Do you love to write? I know I do. But, sometimes, the creative juices just ain’t flowin’. So what is a geek girl to do when she experiences writer’s block or just needs to sharpen up her mad skillz in fiction writing?
She gets Rasmus Rasmussen’s freeware WriteThis. From the site:
The tool generates writing exercises, based on a set of keywords and criteria. It can generate characters, locations, items and special rules, and you the writer have a specified number of minutes to combine these things into a story…
…WriteThis can generate more than 25 million different exercises and with each new version, even more are added. The current version is WriteThis 2.0 BETA, featuring some powerful new features such as addition of custom exercises!
I like this program because it’s light, simple, and amazingly useful for what it is. And best of all, it’s free!
I help run a private creative writing forum… I showed this to one of the members who does short stories and she liked it alot… may have to post about it on the forum.
Some time ago, I wrote a couple of “improv” tools to help writers (poets, mostly) break writers block some time ago… simpler than this, since they’re for poetry rather than prose. One uses a situation and a control word and the other uses a work of art and a control word. The control words are chosen from a database of 500 or so words, and help prevent plagiarism (The original purpose of the “improv” tool was to help us detect plagiarists who applied… each app requires 2 prewritten poems and one improvisational work… even if the improv work isn’t very good we can almost always pick out whether someone’s a legit writer or not) as well as providing a sort of starting point to help them focus in and get something down.