Top 5 Tips for Brainstorming (With Downloads!)

Brainstorming. We all do it.

If you don’t do it, you probably have some kind of secret idea generator in your brain. I, for one, welcome our brainstorming robot overlords. But if you’re like the rest of us and sometimes you just have no idea what to write about or how to write about it, don’t give up. Here are my favorite 5 ways to brainstorm.

Kill Writer's Block with Fish Bowl of Prompts

I came across this great tool floating around the internet. It's beautifully minimalist and straight to the point. Fish Bowl of Prompts offers one thing and one thing only: creative prompts.

This is the site's only page. It offers a cute description of a room with a fish bowl full of writing prompts sitting on a table and a bare-bones prompt. Click the "...Or something" button to get a new prompt.

Fish Bowl supposedly has "hundreds upon hundreds" of prompts, stylized as "small slips of paper". I haven't spent enough time clicking to find out if this is true or not, but there are certainly a lot of them. They range from the mundane and romantic-- "You should make something about... a coffee date!"-- to the slightly weird-- "...extraterrestrials!" and "...giant robots!" The prompts are short-- usually just a single word or short phrase. But they can be surprisingly evocative of tons of great ideas.

What do you think? Have you seen any tools like Fish Bowl of Prompts? What about other prompt generators or writer's block killers? Share them in the comments!

The Ultimate Guide to College Note-Taking

College will be starting up again in August for those of us who have become slaves to the system and taken out more loans than we know what to do with. Since we're paying ungodly amounts of money to be there, we might as well get something out of it.

Ask any college student and they'll tell you that taking notes is important. Actually, you probably won't even have to ask. They'll just sort of start talking about it if you spend enough time approaching their event horizon. Most full-time college students have fallen so far into the singularity (i.e., homework) that they have no time to think about anything else. They physically cannot comprehend anything but school. Especially if it's finals week. Even light cannot escape. Approach with extreme caution.

"Yeah, I just got out of my 8 a.m. Llama Breeding class."

The Best Name Generators for Writers

If you're anything like me, you have trouble naming your characters, towns, magical creatures, legendary weapons, talking cars... et cetera. Sometimes it seems like all the good names are already taken. Some names are just too iconic to use anything that sounds similar-- Harry Potter, Bilbo Baggins, Jim Kirk. These are some of the best name generators I've come across.

The 5 Most Inspiring Tips for Writers

I'm a fiction writer. I've been interested in fiction basically since I could hold a pencil. Other kids had imaginary friends; I had story characters. I used to come up with backstories for stuffed animals and virtual pets like Neopets. (In fact, some of my Neopets characters have been around since 2007. No shame!)

I have a few guidelines that I use when I write. None of these are rules, per se, just suggestions that you might find useful. They help with motivation, technique, and style, but content is up to you!

The Morgue File: An Artist's Secret Guide to Knowing Everything

No, it's not that kind of morgue. A morgue file is a repository for inspiration, tutorials, reference images, writing tips, newspaper clippings-- and it wants to be your new best friend. There are no dead bodies involved (unless you're just that kind of person, I guess).

Who uses morgue files? What are they used for?

Artists, writers, storyboarders, college students, animators, supervillains, teachers— pretty much anyone who needs quick access to a bunch of things that are related to each other. 

You can use morgue files for quick reference, tutorials, tips, dirty cheats, all kinds of things. You can put reference photos and photos of cats and pictures of things that just inspire you to be creative. 

It's important for artists to have reference photos on hand so that they can draw from life and create accurate art without having to interrupt their workflow by Googling 'how many toes does a llama have?'.