Pinterest for Writers

I thought I would post some of my favourite writing tools here. One of my top 10 is Pinterest. For the uninitiated, it's basically an online cork board where you can pin images and articles that take your fancy. You can choose if you want to share your boards with others, a select few, or keep them private.

I use Pinterest for my setting research and have one for all of my novels (as well as every room of my house). You can either search Pinterest itself for images you like, find pictures via Google or wherever and add them yourself, or pick from the recommendations based on your viewing history (my current recs are a combination of beautiful staircases, educational activities for kids and - bizarrely - sexy clowns). It's really simple and a great way of gathering images and bookmarking research articles all in one place.

In a previous post, I mentioned a book I wrote inspired by Ballard's A Drowned World. This is a Pinterest board I made when imagining the setting, plus there's a screenshot below.

As an aside, Pinterest have introduced a newish tool in which you can take a smartphone picture of anything and it will find you similar images online. I just tested in on my cat and found his doppelgängers from around the world. It will probably prove more useful in other, yet to be discovered, ways.