French creative writing

I improved my French writing skills by working on a long and ambitious creative project rather than only short or isolated writing exercises. I am very interested in narrative games and Role Playing Games (RPGs) that are based on strong stories and rich worlds with anthropomorphic characters, such as those in Cats! The Conspurracy, so I started to create my own universe in the same spirit and had the basic idea for the main characters. This world was based on a conflict between different groups such as humans, demons, and werewolf-like creatures. However, everything was still very fragmentary and not really organized or developed. 

At the beginning of the project, I did not start from nothing, because I already had the main idea of the universe and some characters. The first step was to organize, clarify, and expand these ideas. I defined more precisely the rules of the world, the different groups, their relationships, and the general atmosphere of the story. I wrote notes and short texts to define the main ideas, then gradually organized them into something more structured. Then I worked on the characters: who they are, where they come from, what they want, and how they are connected to each other. This step was important because it helped make the story more coherent and more alive. After that I began writing the main story. I wrote many narrative scenes, dialogues, and descriptions. At first, the text was not very organized and sometimes inconsistent, so I had to rewrite and reorganize large parts of it. I also added new scenes and removed or changed others. Throughout the semester, I regularly went back to earlier parts of the story to improve style, fix inconsistencies, and make the world and the characters more coherent. I paid attention to vocabulary, sentence structure, and clarity.

I have also been writing novels, other role-playing universes, Kahoot games and character sheets on a regular basis. I also documented the informal reading I do in French, be it the daily newspaper “l’Actu” to which I have subscribed and receive by mail, the weekly newspaper “L’Eco” (also paper version), the numerous career guidance books as well as other books and online documentation.

I have improved upon the vocabulary and expressions used in my creative writing endeavors so that my writing is both complex, rich and clear at the same time. For the reading part, I improved on my comprehension and fully understood the different themes and issues being discussed in my daily and weekly newspaper.

My better comprehension of the French language also allowed me to grasp the intricate concepts and ideas that are contained within the pages of career guidance books and online resources.

I had also focused a lot of my reading around resources available at Cité de Métiers where I was able to borrow Career guidance books in every field imaginable. I have obtained valuable insight into the higher studies, career paths and salaries involved in jobs ranging from webmaster to veterinarian.