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Writing prompts can be found all over the Internet, from single words to pictures to scenarios. Hey, a writing prompt doesn’t even have to be a “Writing Prompt” to be a writing prompt – anything can be used to kick off a piece of writing. But it’s nice when some thought has been put into something which is meant to kick start someone’s imagination.

This weekend I came across a new feature on the sci-fi/fantasy/science/tech/geek site io9 – Concept Art Writing Prompts. What I really like about it is that the pictures will most likely be weird and wonderful – a step up perhaps from a lot of ordinary and mundane prompts you might come across.

This is the first – a fantastically bizarre and playful image titled “Autopsy Lake”, by illustrator John Hendrix. It’s so wonderfully over-the-top that I’m sure it won’t fail to spure you into a story, even if it’s just a quick piece of flash fiction.

I think this will become a great resource for writing prompts, although at one a week it will grow slowly. It will be perfect though for the writer wishing to write a story a week perhaps, follow along and take your cue from io9 each week. The site always shows amazing and interesting artwork, so I am sure this feature will be no exception.

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What do you think of this feature? Do you know any other sites with similarly interesting and unique writing prompts? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below!

Image courtesy of io9.

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We all know, the Internet is run by cats. Or, something like that anyway.

Cats certainly have become ubiquitous online. They’re cute, they’re beautiful, they’ll fight you for a cheezburger. And now, they are encouraging you to write!

Written? Kitten!

Written? Kitten! is built on the principle of positive reinforcement. Write 100 words, and you get a new picture of a cat. If you want to push yourself, and go even longer without seeing a new kitty picture, then you can up this threshold all the way up to 1000 words.

Created by housemates Alex and Emily, this simple web app was (clearly) inspired by Write Or Die, but with extra cute. The advantage Written Kitten has over its more feature-filled counterpart, is that its positive reinforcement should work better than the negative reinforcement of Write Or Die. Having said that, it all depends on whether you like kittens or not.

But who doesn’t like kittens?!

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Images courtesy of Urs Wachter and .

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Researching your novel can be incredibly fun and very useful, but often a frustrating experience. Nowadays writers have the world at their fingertips, with the Internet just a click away. With such a wealth of information to draw from, we can often get lost in the clutter.

That’s where web-annotation software comes in. There are several choices on the market, and the latest offering is Scrible, created by Victor Karkar and Andrew Delpha, and released in public beta a week ago. Scrible uses a browser-based bookmarklet, and a browser add-on for you IE folks, to allow annotating and marking-up of web pages right inside the broswer.

Annotate & Highlight

Sign up is really simple, and free, and then all that you need to do is drag the Scrible bookmarklet to your browser toolbar. Once clicked, the bookmarklet brings up a simple editor toolbar, which can be used to add notes; highlight sections of text; bold, underline, italicize or strikethrough text; and select colors.

From the toolbar users can also select an annotating legend, share their page with others, and a button to save their page online.

Save & Organize

Organizing and saving notes for your writing is always a challenge, especially if you are working on a novel or a long piece of work such as a dissertation. Regular bookmarking is a possibility, and we have shown you better ways to save and organize your research before on FYW using things like Dropbox and Evernote. Scrible allows users to save their annotated web pages in a Personal Library, stored in the cloud so accessible from anywhere. Web pages saved here are organized by tags (with the same tagging principles as Gmail uses) allowing quick and easy retrieval of the information you need. Scrible also indexes the text of saved pages, so users can perform full content search from not only the web page texts, but also anything written in their notes and annotations.

Share & Collaborate

You can use Scrible to quickly share your saved web pages, along with any annotations and highlights you make, with anyone through email. This makes collaboration with others really simple, whether you are working on a piece of writing together, checking information with clients or simply asking advice concerning your research.

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With Scrible being in public beta, there is of course the chance that you will encounter a few bugs while using it. But by signing up for free you will be able to use this great software, and also help to fix those bugs and improve the service by giving feedback, before Scrible is fully launched.

Keep an eye on the Scrible blog for announcements on future developments.

How do you keep your online research organized? Let us know how you find Scrible, or whether you prefer any other web-research annotation tools, in the comments below.

Images courtesy of Scrible.com.

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With the Internet, the opportunity to create and share you writing is almost infinite. You can do it in a multitude of ways, but by far the purest I have seen is Pen.io. With just a pagename and a password (to allow you to edit your work) you can have a page set up in literally a matter of seconds.

Pen.io was created by Australian entrepreneur and designer Anthony Feint. By focusing on content, he has made a site that gives each piece of text its very own home, free from distractions like navigations menus, links or banner ads. Content doesn’t get pushed down below the fold and lost in pages of writing like it would do on a traditional blog. All that is to show on a Pen.io page is the writing that you create.

Creating couldn’t be easier with Pen.io. Here’s why you should be using it:

Simplicity

After you have come up with a page URL and password, a new page is created. On that page will be a amount of text that explains and prompts you on how to get started. All you do is click on this existing text to change and replace the title, the body and even the url you started with, and away you go.

Power

Despite its simplicity, Pen.io does allow you to do some pretty cool things, by allowing basic HTML and powered by the specially designed PenUp markup language. PenUp uses simple tags to allow things like video embedding (:video), images (:image) and even extra pages (:page). I’m sure by know you can already grasp the very easy concept behind PenUp tags! The language is still growing, with more tags under development. Follow along with Pen.io on Twitter, or subscribe to the blog, to stay up to date.

Content

The focus of Pen.io is firmly on the content: what you choose to write. And what you choose to write with Pen.io can literally be anything. Many people use it to share snappy, funny comments or jokes. You could write “blog” posts with this way. Perhaps write an online letter to someone, and then send it to its recipient via the URL. Or maybe you want to just write something for yourself, you can do that. Just don’t direct anybody to the page.

Be creative! There are a few examples of uses for Pen.io here, but there really is no limit to the number of things you can write. The true beauty is that you can use Pen.io to publish anything you like, no matter how long or short, no matter how trivial or serious.

Share

One of the best things about writing, and writing anything, is sharing it with others. The final wonderful thing about Pen.io is that sharing is as easy as copying and pasting a URL. They aren’t horrible, long URL strings either, with countless numbers, random letters and punctuation marks. You create a simple URL, making it evocative, informative, striking, whatever you like… and that’s it. It ends with a tidy .pen.io.

So, whatever it is that you want to write and share with the world, Pen.io is definitely something to try. Its simple, immediate and surprisingly powerful. It’s beauty lies in what YOU choose to do with it.

Please share your thoughts on Pen.io, and examples of anything you have written with it, in the comments below!

Images courtesy of Pen.io and @penapp.

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There is a lot of writing advice out there on the Internet. Even beyond this site *shock horror!* there is a wealth of amazing articles and videos and information to both help and inspire all types of writers.

The problem is that there is so much of it! Like anything on the Internet, finding information that is interesting, relevant and helpful can be a chore, and sometimes you might spend so long wading through the rubbish that when you find something that’s actually good you can’t even be bothered to read it, or you skip right past it.

What you need is something that brings the advice you want to you, without you having to search for it. One of the best ways to do this is Twitter. There are loads of interesting feeds offering inspirational advice, as well as many big- and small-time authors tweeting about their lives as writers, which can be very interesting and informative, and even agents offering insider knowledge on how to get published. By signing up to Twitter (if you haven’t done so already, as I know a lot of our readers are on Twitter) and following feeds such as these, the information comes directly to you.

To help you find the best that Twitter has to offer, we at Fuel Your Writing are going to sharing our favourite writerly feeds with you. Taking a lead from the popular Twitter hashtag #FF (or #FollowFriday – Friday is traditionally the day that Twitter users share their favourite feeds and friends with the rest of their Twitter followers) we will be running a regular Friday feature on our favourite Twitter feeds.

To kick things off, one of my favourite writing feeds:

This brilliant feed is a compilation of quotes, tips, articles and wisdom compiled by Jon Winokur. A lot of the quotes are from literary greats as well as people you might not have heard of – they are often very funny, frequently inspiring and always helpful. There are also some links to excellent articles, such as this one (shared in a recent tweet) about Writing With Style, written by Kurt Vonnegut.

Here are a couple of my favourite recent quotes from Advice To Writers:

Excellent advice on just “doing it” – sit down, write, and worry about editing later.

Writing should be bold, in both tone and content. Don’t hold back, write with guts. Read my FYW article on writing with guts here (shameless plug – Editor’s prerogative!)

Because we all need some to love, cherish and to put up with our writing!

So, get on Twitter (if you aren’t already) and get following Advice To Writers. And stay tuned to FYW every Friday for more awesome Twitter feeds and writing advice.

Who do you follow on Twitter that helps you writing? Please share in the comments below!

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Sing along now, everyone: “writers have to write.”

Pretty solid advice, by most standards, and the sort of mantra worth drilling into the skull of any poor sod writing for a living. Four years of university forced me to flex the creative muscle on a weekly basis, putting pen to paper for at least a few hours each day, but graduation paints a different picture entirely. This came as a shocker, but – and hold on to your hats, folks! – apparently I’m kind of lazy.

But that’s okay! Sometimes writers don’t want to write. Sometimes we want to sink into the couch and soothe our tired minds with less productive pursuits. For those forced to slog through a typical work day, that kind of vegetative state might be more common than not. As those off days start to tally up, however, so does the guilt – a creeping sense of restlessness, one only assuaged by sitting down and churning out some verbs.

How about we skip that guilt entirely? Writing every single day doesn’t always come easy, but it’s a battle-tested tool for fighting through writer’s block and helping to cultivate your personal style. And, with a website like 750words, even a shiftless writer like myself can stay well on track!

The concept of morning pages originated with Julia Cameron in her book The Artist’s Way, a process which tasks writers and creative folks of every stripe to touch base with their innate talent by writing three pages of mindless content every morning. Sounds strange, but it’s a great way to reawaken your latent creativity – in your sleepy state, the little voice that criticizes your work is often muted, allowing you to develop your skills without interference from that pesky thing between your ears. 750words adapts that same idea for the internet, providing you with an appealing blank screen and a little counter on the bottom right to chart your progress.

The goal is simple: write 750 words. They can be about anything, of course, and rest assured they exist for your eyes only. My daily pages often take the tone of a diary, but that’s just dandy – I’m writing, at least, and 750words provides a neat page of stats for me to skim whenever I’m done. The site employs computerized text analysis systems to show you the emotions that come through your words, as an example, and even your tendency to write about certain subjects versus the rest of the world. I’m proud to say I write about death slightly less than the rest of the planet!

The stats come formatted in pretty charts and graphs, making them both a pleasure to view and ponder. You’ll even receive various ‘awards’ in the form of animal icons for maintaining streaks of daily writing, and you also have the option to participate in the monthly challenge, whereby you strive to write every day for a month and give yourself a big fat pat on the back at the end.

You’ll find my name on the ‘Wall of Shame’ for the May’s challenge. I don’t want to talk about it.

All in all, 750words is a pretty nifty tool for writers. Rant about your ex, fiddle with flash fiction, or keep progressing on your latest novel – 750words provides a perfect home for your output, one that encourages a lazy author like me to keep writing every day of the week. Putting pen to paper on a regular basis is one of the best practices a writer can follow, so consider this a heartfelt recommendation to check the site out.

Image courtesy of 750words Facebook page.