Before We Start: Choose Three Things

Before we start, I'd like you to choose three things.

It doesn't matter what three things you choose.

Inspiration

Each might be an animal, a concept or place. Or a person, a brand and a point in time. Or a word, weather and a feeling.

IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT THEY ARE!

And you can change them at any time, or have more than three. 

With lots of the exercises, you will need some raw materials to work on, images, sounds, texts, data so let's go get three random ideas. Your chosen things can be anything. You might already have three things you want to work with, great, but if not let's use these random sites to magically bring three things to you.

USE THE RANDOM TOOLS AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS PAGE TO HELP YOU.

Wikipedia Random

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Random

Click on the Special:Random link to get real items to use in your writing. I got "Swarfega" and a Serbian footballer.

Resources

If you have decided on three things, if you want you can use these resource sites to go and collect some pictures and sounds etc.

Creative Commons

https://search.creativecommons.org/

Freesound

https://freesound.org/

Open Image Collections

https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/openimagecollections/

New York Library Digital Collections

https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/

EU Open Data Portal

http://data.europa.eu/euodp/en/data/

Data.gov.uk

https://data.gov.uk/
Find data published by central government, local authorities and public bodies to help you build products and services

Kaggle

https://www.kaggle.com/datasets
Data to download

Royalty Free Soundtracks

https://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/full_list.php
Great list of Creative Commons audio files

BBC Sound Effects

http://bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk/

16,000 BBC sound effects for personal, educational or research purposes.

pngimg

http://pngimg.com/
Large collection of isolated PNGs, great for making montages.

Free Audio Books and Poetry

http://www.openculture.com/freeaudiobooks
Huge List of Free Audio Poetry and Audio Books

Over 13,000 Free Audio Books

https://archive.org/details/librivoxaudio

Project Gutenberg

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?sort_order=downloads

A collection of thousands of free to read and use texts, from Trump's inaugural speech to Alice in Wonderland.

Europeana Archives

https://www.europeana.eu/en

Europeana provides access to millions of books, music, artworks and more – with sophisticated search and filter tools to help you find what you’re looking for.

Tools

There are the tools that might provide some things you'd like to work with.

Random Animal Generator

https://www.generatormix.com/random-animal-generator

Generates a number of random animals for you. If you dig around, it can also generate places, flags, food and lots more.

TakeThreeNouns

http://writingexercises.co.uk/take-three-nouns.php

Creative writing prompt tools

RandomWordGenerator

https://randomwordgenerator.com/

Generate random words to use as a creative prompts

Meaning Generator

http://meaning-generator.com/

Random concepts to help with creativity. Amazing what you can make with just three words