For past couple of months I have been undergoing a writing crisis of sorts. Reviving this journal was a part of the plan to over come the writers block. The plan did work for a while and then I slipped up again. I don’t really know if the thing I call a ‘block’ is real or just part laziness and part twitter effect, but I would like to put the blame squarely on twitter because I do manage to write about 3000 words during the week in tweets. However I still struggle to come up with a decent blog post about anything. As I tweeted Twitter killed the blogging star! but thanks to twitter I came across 750words.com!
The tag line for the site is ” Private, unfiltered, spontaneous, daily” and is based on an idea presented in the best selling book “The Artist’s Way” written by Julia Cameron. It is something called the “Morning Pages”, where you get up and write 750 words as they stream into your consciousness. 750 words are roughly equivalent to three pages on a printed paper. As wikipeida puts it stream of consciousness is a narrative mode that seeks to portray an individual’s point of view by giving the written equivalent of the character’s thought processes, either in a loose interior monologue, or in connection to his or her actions. Stream-of-consciousness writing is usually regarded as a special form of interior monologue and is characterized by associative leaps in syntax and punctuation that can make the prose difficult to follow. This does not mean that the stream of consciousness has not produced any notable works, Ulysses by James Joyce and The catcher in the rye are two such works which I have read and enjoyed.
What 750words provides is a minimalistic uncluttered editor which auto-saves your work as you type and informs you when you reach 750 words. To keep the user motivated there are number of badges which can be earned, like you start with an egg, 3 days of continuous writing will get you a turkey, 5 day streak a penguin, you become a flamingo in 10 days. There are some added badges for speed typing – cheetah, un-distracted typing – hamster, just head over the Badges section on the site to see a complete list. You can enter challenges for writing every day throughout the month and get your name on the wall of fame or hall of shame. If you are like me you will like the stats the best. Apart from the the typing speed and word count the site also uses the Regressive Imagery Dictionary (for the emotions), and the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count system to dig into your subconsciousness.
Go ahead, try it. Has worked for me perhaps it will help you too…
