I recently heard about Word Hippo, from a school pupil at Victoria Park Academy in the West Midlands, England. It’s an online dictionary, thesaurus and general all-round word helper.
I’m used to using the Oxford English dictionary and similar reference works, to which I have access through my library membership, so I wasn't feeling tremendously optimistic when I approached
I love how even the most mundane of photos can act as a stimulus to the creative writing process. That’s why I always carry a camera of some description around with me.
I have always liked presenting ideas in the form of a magazine cover. It can act as a stimulating writing prompt for other people, and it can also serve to help you focus on some key ideas. But most of all, it’s just enjoyable in its own right!
If you want to write consistently on a regular and frequent basis, you don’t have to use technology at all.
True, it can help. I, for example, like to give myself a bit of extra pressure by trying to write articles in half an hour or less, using TimeLeft. I wrote about that in How to write an article in 30 minutes or less. Some people prefer a no-frills wordprocessor such as FocusWriter (see my Review of FocusWriter).
However, I was reminded by Stephen King in his book On Writing that the routine of shutting yourself away until you’ve achieved your daily writing goal is an excellent strategy.
If, like me, you enjoy taking photographs, then why not use them in your blog posts. An easy way to do so is to open a Flickr account, upload your photos to it, and then use them when you need to.
Flickr is, to be honest, looking a bit long in the tooth, although its recent innovation of displaying very high resolution photographs by default is, shall we say, striking. But it is still a great service in my opinion, and for the writer a much better one than, say, Facebook.
Flickr, blogging, digital photography, embedding, photography in How to, Photography, Web 2.0 