This is some stuff I’ve gathered over the years from various masterposts and poking around on the internet that help me with my creative writing. I hope you find something to help you, these have really gotten me far! (Note: Everything is free!)
I can not stress how amazing this website is. You can keep track of your characters, events, plot lines, and settings. It’s great if your story has a lot of different characters and places you need to keep track of. You can create timelines in which you place in your characters and have a visual representation of where they are and the events happening while they’re there. There’s a lot of information about it on the site if you want specificities.
This lets you set a goal for how many words/chapters/lines/etc. you want to write in whatever frame of time you choose. There are many options for how you can divide your time, and what your quota is for each day. It also gives you visual representations of your goals and progress. This is super helpful is you’re a procrastinator like me.
This site is awesome. You enter in a name, and it gives you a list of names similar to it. This is great for when you want a specific type of name (ex. specific to a time period, specific to a race) or when you have a certain feel for a name you want, but don’t have an actual name in mind.
Has a bunch of names for girls, both common and unique.
Has a bunch of names for boys, both common and unique.
Most Popular Surnames in the US
Having a practically unheard of surname can sounds awkward, unless it has some sort of relevance to your story. Keep it mainstream and believable by picking from this list. If you scroll to the bottom there are also options for popular surnames in America by race, which can be quite helpful.
If you’re not one to sit and scroll through lists, then try out a surname generator. You can also enter a first name and see how the name and the generated surname look next to each other. This can also generate a lot of other types of names, like for locations or boats or teams or first names or whatever.
This generates believable sounding angel names.
This site has a lot of different options for mythological creatures, and you can also choose what length you’d like.
Having some visuals can be quite helpful if you need inspiration. Just play around with search terms and you’ll find some cool, inspiring stuff. You can also create an account and pin pictures that inspire you to look at later. If you want, you can have different collections of pictures if you want to organize your pinned pictures with different labels. As an example, here’s mine (which you could also use for inspiration).
Tumblr Blogs ( 1 2 3 4 5 6 )
(Warning: Some of the links are nsfw and/or potentially triggering) These are a couple of blogs that have some cool pictures that are good for inspiration. Also, I recommend creating a blog that you use to reblog things that inspire you for whatever your writing. I have one for a novel I’m writing and looking at it always gets me inspired.
I love this site. You can turn on sounds like river, fire, storm, railroad and others. You can combine them to create different environment sounds, and choose the individual volume of each one. Another thing this site does, is it has a space for writing. It’s very simple, just an empty space, but the background slowly changes color as you write. It’s not distracting like it sounds, it’s actually very relaxing, and the change is nice so you’re not staring at the same-looking screen for hours.
This site is good if you want to hear the background noise to your story. It has themed generators for specific sounds like a battlefield or a spaceship, but also other types of sounds. It’s great for getting into the mood or the scene.
This is great if your story is set in the city, or even a town. It sounds extremely real and is very relaxing.
Star Trek Bridge Ambience
You don’t have to be a Star Trek fan to find this useful. It’s really good for any type of future-y setting, especially a spaceship or work setting.
8tracks ( 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 )
8tracks is my go-to site for writing music. You can search by mood, genre, fandom/character (good for fanfics), or anything else that comes to mind. There are also tags like “writing inspiration” and “character inspiration” that have great stuff. You search multiple tags at once, to get the exact feel you want. You can also make collections of playlists, which is helpful to organize by things like “fight scenes” or “insane characters.” I’ve linked playlists that are great for writing inspiration above, each with a different theme. Also, here’s a helpful masterpost that has a collection of 8tracks playlists for writing that are categorized by scene type.
Video game music is designed to get you hyped and concentrated, which is great for writing! It’s also quite fun to listen to, so if you’re looking to write an exciting but light-hearted scene, this is good to get you in the mood.
This is actually just a link to one of Daft Punk’s ablums. It was the soundtrack to Tron: Legacy, so it’s super intense and future-y sounding. You can listen to the album anywhere, really. They also have songs that aren’t on that album that are good for future writing.
Other Masterposts ( 1 2 3 4 )
These are some masterposts I use a bunch that have lots of great writing resources. They’re mostly resources for writing characters, but the first one touches on a couple different topics.
If you feel like you’re character is a little too perfect, here’s a bunch of flaws you can give them. However, know that this list was originally created for RPG characters, and anything that would give the character a disadvantage would be considered a “flaw,” so that’s why a few of the suggestions are a little odd. It’s a great list otherwise, and extremely helpful.
This is a site that explains what all the colors stand for and mean, and what they’re associated with. Throwing color symbolism in your story can be really cool and an easy thing to do to make your story a little deeper.
Realistically depict your character being stranded or going on an adventure in a challenging terrain. There are guides for being stuck on a island, in the jungle, in the forest, in the ocean/open water, in the desert, and in the snow/extreme cold.
