Many of us want to become writers. While a good story idea and great language skills are the two obvious requirements, there are some other factors at play — self-discipline, knowing how to continue a plot, character development, fighting against writer’s block, and so on. Well, worry not. Arm yourself with a copy of Writing for Dummies and download these apps.
Writing Challenge
This app probably won’t help you become the next Vikram Seth, but it’s a great way to practise incorporating different ideas in a story, to see what works best. Once you press ‘Start’, the app prompts you with a few ideas. Choose what you like best and scribble away. You can select how often the app prompts you with an idea, words, characters, or plot twists. The best way to improve your writing is to write a lot, and this app makes sureyou keep writing. You can also share your story in the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) writing marathon.
ADVERTISEMENT
For those of you who like a more graphic approach to the writing process, Flava is very handy. It’s like a journal or scrapbook for your ideas, where you can add text, pictures, voice notes, video, related books or movies, and location data. You can then put them down together in a sequenced manner when you have the time. It’s kind of like a jumbled storyboard, so have fun putting the pieces together!
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
This app is a godsend, or rather, developer-send, for those of us who regularly suffer from writer’s block. The Story Plot Generator offers you a genre, a location/situation, a detail, a complication and a resolution for the story you’re stuck with. It then generates more than a million possible combinations of the selected points that make sure you can move forward in your plot without any problem. There are plenty of genres you can pick from, and even more are included in the pro version, which is ad-free.
Spice Mobile
Spice Mobile also helps hunt for that elusive muse, albeit in a different way. All it does is provide inspiration. If you do not know how to move forward within the plot, Spice Mobile’s comprehensive database of excellent (not to mention famous) literature can help inspire the next paragraph, if not page. The app also contains an excellent thesaurus to help you out of any kind of jam ( bind, difficulty, dilemma, fix, pickle, predicament, or quandary) with more than 8000 keywords, 22000 creative phrases . A Grab Bag option also collects associated phrases/keywords for better searching.
So go ahead, get inspired.