If you’re writing short stories or books—and let’s face it,
who’s not?—I have a few tools for you, character name generators (contemporary
and Seaborn names) and a word pair list generator, all of which I use for my
own work. One of the greatest things
about fantasy and science fiction as a genre is that so many F&SF readers
are also writers. I don't think you'll find that in
thrillers, murder mysteries, romance, or anywhere else.
The contemporary name generator lets you create a list of male or
female names. Same goes for the Seaborn Name generators, except that they're all ancient Greek names, male and female.
The word pair list is a way to spark ideas. Sometimes when I'm stuck in a plot I will pull random words out of the dictionary--usually nouns--and play with the ideas, see how the story would change if I introduced poison, or make one of the characters a really good cook, or take a word like "chronograph" and it makes me wonder what would happen to the plot if there was a "ticking clock"--a count-down timer on a bomb, or the bad guys are going to kill someone at a particular time and the protagonist has to do something extraordinary in order to prevent it. The words are there to feed the story with new and unexpected ideas. It's not quite the same, but think of it as something like Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies, except for writing instead of music. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies. There was a cool "Oblique Strategies for Authors" panel at the last Readercon led by Glenn Grant with panelists Gavin Grant, Eric Van, Jo Walton, and others).
Check it all out here:
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