“Writing is a struggle against silence.” ~Carlos Fuentes
This is one of my favorite quotes about writing (and trust me, that’s saying something) mostly because it addresses the central struggle that anyone who writes for fun, blogs, or writes books faces on a regular basis. Writing is fundamentally an act of bravery; when we write, we really are breaking some sort of silence. I think this is why I find blank pages so intimidating. They have that same feeling to them, and it’s very hard to get past that sometimes. When you add in the stress of writing for a blog, or for a book, or even for yourself, you’re adding in a personal element that makes things difficult. If silence is intimidating, breaking that silence and then adding in deeply personal reflection is even harder.
This is why, quite frankly, a lot of people don’t write. This is why a lot of writers frequently have trouble writing. That struggle doesn’t really go away either; every time you open a new word document, or a new page of a notebook, you’re right back where you started. Every time you actually write something down, you’re being incredibly brave.
I get a lot of email with questions about how to get started writing on a daily or a weekly basis. The irony about this is that for a long time, I didn’t. I wrote for work, and then I stopped. I chalk part of this up to me being someone who is a little freaked out by writing deeply emotional and personal things. I never tried to start the process, because I wasn’t sure I was cut out for it, and I wasn’t sure that I could keep up with it.
I’ve been using this site called 750Words for awhile now, and I am really not exaggerating when I say that it’s changed how I write, how I think, and is slowly changing how comfortable I am talking about that deep and dirty personal stuff that I’ve never been a fan of discussing. The concept in itself is pretty simple. It’s based on one of the exercises in The Artist’s Way; it’s one of those ideas that is very zen in the fact that it seems like it should be easy, but can actually be pretty painful and difficult. Each day, you write three pages (or 750 words). There’s no assigned topic, and there’s no expectations. It’s just a simple brain dump to let you get your brain connections moving.
The site takes the concept and improves upon it, at least in my view. The first advantage of the site is that it’s completely private. No one has to see your whining, your anger, your kinky sex practices, or your love of dorky sci-fi shows but you. Whatever you write, it’s yours.
Secondly, it adds in a scorekeeper element. It uses silly things like made up bowling scores and little animal badges to keep you going, and will even send you cute little reminder emails at a set time each day telling you how long your writing streak is. If you want, it will also analyze your writing over time for thematic content and what you seem to be interested in. It’s a simple interface, but has an amazing amount of depth to it.
All the people I know who use this site started on a whim, and have moved on to do incredible things with it. My daily writing has helped me accidentally stumble upon solutions to problems I didn’t even know I had until they came up subconsciously in my personal writing. I know people who are using it to draft novels in small chunks; these are people who have never considered fiction writing before. I know people who are using it to make a daily schedule and have become much happier and more productive as a result. This is, in my mind, the beauty of the whole system. You can use the daily writing practice to fulfill whatever need you have in your life.
It would be easy to label this as a website for writers, but it’s really more than that. It works for anyone who is interested in exploring themselves and helping their brain branch out in new directions. I suspect it might even be a good place to try and draft tricky things like the dreaded ‘About Pages’. No matter what you think you might use it for, Monday is a good day to start (mostly because if you do it every day this week, you’ll have a very cute penguin badge by Friday).
If any of you guys get motivated to try it (or already use it), leave a comment and let me know what your experience is. I’d love to know more about how other people use the site in their daily lives.
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