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.
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.
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).
(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.
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.
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.
Someone was wondering why even people on TV with non-mainstream-TV-approved body shapes always look so good in their clothes.
The long and short of it is: their bodies aren’t better than yours. They just have people tailoring every single piece of clothing they wear to flatter their figures.
Off-the-rack clothes aren’t made to look good on most people’s bodies. The advice in the post was buy clothes that fit the largest part of you, even if they’re too big elsewhere, and have them altered to fit.
That post hit me like a lightning bolt. I have a curvy figure. I’m not plus-sized, but I’ve got a small waist and large hips. Which is great in certain types of clothes (dresses, mainly), but means that if I don’t wear fitted t-shirts or blouses–if they fall straight–I just look sort of… boxy. I need clothes that go in at the waist.
My grandma was an amazing seamstress, so when I needed clothes fixed, she was around to tailor them. When she got into her 90s and her eyesight was too diminished for her to sew, we started going to a woman in our neighborhood who’d lost her husband and had started doing alterations to bring in some extra income. OF COURSE I looked good back then. I had a tailor.
Then I moved away from my parents without really knowing How To Adult and would go to Target to get clothes and just get depressed by them and never realized how much of an advantage having people who could tailor my clothes (and, you know, parents to pay for having them tailored…) had been.
So. I have a 1970s Singer Fashion Mate sewing machine that is designed to weather the apocalypse–I got it at Goodwill for $20.
And I have begun researching how to tailor your own clothes. If anyone else was wondering about that after that last post, here are some helpful links I’ve discovered.
When and Why to Get it Tailored - This article is (annoyingly) set up as a slideshow, and focuses on getting a professional to do your alterations rather than doing them yourself, but it’s got some good advice nonetheless, such as:
Basic alterations that can make a huge difference, such as adding lingerie loops to keep bra straps in place (SERIOUSLY MY FAVORITE DRESSES FROM HIGH SCHOOL ALL HAD THESE AND WHY DID THEY DISAPPEAR IN EVERYTHING I WEAR NOW?), adding snaps between the buttons on button-down shirts for larger-busted women (you know how sometimes they gap? there’s help for that), etc.
Average prices (at least on the East Coast) for basic alterations: replacing a zipper will run you about $20, while tailoring pants or a skirt to fit your hips and butt will be about $35.
If you want to get a garment made of special materials (leather, fur, beaded/embroidered silk) altered, go to someone who specializes in working with that material.
What NOT to try to alter.
How to find a tailor.
Having that perfect dress that you love so much duplicated and how much that will cost.
Learning Alterations - Great step-by-step tutorials on basic alterations like how to take in the waist of jeans (essential if you have a smaller waist and larger hips, because it’ll stop them from riding down every time you bend over or sit down).
Tailoring Ready-to-Wear - A full-on online course from Craftsy (costs $24.99) with videos and individual lessons on everything from hemming pants to lengthening them to altering shoulders and armholes to adding hidden zippers.
Plus-Sized Fitting and Design - Another online course (this one’s $34.99) that looks like it focuses both on alterations and on actually making clothes that are flattering to plus-sized forms.
Alterations and Tailoring 101 - Not a how-to post, but this one has a lot of useful information and ideas, such as identifying which garments to alter.
Alterations Needed blog - A whole blog on this stuff, with a lot of detailed how-tos. It focuses on fixing things to fit if you’re shorter than average/petite, but contains a lot of great advice for anyone (like an entry on why button-down shirts often bulge in back and how to fix it).
Pinch and Pin your Shirt - Super-quick video tutorial (aimed at gentlemen), but useful for anyone who wears button-down shirts on how to fix a baggy shirt.
If I find other helpful tutorials, I’ll add them. If you know of any, please let me know!
reblogging because I’ve known this for a long time but my sewing skills are not so much in this direction as of yet
this is how you can buy almost anything and make it a confidence tool
I also posted DIY Naturally Dyed Eggs with Color Dye Chart from Two Men and a Little Farm here. At the link there is an updated post and a a much more extensive color dye chart using ingedients like grape juice, tea, beets, carrots, canned cherries, dill seeds, etc… *Read the comments for more ideas like frozen spinach. Photo from Martha Stewart.com
Okay so I thought i’d make this tutorial because when I was starting out trying to make gif in Photoshop CS5, I looked up a few tutorials & some of them were really hard to follow, so I made this tutorial really simple with lots of screencap’s & little text.
If you havn’t got Photoshop, HERE is my tutorial on how to get it for free..
So I hope you find this gif tutorial easy to follow :)
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