The Hardest Part

Dear Writer’s of the World,

When Writer’s Block entered my life, I found that the hardest part of living was the fact that I just couldn’t write. No matter what form I used, paper and pen or keyboard on a word document, blog, or even facebook, there just weren’t words. Of course, that was when I hit rock bottom. Before hitting that point I would write several things that I perceived as crap and then trash them.

For anyone that’s at that point right now, do NOT trash your scraps. Unless of course it was going to be a facebook post and should not be. In that case, please don’t post it. But for your blogs, your word documents, and you’re notebooks, save them. You never know, those scraps that came out of your inner mind in the heat of Writer’s Block’s time in our life could be a nugget to something wonderful once Creativity comes calling.

But for rock bottom, what is there to do? Well, you need not wait it out anymore. This is where things called Freewriting and Journaling come into play. They’re essentially the same thing, except freewriting isn’t as private, unless you want it to be, in which case the terms become interchangeable.

What? You aren’t the type to be a diligent journal keeper? Neither am I. I need motivation to keep me going if I’m going to even attempt that sort of thing. It’s why my other blogs have failed. The only one that had more than two or three posts was the blog I had to create for a grade my freshman year in college. It had five posts before I deleted it.

But a few days ago I found something that’s been working for me. It’s the Motivation that got the wheels in my mind churning and helped me start this blog. So for my first contribution to the war against Writer’s Block, I present to you (drumroll please!):

http://750words.com

Quote from the site’s About page:

“I looked this up. 250 words per page is considered to be the standard accepted number of words per page. So, three standard pages are about 750 words. Of course if 750words.com hadn’t been available, I would’ve totally found a way to prove that 249 words per page was the accepted standard. It really just comes down to the fact that this amount of writing feels about right. You can’t just fart out 3 pages without running into your subconscious a little bit… 750 words takes a bit of effort, and it never fails to get me typing things that I have wanted to articulate without realizing it. And that’s the point.

Because 750 words is nothing to sneeze at, it’s also nice to have an easy way to know how many words you have to go. This site of course tracks your word count at all times and lets you know when you’ve passed the blessed 750 mark. And it gives you a nice big screen to write on, automatically scrolls as you write (like a typewriter), and automatically saves your writing as you go.”

The site is completely private, so you don’t even have to worry about clicking the ‘private’ button on the blogs. (If you’re like me, you probably forget that all too often, which is a rather strong deterrent from the daily mind dump, which we all need to do if we want to be uncluttered and ready to write from within.) However, my favorite feature is something that you can check out under ‘today’s stats’ and on the ‘Eternity’ pages. The creator of the site has two programs that analyze your writing and shows charts based on your writing style. I’ve found out that I, apparently, really enjoy talking about death. Well, I’ve mostly been talking about my ideas, and yes, my characters face death a lot. I just never realized how much until I saw those charts.

The ‘today’ page will analyze your daily writing while the Eternity page will analyze everything you’ve ever written, as well as compare it to the general stats of the world as a whole. Well, the world that writes on 750. It’s a great place to discover yourself.

But I have to say something very important right here: Take the charts with a grain of salt. They may not be completely accurate all of the time. After all, it is just a computer program that has no direct interaction with you. It sees your writing and analyzes that. It cannot tell what you’re thinking about at any given moment.

There’s one other feature I would also like to point out before letting you all go: The badges. They’re little, but they’re a cute sort of motivation. The first three days, you’re an egg. Then you’re a turkey, then a penguin, and then a flamingo. If you reach 500 days without skipping a single one, you get the space bird badge. And days-in-a-row isn’t the only kind of badges you can get. In the end, they’re little bits of that motivation many people need. It isn’t much, but every little bit helps.

I wish you well in your endevors,

K. Elaine Taylor