Write or Die

I discovered a writing program called Write or Die that puts pressure on a person to put words on the blank screen. This seems both like a helpful idea and a terrible idea. The premise behind is that the only thing you can't fix is a blank page. I don't know if I agree with that. If pressure makes you write in the wrong direction entirely, you will end up wasting a lot of time trying to fix pages that shouldn't be there in the first place.

But on the positive side, I wrote more in 22 minutes with this program than I normally would in 2 or even 4 hours. It worked because it forced me to not be distracted by other things. How did it do that? Well, on "normal" level, when you don't write for more than about a minute, the screen starts to turn pink, then red. When it gets red, a loud annoying song starts playing in the background. (My only issue was that I actually couldn't stop singing the song for the next two days.)

But, as a coworker asked, was the writing good or was it crap?

Well... to be honest, it had it's weaknesses. But generally at this point, when I am constantly forcing myself to write, I end up having to do revisions, major revisions. Even if it takes me hours to write a couple of pages. So at least I made some progress. I think the events are fine. It's the wording that needs work. And that's ok.

It's a very different experience of writing for me. I'm usually slow and careful, easily distracted by ideas that I have to research and sometimes this leads me to other ideas and soon I've done a ton of research, only some of which is useful, goofed off some, had a snack and my page might still have only two sentences on it. I'm still deciding whether this is a better way. Try it for yourself and let me know what you think.