Hello, I first posted this on my substack blog. Check it out if you like!

In this post I’m going to share a few useful creative resources I’ve found lately as I’ve been making art and trying to develop my story (as yet unnamed; the working title is “MVJ”). I hope you find these useful!

Writing

Text Synth is a tool for AI-generated text, and tends to spit out creepily coherent things. I put in a short blurb of the idea for my story, and it continued what I had written. I find it especially useful for name ideas (sometimes the names it makes seem to be genuinely made up - nothing comes up on Google/Google Translate!). If you seed it with a particular kind of name, it will choose names in a similar style. It’s a lot of fun to use (also, for some reason AI-generated things make me laugh an embarrassing amount - see Bots Of New York. I guess that’s just my sense of humour).

An example of TextSynth generating a character idea

I’ve been using Notion to write out ideas for my story, and I’ve been taking bits and pieces from templates other people have made to make one that suits me. Some especially good ones I’ve found are this novel template and this worldbuilding template.

There are a lot of generators floating around on the internet to help with writing, and I like this character personality generator which has a lot of depth to it, covering multiple personality inventories (e.g. MBTI / Enneagrams).

Art

Speaking of AI, this is something I had already discovered but I thought I’d mention it anyway: Artbreeder is a site for generating characters or landscapes. You’ll need to play around for a while to get an output you want, but it’s great for seeding ideas for stories or paintings.

An image I generated recently to help with an art piece

I’ve been using same.energy (recommended by Noor on her podcast) a lot recently to find photos for moodboards when I start a piece. The idea is that you can find images with specific moods and sort of “hone in” on what you’re looking for. It seems much nicer to use than Pinterest - at least for me.

same.energy

Well that’s all for now! Subscribe if you like ☺︎