750words.com

Browsing the facebook page of one of my old English professors (Dr. Smith), I came across the mention of a website called 750words.com.

Apparently, there was an once a writing exercise where you attempt to write three pages (long-hand, on paper) of just random, stream-of-consciousness stuff, every morning; with the idea that it would get your creative mind working and make it easier for you to do your proper writing.

Well, the guy who designed the 750words.com website says that he's reviving this exercise, with a difference: it's all online. You type the equivalent of three pages (750 words) of stream-of-consciousness blarg. It's not a blog, because it's not public. Only you can go back and read it. The only thing that's public (as far as I can tell) are the "statistics" pages, showing how much you used particular words, gathering what your mood and thoughts are from the particular words you used -- and I'm not even quite clear if that's open to the public. You get "badges" for writing fast, for writing frequently, and such.

I glanced over the page and was a bit skeptical. For one thing -- writing "exercises" never work for me, which seems to be the problem with me and most books about writing: they always have you doing these little exercises (write a page about your first kiss! write fifty words about your favorite food!) It's not good writing, it serves no good purpose, no one will ever want to read it, it makes me self-conscious about my writing -- and all I can think while I'm writing it is that I could be working on something worthwhile, but NO, I'm sitting here writing a freakin' theme.

But, I don't know, it sounded like an interesting experiment... To see if it actually did free up my subconscious so I could write. Could I manage to write 750 words a day, even just of random nonsense? So I sat back, and in about twenty minutes, I'd hammered out 750 words of stream-of-consciousness blurf.

Well... I didn't feel particularly different. But I did go home and start writing on another actual writing project of mine that I've been stalled-out on. So maybe it did help!

I went back again this morning and wrote another 800-something words. We'll see if this really works... Mrs. Hall