Month: July 2017

Use Your Pain Wisely

The past few days, I’ve been hating moving my mouth and eating more than usual due to severe pain. My wisdom tooth (well, one of them) has been acting up, and after a while, my jaw joined it. It’s a real fun pain fest, I’ll tell you that! </sarcasm>

However, pain can be helpful in the creative process. Today, to spite this normal but painful issue, I posted a prompt on Twitter:

(Random shootout to those in the image~)

Pain can be a horrifying setback, but you can use it to your advantage when your muse feels dry. I find some of my best poetry has been from letting my pain onto paper, and it can be great incentive for writing aggressive moments to torture challenge your characters and help them grow! Even if you don’t give them the same pain in a story, you can think of how they’d react to it compared to you for personal character development, or just use your frustration to give them a situation you were already planning to make them struggle with.

Whatever way you choose, remember: writing is more than an art, it’s a lifestyle (and an outlet)! Use your experiences, pain included, to your advantage!

Even Without A Computer, You Can Write!

I don’t have a working computer yet, but I’m using my time without it to write still. I find it hard to type on my tablet, if I’m being honest- something I basically always am- but even if I have to fight with autocorrect regularly, I won’t just stop writing! There’s lots I can do thanks to apps…and many are free!Today, I’m going to share some of my favorite apps I use when I write, along with some little tricks for using apps not even FOR writing for writing purposes. Please feel free to share your own tips, app preferences and more in the comments!

APPS MEANT FOR WRITING AND WRITERS

  • Lore Forge Creator Resources – This app has all sorts of generators in it that you can use offline, from names of places and characters to motives and jobs! Names and jobs have options of modern and fantasy, and places include street names, pubs and more!
  • World Scribe – A great way of planning worlds, World Scribe is a simple app with the ability to put basic information of places, people and organizations in your world. You can also link them, include pictures of them, add snippets about them, and it’s really easy to use!  
  • Character Planner – World Scribe is more for simplistic planning, but if you want to go into more details, Character Planner is a a great free way to go in depth for all your characters, and places too! It separates information you can input for each place, character, etc. with prompted information, but you don’t have to answer everything. If you leave a piece blank, it won’t show up in the view of the character sheet when you finish edit mode, and while it includes all sorts of questions for appearance, personality, life, story involvement, relationships and more, you can easily add custom information too! With places, you get prompts for everything from the government and religions to ecology. For when you want to go really in depth, this is a must have to me.

APPS YOU CAN USE FOR WRITING EVEN IF NOT MEANT FOR IT

  • MediBang Colors – Although this app is essentially a free mass coloring book, the varieties of line-art and mix of coloring tools makes it great for concept pictures! You can either use line-art from the library included and other people, or you can add some of your own. With bucket, pen, gradient and more, you can easily color the line-art you feel fits a character to be like them for concepts! Here’s one of my recent results as an example. 

    • This is a side character for Alien Irony. My coloring isn’t as awesome as stuff others share in the MediBang community though. Just browsing is fun sometimes!

  • Creative Games?! – A lot of games include customization in some way, and even if it’s a simple farm game, you can try to play it as if what you do is in perspective of a character and how they would! One company I like the games from is Kairosoft. It’s all simple and retro designs, but I like customizing whatever I’m making in the game like a character would. I also like making replicas of sorts (at least basic construction/layouts) of character’s houses in Minecraft. I admit most of these aren’t free, sadly, but…

FOR INSPIRATION’S SAKE

  • RPGs – Though my favorite games are from Kemco (I splurge on them a lot when there’s a sale on the play store), RPGs in general are known for their complex storylines and characters, making them great for inspiration. A really creative game I found recently, Light Apprentice, mixes RPG elements and comic books insanely well, and you can play the first chapter free, and incredibly moving!
  • Manga Reader – If you like manga online, you should love this app. You can read online through it’s easy reader from at least seven different manga sites, from MangaFox to MangaHere and more, and it’s a lot like having an online manga library card on your device! You can also download chapters for later, meaning even without internet you can enjoy your favorite scams. It’s search can be by title, author or genre, and if you enjoy a manga you can both add it to your favorites (which doubles as the home screen of it), press “related” for other works from the author and similar stories, and it always saves your place as long as you read the scan consistently on one source. Did your source flake? You don’t have to go from the start- choose what chapter you were on on another site with it and it’ll save your progress there as well. If you add both to your favorites, it’ll appear as two separate entries though.

    There’s likely many more I haven’t discovered yet, but these are ones I had almost daily, so I wanted to share. If you share your favorites I might just try them and add them to this list! Next time I’ll share ways to use social media for fuel too. That’s all for now though. From my tablet…I wish your stories forever flow and grow!