Tools Any Creative Writer Must Have

In this day and age, technology offers you the world at your finger tips. You no longer need to go to a country to place a story in it. You no longer need to buy baby books to find names for your characters. Everything is free or costs a very little amount so you can start writing and never have to leave your home. Here are tools that all creative writers need.

Baby Name Websites

There are plenty of them! Bookmark a number of baby name websites to help you with your character names. All you need to do is go through the list to find one that jumps out. Many will let you do searches for certain types of names, such as by the alphabet, the meaning of names or the origin.

Search Engines

While Google is arguably the best, there are plenty of other search engines out there that will offer you the information you need. Whichever you choose to use, learn everything you can about it. How will it rank information? Can you filter the information to remove the content that you don’t want? Can you specify something if a word has a few meanings? The more you know, the more effective your searches will be and the easier it will be to find out information about your chosen subject to write about.

Google Earth

Want to write about a country that you have never been to? Need to write a chase scene and want to make it more realistic? Google Earth will help you with that. You can see a 3D view of the area and find out the street names. This is much easier to plan around buildings so readers are drawn into your story. This is free to view on your computer or you can download the app onto your phone.

A Good Encyclopaedia

Gone are the days when you need to have shelves filled with encyclopaedias or have to visit your local library. The internet is full of information for you. Avoid Wikipedia, unless you want to scroll down to the references and check them! Wikipedia can be changed by anyone so the information is not always accurate.

When working on creative writing, I’ve found all of these have been excellent. I can write scenes in the United States without actually going there to make sure it is possible; I can offer different names for my characters instead of using the same ones in different books; I can offer accurate information about history or myths when using them. I recommend these tools for any writer just beware of doing more research than you need to because it is fun!