Tools for writing more: 750 Words
I came across the website www.750words.com in the summer of 2020 when I was searching for ways to motivate myself to write every day. I used to sit on my balcony and write before the morning would get too hot. This practice was helpful in terms of both achieving my writing goals as well as calming my mind, as it allowed me to write almost in the open, in nature.
750 Words is a platform that helps you develop the habit of daily writing. You write online and what you write is kept private and saved automatically as you write. Your only task is to write 750 words a day, which can be of terrible quality. Just 750 words. No spell check and autocorrect. It has a really simple interface, yet it gives you ideas on your writing mood and progress. You can see how long it takes for you to write 750 words on different days and you can monitor your progress in a given period through simple stats. After an initial free trial, your writing is not lost, and you can still access and export it. To continue writing, there is a $5 monthly subscription fee. It’s a much better investment than a Netflix subscription if you ask me.
“Why 750 words?” you may wonder. This amount of writing takes some effort and thinking, and allows you to fully immerse yourself in the subject. Eventually, I always find myself writing more deeply than expected, accessing deeper levels of subconsciousness, which is something that I generally struggle with as a beginner creative writer. On good days, I reach the 750-word mark in a single sitting and continue writing. Nothing sets me up for the day like knowing that I completed my daily writing goal. Other times, I come back to the website multiple times a day, often writing nonsense just to hit the mark.
Using the website is also a good challenge. You start every month with a clean slate and collect points and badges for not breaking the streak. At any point, you can see how many writers are engaging in the challenge and how much the community has written on a particular day. In the past, I’ve set daily writing goals for myself or participated in similar competitions, such as monthly Twitter writing challenges (e.g., #JuneWritingChallenge) or an academic #GetYourManuscriptOut, but I always failed miserably and felt guilty for not following through. Usually, the goals were too ambitious and the accountability element too week, buried in the depths of the Internet.
Furthermore, writing in a word editor that keeps track of my word count never works for me because I end up editing what I’ve written rather than writing. 750 Words, on the other hand, has a very different feel to it. I am encouraged to simply write. Having a sense of accountability and the supporting community is exactly what I need to keep me engaged but not stressed out about having a daily writing deadline. Importantly, I feel like I’m learning about myself as I go, exploring my moods and emotions while writing thanks to simple but powerful statistics, like the ones from writing this post:
