutorials again soon. In fact, I'm working on a new one already.

More good news:
Updated versions of my Blogging Tutorials have been published at BrightHub.

Blogging for Fiction Writers
A Blog with Bigger Pictures - Part 1
A Blog with Bigger Pictures - Part 2

A Blog with Bigger Pictures: The E-book

2008-04-30T21:25:00.004+02:00

My A Blog with Bigger Pictures Tutorial is now available as E-book, which prints out much nicer than the tutorial on my Blog.

It's a free PDF-download from Lulu, and may be shared under the Creative Commons License.

This means that may it be shared freely for
non–commercial use only, provided that credit is given to the author (Leah Witmond), and a link provided to her website:
http://www.simtales.net

So have fun with my E-book. Upload it to your website, send it to your friends, print it out for personal use...

Get your FREE copy now!

A Blog with Bigger Pictures

2008-04-30T13:08:00.023+02:00

An updated version of this tutorial is now published as a two-part series at BrightHub. Please read it there:

A Blog with Bigger Pictures - Part 1
A Blog with Bigger Pictures - Part 2

or download the old (E-book) version from Lulu:
A Blog with Bigger Pictures - The E-book
It's a free download, so you won't have to fork out any money.

Good Luck!

To see an example of a blog with big pictures, you can visit one of the following SimTales blogs:
The Queen of Hearts - by Leah
Priest Cutie - by Leah
Leah's Short Stories - by Leah
The Lover - by Sandra

Blogging for Storytellers: E-book

2007-12-31T23:12:00.000+01:00

My Blogging for Storytellers Tutorial is now available as E-book, which prints out much nicer than the tutorial on my Blog.

It's a free PDF-download from Lulu, and may be shared under the Creative Commons License.

This means that may it be shared freely for
non–commercial use only, provided that credit is given to the author (Leah Witmond), and a link provided to her website: http://www.simtales.net

So have fun with my E-book. Upload it to your website, send it to your friends, print it out for personal use...

Get your FREE copy now!

Write Better Sim Stories

2007-06-22T00:04:00.000+02:00

So you want to write a really good Sim Story? Read on and I will give you some advice on how to become a better writer.

First Things First

A writer does not just sit down to write. Instead, a writer has a story to tell, and sits down to write that story.
It all starts with an idea.

Idea:
I want to write a story about Dusty Rhodes from the “Failure is not an option” TSR-Challenge

The writer turns the idea around in her head, asks herself questions like: “What if?” and “Then what?” This is how the idea gets turned into a plot – a very, very basic outline of the story. And when I say very basic, I really mean very basic. The plot might not be more than just two or three lines, but it decides the course of your story.

Plot:
Because of his childhood trials, Dusty grows up badly and – having lacked love in his life so far – he becomes a romance Sim. He makes a complete mess of his life, fathers several children with several women, but in the end he becomes a dedicated family man.

Develop your Storyline

Now that you’ve got your plot - also called storyline ¹) - your time has come to develop it.
Since we’re talking about Sim stories here, you could actually start up your game now and start playing. You’ve got the main ingredients of your story, and should be able to steer your main character in the general direction you want him to go. If you’re a good writer, I’m sure you could pull it off that way.
But it’s not the best way. Not in my opinion anyway.

I usually develop my storyline simply by asking myself more questions about the story and the characters in it. More “what if’s” and “then what’s”. In my ten-part Sim story “Dusty’s Diary” it meant answering questions like:

• What were his childhood trials?
• What kind of a mess does he make of his life?
• How many women is he going to seduce?
• How many children will he father, and with whom?
• Is he ever going to get married?
• What causes “The Big Change” in Dusty’s attitude?

As you see, I’ve got a lot of questions to answer, which is a good thing. It means I’ve got plenty of things to write about.

Developing your storyline usually also means creating sub-plots. Yes; that’s right: sub-plots.
A sub-plot is a secondary storyline - separate from the main plot – that serves to flesh out and strengthen the main plot.

Two examples of sub-plots in “Dusty’s Diary”:
1) Shortly after Dusty gets married, both his parents die, leaving him to take care of his two younger sisters.
2) Dusty’s teenage sister is raped and becomes pregnant.

Character Building

Having a nicely developed storyline and some subplots ready to go, still doesn’t mean I’m going to be able to write a good story. I might have all this, and may still not be able to draw my readers in. What I need now, is some good, strong character building. Again, the game is going to be able to help you here.
In the case of my Dusty Rhodes, I know that he is a very nice person. He’s kind, active and playful, but unfortunately also hopelessly shy. Poor Dusty, I turned this very shy young man into a Romance Sim – I bet he must hate me for it, but that cannot be helped. Thankfully his other character traits will help him make friends. Lots of friends. I decided early on to stress on his strong character traits and not to dwell too much on his shyness. Additionally I gave him a bit of a temper too, just to make things more interesting and real. After all, one cannot be nice all the time.
What’s very important in character building, is that you want to create real people; no Mary-Sue’s ²). You have to give your “good” characters at least one serious shortcoming as well as some minor bad habits, and your “bad guy” (or girl) some “nice-aspects”. This is very important! Nobody is all good or all bad. It’s not like that in real life, and should not be like that in your stories either.

The Writing

With the stage set and the characters more or less defined, we’ve finally come to the part you’ve been looking forward to: the actual writing.
Sit down at your computer, open MS-Word or any other word processing program of your choice and start writing. Alternatively, just grab a pen and paper and let those creative juices flow. Put on some nice music if it helps you relax, have cup of tea – ok coffee’s alright too - and simply get those words down. Right now you don’t have to worry about grammar, spelling and punctuation yet. Nor about style. Just write.
When you’re done writing, save your document, put away your pen and paper and do something else. Forget about your story for now.
I mean it! Do the dishes, walk the dog, have a bath. Anything that takes your mind off your work in progress (WIP, for short), but whatever you do: Don’t think about your story.

The Editing

After you’ve left your story alone for at least a couple of hours – but preferably for a day or even two days – go back to it and read what you’ve written so far. You’ll see things you didn’t notice when you first wrote it. Things that need expanding, improving, deleting… That’s why you needed to leave it alone in the first place: to be able to look at it with fresh eyes.
Now that you can see all these things, you can start editing your story, and now is the time to pay attention to little details, too.
Have you used the same word over and over and over again? Try to think of synonyms, or go to http://thesaurus.com/ , type in the offending word and the site will come up with a list of words with (nearly) the same meaning.

How’s your grammar? Your spelling? Punctuation?
Did you use your times consistently, or are you constantly switching between the past and the present?
Do you know how to use “their”, “there” and “they’re” correctly? “Its” and “it’s”? Do you write “should of” instead of “should have”? Do you know the difference? If not, you’d better brush up on your grammar quickly because those are mistakes that make a writer look stupid – and you definitely don’t want to look stupid.

I’m not the right person to teach you grammar, as English is not my first language and grammar isn’t my strongest point anyway. I use it correctly – most of the time – but don’t know how it works. But if your grammar needs improving, do yourself a favour and read up on it. There are probably tons of helpful sites out there on the internet.
http://www.dailygrammar.com/ seems like a good starting point to me. There’s no need to sign up – just go to the lesson archive section and browse all the lessons.

If your spelling needs improvement, there’s nothing like the spelling check of good old MS-Word! It usually does a pretty good job of weeding out the stupid mistakes you made because your fingers were faster than your brains ;P . Of course it’s not fool proof: it won’t find mistakes like “you” when you really should have written “your”, or “how” where you meant write “howl” but it’s a good start.
Spending some dollars on a good dictionary certainly won’t hurt, but with a free online thesaurus and dictionary at your fingertips this isn’t really necessary.

Taking Good Screenshots

When you’ve written your story – and rewritten it several times – it’s about time to start up your game and take the screenshots. This can be tricky, because not everything you wrote is possible in the Sims to start with, but also, taking good screenshots is an art in itself and doesn’t come easy. Not if you’re like me anyway.

If you take a look at the first screenshots I took for my Dusty Rhodes story, you will notice that they weren’t any good at all.

First of all, the pictures (dating back to early February 2007) are taken from too far away – I should have zoomed in closer. Much closer! But that isn’t nearly all. Plumbbobs and headlines are showing, and in the first picture the room seems to be toppling over.
What’s less obvious, is that my camera settings were bad too, resulting in ever poorer quality pictures.

But I think I’ve learned a thing or two and know how to take pretty decent screenshots now.

These screenshots are from Chapter 4 of my story “The Queen of Hearts”, and were taken in May 2007. As you may notice I updated my camera settings, resulting in much clearer pictures.
I also learned how to use the free camera mode, and zoomed in close to the action. I turned off the headlines and the plumbbobs, used the slow motion cheat to be able to pause the game at the exact right moment, and made use of a hack to get rid of the cartoonish stars around the head of a person who’s being slapped.
You’ll also notice that all vertical lines in these two pictures are really vertical. No walls falling down on me this time :).

How did I learn all this in such a short time? Am I such a genius? No I’m not, but I got some help. First of all I found this really great tutorial on how to take good screenshots:
Sims Photography - Taking Better Photos – by Wildstar24, at TSR.
I also learned a lot from my conversations with another writer, who very helpfully supplied me with links to some great hacks, and even sent me some files directly. Thanks B!

About hacks and cheats

Since I’ve mentioned hacks and cheats a couple of times now, I might as well tell you some more about the use of them.
First off – it is possible to write a Sim Story without the use of hacks and cheats, but personally I wouldn’t even try. If you are one of these people who are against the use of hacks and cheats, my best advice to you is: get over it!
I wrote most of the first chapters of Dusty’s diary without any hacks in my game, but even then I was already making use of cheats. As the story progressed I discovered that I needed some hacks in my game, or I wouldn’t be able to let my Sims do the things I needed them to do in order to take the right pictures.

My favourite cheats are definitely:
• “moveobjects on” to move sims around, clean up rubbish, etc.
• “plumbbobtoggle” to get rid of the horrible plumbbob
• “showheadlines off” to get rid of the headlines. Unfortunately this cheat also turns off some important warning messages – your child might just miss the school bus, or your sim might get sick without your knowing it.
• “slowmotion” (0-8) to play the game in slow motion. 0 is the default setting of the game; and in my experience slowmotion 2 or 3 works really well for story telling purposes.

I’ve got a whole list of favourite hacks, but discussing them is beyond the scope of this tutorial.
One suggestion though: Go to http://www.insimenator.net/ and look for Squinge’s Mods. He’s developed tons of very good hacks and updates them regularly too!

Ever since I started writing Sim Stories, more and more hacks have entered my game as and when I needed them. They enable me to take pictures of actions that otherwise would not have been possible in the Sims.

Making Backups

Usually the hacks I use are perfectly safe, but sometimes things go wrong and if they do, they may even go terribly wrong.
So if you are going to use hacks in your game – and I really cannot think of any valid reason not to do so if you’re serious about writing a really good story – it’s always a good idea to back up your game before installing any custom content. Personally I backup my game almost every night. It only takes a few minutes and has saved my stories several times already.

Have fun

Now go and write that amazing story, play your game, take great screenshots. Give the best you have, but above all: Have fun!

Notes:
¹) Some writers distinguish between plot and storyline, others don’t. To keep this tutorial simple, I will (for now) not distinguish between the two, but personally I don’t think the two are exactly the same. I would say plot focuses on events, whereas storyline focuses on character building.
²) A “Mary-Sue” is the literary term used for cliché-characters. She – or he, as the term is not gender-specific – is either too good or (less often) too bad to be true. You don’t want that kind of characters in your stories. Most readers don’t like them, and will quickly become bored with your story.

Blogging for Storytellers

2007-06-07T10:07:00.004+02:00

Introduction

Before I started my writer’s blog, I had my Sims2 Stories published on one of the largest Sims Community websites. This was nice for as long as it lasted, but one terrible night I was faced with the fact that the site’s administrators had decided to remove two chapters of my story, thus effectively killing my whole story.

I took me one night to decide that from now on I would never upload any of my stories to their site again. Instead I would publish them on my own blog – where I would be the one in charge. With no one telling me what I could or could not write.

I created my own blog, informed my readers and was happy again.

But meanwhile other good writers at that same website had their stories “unpublished” as well. It’s for them that I decided to write this tutorial, in order to help them set up their own Story Writing Blog, just like I did.

An updated version of this tutorial is now published at BrightHub. Please read it there:
Blogging for Fiction Writers

or download the original E-book version from Lulu:
Blogging for Storytellers
It's a free download, so you won't have to fork out any money.