The Most Dangerous Writing App –
I’ve used this high-adventure app to complete NaNoWriMo and to meet the 2nd draft deadline of my current WIP.
https://www.squibler.io/dangerous-writing-prompt-app
It’s a web-based app with a timer – 3 minutes or more; you decide – where you write into the text box and must keep going until the timer stops – or else everything you’ve written will be erased. You can’t stop for more more than like 3 seconds. It kicks your inner critic out on its ass, because who has time for that? Not you.
The first time I used it, I got erased. I hesitated a second too long over something that normally might have had me staring at the screen for a few minutes. Fortunately, I remembered most of what I’d written, so I was able to recreate it and not look back.
I struggle with fluency – not in getting my words to flow well for a reader (once edited) but in getting them to flow onto the page to begin with. The fix I usually apply for that is free writing – starting and not allowing myself to stop, writing gibberish if necessary to keep things going until the good stuff kicks in. But that doesn’t always – usually doesn’t, anymore – work for me.
According to my mother, when I was about 5 I told her that nothing she said to me mattered unless she hit me…that no matter how many times she told me to do something, I thought she didn’t mean it unless she hit me. (The psychology of that is left for another day.)
Apparently I’ve carried a version of that belief into my writing: no matter how much I might want to get it done, only the threat of punishment will actually make it happen. And it has to be painful punishment: getting kicked out of my writing group if I didn’t meet the requirement of a full ms (I met it); wasting $600
if I didn’t finish that 2nd draft mentioned above; having my writing erased if I stopped for a deep inhale.
When I’m desperate, this is what I use. And so far it has worked.
So if you find yourself fiddling around at the keyboard instead of writing, try this. Just maybe test it first on something you won’t cry over if it gets erased.
