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!
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