15 Places to Find Inspiration Online

Being inspired is one of the best things ever. Ideas pour through my mind. Simple, everyday events suggest new plot events, characters, and awesome snippets of dialogue. It’s a truly amazing feeling. But sometimes the inspiration just…stops. I might be trying to brainstorm for a new book, or deep in the midst of writing one already, and there are no new ideas to help me push through. I could sit around and wait for inspiration, but frankly, who knows when inspiration might deign to come back? So instead, as Jack London said, I have to go look for it with a club.

There are lots of places online to look for inspiration. Pinterest is an excellent (though dangerously addictive) place to find inspiration, as are some websites. My amazing writing friends Cait, Elizabeth and Kristana, helped me compile a list of 15 places on the web where you might be able to track down some of that elusive inspiration and capture it for your books. There are a lot of great Pinterest boards and quite a few other resources as well. Hopefully at least one place on this list will help you find some awesome ideas.

1. Writing Exercises: This is a great website with random generators to generate instant plots, dialogue, opening sentences, titles, and many other things. 

2. Prompts: This is a Pinterest board with a whole bunch of writing prompts. There are suggestions for stories you could write, sentences to spark ideas, and random what if’s to get your mind thinking. 

3. Saturday Story Prompts: The writer who runs this posts five new story prompts every Saturday, and her back catalogue is enormous. She posts dialogue and thought provoking sentences that could inspire some new ideas.

4. Storyboard-Words: This is a Pinterest board filled with pins covered in words. Sentences, dialogue, words on interesting pictures, quotes from famous people, this board has plenty of inspiring pins.

5. Stories of Someday: This Pinterest board has some of everything, words, sentences, pictures of people and settings. Perfect for generating new story ideas.

6. Waiting for My Pen: This is another Pinterest board that has both pictures and words. I’m especially inspired by the pictures on this one. They all seem to have a story waiting behind them.

7. Writing Starters: This webpage has lots and lots and lots of ideas to help writers start stories. It’s got first lines, dialogue, and words to incorporate into stories. There’s plenty of inspiration for starting a story here.

8. Writing: This is a really helpful Pinterest board with lots of sentences, words and even links to helpful writing posts on subjects such as how to write fight scenes with injured characters.

9. Inspiration of Things: Yet another Pinterest board, with words and pictures. Seriously, this board has some of the most inspirational pictures I’ve seen. I might be coming up with a few new story ideas myself.

 

10. It’s Time to Tell a Tale: This Pinterest board has lots and lots of amazing pictures to scroll through for ideas. There are a few with words, but mostly they’re just pictures.

11. Pictures and Stuff: If you’re looking for settings then this Pinterest board has you covered. It’s got lots of pictures of both settings, and also of some very interesting objects that might spark a few ideas. 

12. Write World: This website is dedicated to getting you writing. They have daily image, sentence, or word prompts, and also post music as a prompt too, which I found very interesting. I’ve used the pictures for inspiration in the past.

13. Writing Prompts: If you’re wanting just writing prompts, then this Pinterest board is for you. It is entirely dedicated to pinning prompts to get writers started with interesting facts, story ideas, and challenges.

14. Stories of Their Own: The pictures on this Pinterest board all scream ‘story ideas’ at me when I look at it. There are a few interesting word pins too, but the pictures are definitely most inspiring.

15. Characters in Their Own Right: This Pinterest board is perfect for character inspiration. There are so many good pictures of all kinds of people who look like they’re just waiting to populate a story.

Where do you go to find inspiration online? Any of these places help you?