websites that made me want to write

I have to admit something. I’m a hoarder. Birthday cards, plane tickets, stickers I never put anywhere because I’m a commitment-phobe. They all stay shoved in different drawers, ultimately to be lost to the bottom of a moving box.

And like my stickers, I have a bookmarks graveyard full of sites I might never see again. However, every once in a while I come across a website that is so genuinely interesting and fun that I can’t let it go. Those get a permanent tab.

This is a list of those places. I’ve done this once before for music discovery. This time we’re headed to the land of the writers. For people who love language and occasionally lose it. For the days when the cursor blinks and blinks and nothing comes.

Some of these are tools. Some are rabbit holes. One of them is technically just a window1. All of them made me want to write.

Welcome to the world wide web, baby! I’ve got a passport and no plans2.

Let’s go.

Type in a word and watch it bloom3.

I typed in melancholy and it became a sprawling constellation of everything it’s ever touched. Synonyms, opposites, cousins, the words that live next door and the ones three neighborhoods over — all connected by little color-coded lines that tell you how they relate.

From melancholy, I found black bile humor, which sounds disgusting, but I couldn’t stop picturing it. Medieval doctors diagnosing sadness like a stomach bug, poetry as a symptom. I went in looking for a word and came out wanting to write a whole medieval comedy4.

There’s also a shuffle feature. Hit it and you’re thrown a random word like poppy. I lost twenty minutes on poppy.

My one complaint is that you can’t click through or learn more about the different words that pop up. It really is just the map. If a word catches your eye you have to retype it yourself, and there’s no detail waiting for you when you get there, just more web, which is still cool, but I’d love to be able to fall deeper into it without having to surface first. Still. One of my permanent tabs.

I have written about my complicated relationship with gamification. I stand by everything I said. And also…sometimes it just works.

4thewords is an RPG writing site. You have quests, monsters, and a little avatar. The monsters have HP, and every word you write takes one point off. Defeat the monster by hitting your word count within the time limit and you get a prize which is usually a piece of clothing or a random object for your character. The prizes don’t actually do anything, but that’s fine because that’s not the point.

The point is that I opened it and suddenly I was writing.

I love adventure games, so any excuse to be inside one, even a low-stakes browser-based one with a UI that’s more cute than immersive, is an excuse I’ll take. The gamification isn’t deep5, but it doesn’t need to be. It just needs to be enough to trick your brain into starting.

And that’s what it did for me. My biggest writing problem is the blank page6. I stare at it hoping poetry just arrives, which is not how I work and I know it’s not how I work, and yet.

4thewords fixed that by giving me something else to focus on. I wasn’t trying to write something perfect. I was trying to kill a monster. The words were almost a side effect.

Fair warning: you will probably think more about your word count than your actual sentences.

But, it’s fun. I like fun.

I went in expecting old drawings. Dusty botanical sketches, maybe some maps, the kind of thing you pin to a mood board and never think about again.

What I found was fairy tales.

Old Book Illustrations is a free archive of illustrations scanned from 18th and 19th century books that are all public domain, all searchable, and all completely free to use. And yes, some of them are botanical sketches, which are honestly really gorgeous7. But some of them are this:

And doesn’t that just make you want to WRITE? Looking at this little mothman traveler8!!! I felt nostalgic for something I had never seen before. That's the only way I can describe it. It looked like the illustrations from the fairy tales I grew up reading. I wanted to know him, and he's not even real.

That’s what this site does. You go in looking for visual inspiration and come out with characters, whole worlds, a feeling you didn’t have before you opened the tab. For writers especially, it’s a gold mine. Every image is a prompt, a setting, a story that already started without you.

And, don’t hate me, but I’m also getting tired of Pinterest. Every Substack cover image looks like every other Substack cover image because we’re all pulling from the same ten searches. I am not immune to this and I know that! But, this is the way out.

Just go. Start clicking. See where you end up.

I have been chasing the perfect ambiance setup for as long as I’ve been surfing the web. Even my Neocities has its own little iPod of curated sounds on it. I take this very seriously.

The thing that makes or breaks an ambiance site is customizability. A YouTube video of rain is fine, but it’s someone else’s rain finely tuned to be perfect for their ears. You get their thunder, their intensity, their mix, and you just have to accept it.

MyNoise gives you your rain.

Pick a theme and you’re presented with a full panel of dials. Individual sliders for every element of the sound. Your storm can have more wind, less thunder, high rain, a little distant rumble, no lightning cracks at all. You build it until it’s exactly right. Until it’s the specific version of that place that lives in your head.

The first time I used it, I chose Summer Nights and let it run while I wrote poetry about my small town. Something about porchlight, guardian windmills, crickets. The sound didn’t distract me. I let it flow over me like I was sitting outside, and the writing followed.

They’ve also grouped the sounds by mood — focus, ADHD, daydreaming, destressing. So if you don’t know what you need, the site already has a guess.

My biggest problem with writing is starting. I overthink everything. I want the first sentence to be perfect prose before I’ve written the second one, which means sometimes I never write either.

This site fixes that by threatening you.

Literally.

The Most Dangerous Writing App is simple: you start typing and you cannot stop. If you pause for too long between words, everything disappears. Just a blank page and the quiet humiliation of having lost your own thoughts.

The first time I used it I was just testing it out. Then my competitive side kicked in and I genuinely couldn't stop. And when you can't stop, you stop filtering. You write stream of consciousness, you write badly, you write things you'd never let anyone read, and somewhere in there you find the thing you actually wanted to say.

If The Most Dangerous Writing App is your morning pages9, then 750 Words is your end of day exhale. It’s the same premise, but a completely different energy. You write 750 words, roughly three pages, and that’s it. There’s no pressure, no timer, nothing deletes. It’s cozy!10

One is for edging yourself. The other is for winding down.

You probably need both.

Exactly what it sounds like.

Roll some dice, get some images, write a story using all of them. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

I’ve seen people use physical story dice in real life. Little wooden cubes with tiny illustrations on every face. There’s something about holding your story in your hands that I love. However, you’re limited to six images per die, and you get what you get. The digital versions don’t have that constraint. You can choose how many dice to roll, swap out themes, pull from hundreds of images instead of six. The prompt constraint is still there, that’s what makes it work, but you get to shape it.

Here are a few I like:

Dave Birr's Story Dice

Zero Dice

Language is a Virus

Roll, look, write. No overthinking, no blank page paralysis, just random images and the pressure of making them make sense together.

A bicycle and a comb and a cactus walked into a bar. Go.

This one’s a bit different. You have to step outside the box a little to get it, but stick with me. Window Swap is a collection of videos submitted by people all over the world — each one a view from their window. You don’t get to choose where you go; You just land somewhere and watch.

The first window I got was called Twilight Street’s Window. I sat and watched a front porch across the street, a deep green house decorated with pumpkins and cars silently passing by. The kind of scene that made me feel like I was in Gilmore Girls, which is the highest compliment I can give anything.

I stared at that little porch, those pumpkins, that specific quality of an October afternoon that belongs to someone I’ll never meet, and I wrote a fall romance. Just because I needed somewhere to put the feeling.

There’s something about watching a stranger’s ordinary view that makes you want to write. Maybe it’s the reminder that other lives are happening right now, fully formed, just out of reach. Maybe it’s just a nice window.

Either way, I wrote something. While staring out a window that wasn’t mine.

The internet is big. Most of us only ever see the same three rooms.

These are the doors I keep going back through. I hope you find a few of your own.

<3 brooklyn