Writing is (also) all about the looks

Lately I've been writing a lot, mostly short fiction stories. And I enjoy it a lot. Even though I've been writing for years now, I don't think I've ever enjoyed it as much. At times I have written full-time, for instance when I was writing my philosophy dissertation, for which I even moved to one of the best cities to be inspired to write (Berlin, Germany). But the last couple of months I've really started on a new journey, with new highs and new lows. Writing fiction, using my philosophical background in a new way, that suits it, somehow.

More than words

Yet writing is not only about words. It's also very much about how you present those words.

Which words do you put around it.
Which images do you use?

When I first joined steemit, 29th of December 2017, I met @multi4g. He is an artist and visual wizard. In my humble opinion. He has been posting a LOT of amazing tutorials and tips that focus on how to create a personal brand, a type of image that fits who you are and what you offer. He introduced me to canva.com for which I will be ever grateful to him. It's a great and free website, where you can make professional looking images that work well on steemit.

So here I wanted to put some of the cover images to accompany short stories. Every one of them is made by me these past months.

This is a cover to accompany a short story that is very dear to me. The first story I ever wrote set in a place I actually visited. It made me realise writing those feelings & impressions from memory bring a whole new liveliness to the story. I like this image, it's a picture I made from the train when I entered New York City one morning.

This cover is very different. It is a short story set in a video game, and this is kind of the first message you see when you 'wake up' in the story. So the image served two purposes, both as an illustration, and also to get you into the mood of the story.

It is probably not the best cover picture, as when it was shrunk to the thumbnail, the words cannot be read anymore, but I do like the atmosphere it brings.

This is a cover for a short story called 'The Dike' which was mostly an exercise to write a deep POV (point-of-view) from an inanimate object (a dike). I used a famous 19th century tale as the backstory, and I think it worked out well.

This image was taken from pixabay, a great site with free and CC0-images that are free to use commercially. I liked this image a lot, as it shows some of the loneliness and the beauty of being a dike in the Netherlands. I tweaked the original image by adding a grey-scale filter on top of it, to add to this feeling for the story.

I hope you have gotten some inspiration to both follow me and read my future short stories, but also to experiment with making your writing visually tempting.

For now, write on!

^{Here an overview of more fiction/short stories and poetry by @nobyeni.}