A recent search for a specific type of site to help me build new characters led me down a rabbit hole. Normally, that would make me much less productive, but I have found a treasure trove of websites for writers.
Bring Characters/Places to Life
There are a few different places you can use to create a picture of something entirely new. I love this site for making character pictures as references, instead of stock photos or whatever pops up on Google Images.
thispersondoesnotexist: every time you reload the page, this site generates a headshot of someone who doesn’t exist. This is great if you’re thinking about a character’s personality or age and don’t have specifics for their facial features yet.
Night Cafe: this is an AI art generator that takes your text prompt and generates an image for it. I tried it for various scenery, like “forest” or “cottage.” It takes a minute for your requested photo to load, but no more than maybe five for the program to finish the picture.
Art Breeder: this website has endless images of people, places, and general things. Users can blend photos to create something new and curious visitors can browse/download those images without creating an account. (But if you do want to make an account to create your own, it’s free!)
Find Random Places on Earth
You might prefer to set a story in a real-life environment so you can reference that place’s weather, seasons, small-town vibe, or whatever you like. If that’s the case, try:
MapCrunch: the homepage generates a new location each day and gives the location/GPS info in the top left of the screen. To see more images from previous days, hit “Gallery” in the top left.
Atlas Obscura: hover over or tap the “Places” tab, then hit “Random Place.” A new page will load with a randomly generated location on the planet, provide a Google Maps link, and tell you a little bit about the place.
Random World Cities: this site makes randomly selected lists of global cities. Six appear for each search, although you’ll have to look them up to find more information about each place. You can also use the site to have it select countries, US cities or US states too.
Vary Your Wording
Thesauruses are great, but these websites have some pretty cool perspectives on finding just the right words for stories.
Describing Words: tell this website which word you want to stop repeating and it will give you tons of alternative words that mean the same thing. It typically has way more options than other sites I use.
Reverse Dictionary: type what you need a word for in Reverse Dictionary’s search box and it will give you tons of words that closely match what you want. It also lists the words in order of relevancy, starting with a word that most accurately describes what you typed. (There’s also an option to get definitions for search results!)
Tip of My Tongue: this website is phenomenal. It lets you search for that word you can’t quite place by a letter in it, the definition, what it sounds like, or even its scrambled letters. A long list of potential options will appear on the right side of the screen for every search.
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Hope this helps when you need a hand during your next writing session 💛
The blessed time of Cab Calloway of his orchestra and his extraordinary dancers.
(Put on sound)
Pretty sure that’s the Nicholas Brothers. They weren’t a permanent part of Cab’s band, but they were collaborators and incredibly popular in their own right.
They were self taught dancers who basically pioneered their own style of highly acrobatic tap and jazz dancing. There’s another clip that goes around here, from Stormy Weather that they did all in one take that is literally mind bending.
Holy fuck we really are starting to come up on a hundred years since this happened. What a world, what a world.
Oh I love this. This is actually the first time I’ve seen this clip colorized and whoever did it did a MASTERFUL job.
I’m obsessed with several things every single time it comes up:
1) That poor saxophonist in the first row at the beginning. Clearly either his first day on the job or he’s temporarily filling in for someone else. Either way he clearly was not warned about the tap dancers doing jumps directly over his shoulders cause he ducks and flinches EVERY TIME while the rest of the orchestra basically ignores them because it’s a day ending in y
2) DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH CORE AND THIGH STRENGTH IT TAKES TO GET UP FROM A FULL SPLIT WITHOUT USING YOUR HANDS LET ALONE MULTIPLE TIMES AND FAST??? MY GOD THE NICHOLAS BROTHERS WERE PROBABLY ABSOLUTELY SHREDDED UNDER THOSE BAGGY TUXES
3) Okay yes the multiple split jumps down the stairs is fucking iconic but that doesn’t mean my eyes don’t fall out of my head every goddamn time. like… holy fucking shit
4) Would absolutely smash young cab calloway, my god the CHA stat alone
You know they practiced hard enough to get it done in one take because this shit is hell on the thighs and you don’t want to have to do it twice
Asked by Anonymous
