I love 750words.com.
If you aren’t familiar with it, basically, it is a service designed to encourage the practice of writing every day, 750 Words per day, actually. It isn’t a blogging or journaling platform, like WordPress or LiveJournal. It isn’t event really a word processor. It is just a blank screen where you can type (or copypasta), and it will count and analyze exactly what you just wrote. It is just a nice little tool for writers to help them get through some of the hurdles that can come up.
Write You Slacker – Buster the Robot
A healthy mind might be addled by the idea of an auto-mailer robot telling them to get off their lazy ass and do some writing, especially considering the irony of it being an auto-mailer. I’m not, though. Part of setting up your account on 750Words lets you set up an option to have Buster (750Words’ Mailer Bot) send you an email reminding you that you need to write. You don’t have to have him email you, that’s optional, and you get to set up what time he sends out his little reminder. If you’ve already finished your 750 words for that day, he’ll send you a congratulation email instead.
As a guy that gets easily sidetracked by awesome things like buffalo wings and cartoons, it can be nice to have someone send me a little reminder that I’m suppose to be doing this whole “Real, legitimate writer” thing. Let me tell you, Buster is a lot nicer about it than my friends. He doesn’t ever use mean names and words that can’t be said on the radio.
No Body Sees that Crap But Me
With the pressure of the red squiggly lines gone, and no WordPress plug-in to mock me for writing in passive voice, I find that I can just let thoughts pour out, unedited. It allows for a very raw and visceral writing experience that I use as a buffer between my daily insanity and my “professional” writing. It gives me time to let my mind pour out onto the screen in whatever way it sees fit, even if that is ranting in a made up language, whining out all the pent-up wangst that I have stored throughout the day, or just writing about how I’m writing 750 words.
It lets my mind relax and create, and every once in a while, something miraculous happens, while I’m just putting every thought I have on paper for 750 (or more) words, I find little diamonds in the rough that I can snag up and use as a draft for a new post or a short story idea. I love them even more than normal ideas, because they are born 100% from my creativity. By having them flushed out onto the screen, I can work on getting them organized into a brilliant and insightful post, like this one.
No, I know you could do all that with a word-processor document on your computer, or a stack of composition notebooks that is coming dangerously close to being over a foot tall, but those things aren’t in the cloud. However, if that’s how you roll, power to you! After all, the entire point of it is to get in the habit of writing every day.
“You are feeling… Self Important”
One last feature really worth mentioning is the analyzer. When you finish writing your words for the day, you can go to a little page where Buster the Robot can let you know all kinds of things about your writing. He’ll tell you how long you took to write today’s words, and how many words per minute that equals out to. He’ll let you know how many times you took a break to go and get some peanut-butter crackers from the vending machine. Most interestingly, though, he’ll read what you wrote, analyze the words you used, and then pass judgement on your mental state. He says things like, “You’re feeling upset, and concerned primarily about money.” He also is known to give you a bit of a makeshift personality test based on how you were feeling while writing.
It’s not perfect science of course, and just like everything else on the site, no body sees it unless you want them to. It’s just a fun little add-on at the end, another little incentive to splash some thoughts down.
It really has been a big help for me as a writer, and I am strongly encouraging everyone to go over there and sign up right now. I really think it’ll help you out too, even if you just need a place to rant about the cellphone tower in your hometown being blown up by storm troopers.