3 Free Tools Every Writer Needs

Writing is hard work, whether you're a fiction aficionado or a hard-nosed fact-finder. Just ask any Vocal creator, Medium author, or Wattpad publisher amongst us. Fortunately, I've stumbled on three free tools that can break the tedium of writing and get ideas flowing a little bit easier. With that goal in mind, I'd like to share them with you all.

Important Disclaimer: THESE ARE NOT A.I. WRITING ASSISTANTS. While Jasper, CopyAI, and the like arguably have a place in the discussion for ways to get unstuck or conquering the fear of the empty page, these tools are centered around unlocking the creative power of the human mind.

OneLook

Have you ever needed that one perfect word for something but couldn't drag it from the tip of your tongue to the page? I know I have. A formidable vocabulary may be a prerequisite for writers, but that doesn't mean we don't forget the names of mundane objects (what is that thing that a door rests on, again?) or search fruitlessly for connected words to complete alliteration or other literary devices (what's a word about writing that starts with a C?). That's where OneLook comes in.

OneLook features a command list on its Home Page to help you find exactly what you're looking for, but the pièce de résistance is the unique OneLook Thesaurus functionality. While the dictionary allows you to search for words related to a concept or with certain characteristics, the thesaurus tells you the word that's on the tip of your tongue.

Remember my mention of the thing that a door rests on? I entered that phrase into the thesaurus...

...and got the exact result I was looking for. "Hinge" was the word I was thinking of when I wrote the line above, and it's the first suggestion in the list (it's even the one that's featured with a definition).

Hemingway App

Do you have a tendency to ramble on in a labyrinthine wordy bramble of adjectives and adverbs and build sentences that form what might otherwise be considered entire paragraphs as the commas and conjunctions strain under the burgeoning weight of your bloated clauses?

Me too.

That's why I love the Hemingway App, also known as the Hemingway Editor. Grammarly is great for catching actual spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors, but the Hemingway App helps you reign in your more verbose tendencies to settle on a simpler solution.

Not only does the editor highlight wordy, complex, and hard-to-read sentences, but it also draws attention to those ever-pesky adverbs and what I like to call "waffle words," like perhaps—words that rob your writing of its force by softening your delivery. It automatically calculates a goal for your usage of problematic vocabulary (adverbs, waffle words, passive voice) based on the total number of words in your piece and an ideal ratio.

Finally, the Hemingway App enforces that old adage (courtesy of Mark Twain): Don't use a five-dollar word where a fifty-cent word will do. Sometimes the fancy four-syllable peacockery we find so impressive can feel like a glass of ice water to the face of a reader. If there's a simpler word that means the same thing*, it's almost always best to use it. The editor highlights these ostentatious words and offers up their alternatives, making it easy to swap them out.

*Important Caveat: Sometimes there is a simpler alternative to the word you want to use, but by choosing the synonym, you lose some of the nuances from your original choice. When this happens, opt for the five-dollar word.

CapitalizeMyTitle Headline Analyzer

Catchy titles and headlines make a huge difference in engagement, readership, and SEO. I know that SEO is not a super-engaging topic outside of the marketing industry, but it still matters. Even here, on Vocal.

How many posts do we see asking about the secret to success, to Top Story selection, to winning a challenge? Enough that I wrote an answer you can read here. But motivation aside, it comes down to attracting and maintaining a reader's attention. If your title falls flat, the likelihood of you gaining reads without constant self-promotion drops to almost nil. The Headline Analyzer from CapitalizeMyTitle can help you get the most bang for your buck with limited space for attention-grabbing and enticement.

Also, as the name of the site suggests, it will capitalize your title for you. There are a bunch of ads (which is how the site stays free, so I don't mind), but when you analyze your title, you get four important numbers above the fold: your overall score, readability score, SEO score, and sentiment score. Scroll down for detailed breakdowns of each sub-score, such as the factors involved and how your headline scored in each criterion.

3 Bonus Generators for Fiction Freaks (Like Me)

Are you a wordsmith that enjoys building worlds? Crafting characters? Pacing a plot? There are a few more tools I'd like to tell you about! These three generators can help you get started or unstuck (and they're still not A.I. writing assistants) and create the stories of your dreams.

Reedsy Plot Generator

For many of us, Vocal challenges help spark our creativity and get us writing. But where does that leave us when the challenges run dry?

The Vocal community on Facebook, especially in Great Incantations, is often filled with requests for prompts and new contests to ignite new ideas. Many publishing platforms offer regular contests, but they often run for a long time and refresh less frequently than Vocal challenges. What if you want to write a new story every day, but you get tired of the prompt halfway through the contest?

For those who struggle to create without a prompt, the Reedsy Plot Generator could be just the tool you've been waiting for. I know it sounds like cheating, but it's more of a prompt generator than a plot generator. Let me show you what I mean.

The image above is the entire output of the generator. You can specify a genre (drama, mystery, fantasy, romance, or sci-fi), but I chose to run a random generation for this example. Whatever you choose, the generator gives you an ad-lib style prompt that contains the following elements:

• A protagonist (with a specified trait)
• A secondary character (with a specified trait)
• The genre or subgenre of the story with a theme
• The opening scene driver and setting
• A note about a story element
• A twist

All in all, the output is very similar to a first-line challenge in what is prescribed, but you also can disregard any of the items in the list. You can also "reroll" the generator, so to speak, keeping elements you like and disregarding those you don't until you have a prompt you feel you can work with.

Vulgar

Move over, Tolkien. With Vulgar, the fantasy language generator, anyone can create an intricate, functional, fully-constructed language in no time flat. Conlanging has long been the domain of linguists and polyglots, but Vulgar puts language construction within any English speaker's grasp.

You can customize the generation as much or as little as you like, and you can save your dictionary for future reference. You can even use their Smart Translator to translate English phrases into your new conlang!

This is one of my favorite tools of all time. In fact, I love it so much that I paid for the premium version. In my worldbuilding for Noyath, I used Vulgar to create more than fifty distinct early, middle, and "modern" languages (modern for the genre, anyway), with each descending from a single, original language that trifurcated. They have actual dictionaries, working grammar, and the complexity and depth that comes from natural linguistic evolution. I use them to name characters and locations, add depth to stories, define accents, and shape plots.

Fantasy Name Generators

This, to the uninitiated, may sound like an extremely niche tool. However, this incredible site is one of the most broadly-applicable tools I have ever seen. There are more than 1400 generators and tools on Fantasy Name Generators, including a map maker, guides, and more.

As if that wasn't enough, there is also a second site with even more resources and generators (although Roll for Fantasy is exclusively Fantasy and RPG-focused).

The webmaster, Emily, is a genuinely kind person who takes the time to thank contributors by name for donations, artwork, shares, suggestions, and corrections and plants trees with proceeds from the site. I cannot recommend this resource highly enough.

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These are six of my favorite tools to use as a writer, and none of them cost a dime for core functionality. I hope you found some new resources in this list, but let me know if I missed your favorite! I'm always on the lookout for new tools and software that make it easier to transcribe the stories in my soul. That's all I have for you today, but I'll be back with a dystopian story, a moon poem, and some more writing tips (inspired by an old Quora A2A) soon. Don't miss either when you subscribe for more!