SUNDAY SITE SWEEP: Five Fab Sites for Beating Writer’s Block

This week, sites to generate ideas and spark creative thinking. Are you champing at the bit, ready to start a new project, but can’t fix on a starting point? Or perhaps you’ve come to a sticky patch in something you already have on the go? Whichever it is, hopefully one of these sites will provide the inspiration you need….and an ancient post of mine, A Walk Round The (Writer’s) Block, might prove useful too.

Plinky Prompts

Plinky: ‘because sometimes you need a push’. Plinky prompts can be sent to you via email, Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr and there is a new one every day. They used to do specific creative writing prompts but as far as I can tell these are a thing of the past (they used to include prompts such as ‘write the dialogue between a cop and the mother of a lost child’).  Also, overall the prompts seem to require less soul searching than they used to – describing the worst day in your life is very powerful, but describing your three most hated Facebook statuses, perhaps less so. Despite that, they are still very useful and it amazes me that so many writers are still ignorant of Plinky; there will be something to get you thinking at least a few days a week. You get a recap of the week’s prompts every week by email, and on the website you can access hundreds of old prompts – and perhaps even better, look at other people’s answers. Inspiration gold!

The Scriptorium

This site has a whole host of useful features including some excellent printable worksheets. The whole site is well worth any time you have spare for browsing, but for the purposes of inspiration these pages are the ones to focus on:

http://www.thescriptorium.net/features/prompts/

Free-writing exercises and scenes to write up

http://www.thescriptorium.net/toolbox/story-starters/

First lines and paragraphs to get your story brain working.

http://www.thescriptorium.net/young-writers/yw-creativity/

These exercises are in the young writers’ section, but are useful for writers of any age!

Errant Dreams

Scroll down the page until you see category listings. Category 1 is Images – visual prompts; anything from ‘a car with a web of cracks on a side window’ to ‘a star was tattooed on his brow’. Other categories are phrases, concepts and techniques.

PostSecret

‘PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.’ I think this mission statement – or perhaps it’s more of a raison d’etre – tells you why it is a great place for story and character ideas.

The Seventh Sanctum

This novel site has a random story generator and, in the left hand side bar, a whole host of genres – click on one and you will find lots of info on the chosen genre and links to story generators for that genre. Very…novel!

And as a bonus – I’m not an ipad user, but the apps below were mentioned in Webbo’s Web Watch in the September issue of Writing Magazine. Thanks, Webbo 🙂 I’ve added the links so you can investigate for yourself.

Flash Fiction Prompter

iDeas for Writing

Inspiro

 

SUNDAY SITE SWEEP: Six Super Sites on Writing Dialogue

Writing dialogue is a tricky business. We want it to ‘sound genuine’ and not stilted, but we need realism without the everyday ums, ahs and errs. We want it to convey emotion, relay information, show character, move the story on…

Poor old dialogue! We ask a lot of it. And that’s without the scary task of indicating dialects or speech impediments, and ensuring that our characters sound different….aargh! Luckily some writers share their words of wisdom on how we can tackle these problems, so out with the notebook and see whose offerings ‘speak’ to you (all puns intended).

Speaking of Dialogue

A light hearted look at how to make dialogue sound real from Hugo and Nebula award winner Robert J. Sawyer.

A Few Thoughts About Dialogue

Novelist Janet Fitch’s views include the idea that you only need dialogue in your story if it’s showing conflict between characters. It’s a fair bet not everybody will agree with that one, but the post is well worth a read.

Writing Really Good Dialogue

A PDF guide to writing dialogue from NaNoWriMo, complete with exercises to try.

A-Z of Writing – D is for Dialogue

Light-hearted advice from the delightful Sally Quilford, writer of novels, columns and short stories.

Dialogue Techniques and Dialogue Tags

Essential info from the Crabbit Old Bat (her words, not mine!) Nicola Morgan

Dialogue Workshop

This is from author Holly Lisle. Well worth trying this on days when your brain is blank and you want someone to give you a random starting point, too (what do you mean, you don’t get those?).

 

 

SUNDAY SITE SWEEP: Five Fab Sites for Historical Fiction Writers

Welcome to the first Sunday Site Sweep. Every Sunday I’l pick a (hopefully!) useful topic and take you on a quick tour of a few sites that are worth checking out. Today, I’ve  picked some sites that might prove useful if you’re a writer of historical fiction. (Before the heckling starts, this doesn’t claim to be a Top Five, just an Interesting Five!)

Enjoy 🙂

http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/Explore-online/Pocket-histories

Among other things, this page is the hub for articles on ‘what was life like in…’ that are a useful starting point for research. The topics have a downloadable PDF and a general wander round the site is well worth it too!

http://the-history-girls.blogspot.co.uk/

To paraphrase what they say about themselves: The History Girls are best-selling, award-winning writers of historical fiction, writing for younger readers through to adults, spanning periods from the Stone Age to World War II and locations from Trondheim to Troy. “We’ll share our thoughts on writing, research, reviews, and all aspects of our work. We love what we do and we want to talk about it. We hope you’ll want to join in!”

http://suewilkes.blogspot.co.uk/

I follow Sue on Twitter @SueWilkesauthor and she always has an ear to the ground for interesting historical snippets. She is an author and creative writing tutor who specialises in family history, social history and literary biography. On her blog she gives a taste of what she is working on or on other history topics that have caught her attention. Well worth a visit for ideas and info.

http://www.middle-ages.org.uk/life-in-middle-ages.htm

This site has info on the middle ages in general, and links on the page above take you to accounts of daily life for people at a range of different social levels.

http://www.socialstudiesforkids.com/articles/ushistory/13colonieslife.htm

Ignore the poor images for the links, and the fact the site is for children; there is some good information here on the day to lay life of early colonialists in America.