750words.com / Morning Pages In General

Oh scribblers of ILX, who else has become addicted to this?

Loved doing morning pages, hated how late they made me for work because it too so long to do them longhand. Now I do them in 10 minutes over lunchtime and I feel great. With badges!

Been doing it for two months on and off, and I just signed up for my first "one month challenge" - I want my albatross, dammit!

Anyone else?

Don't know what the link is, but my wife did morning pages for a while and loved it, she just couldn't keep it up. Is a site that encourages you to do morning pages?

750 words sounds like a really good idea, actually - it's just the right amount for someone like me, who often can't manage extended prose on a regular basis.

Not that I could really afford even 750 words at the moment, but then that is mainly because I'm in the process of writing 'not-for-fun'.

the link is ... http://www.750words.com

It's a site that encourages you to do morning pages through silly little gimmicks like giving you badges for how many you complete, and giving you stats on what your mood is when you write, and slowly builds up a profile of who you are and what you like to talk about. If you miss a day, your badge goes back to 0, so it's amazing how effective it is to make you want to do it every day.

It's much MUCH easier to type morning pages than it is to write, at least for me anyway, because I type about 10x faster than I write.

And it is weird, I find that I have actually been writing *more* since I started using it - granted, writing prose is different from writing a thesis - but I think the theory is the same. It primes you, I find it also encourages you to talk about what you want to write about what you're writing about, to think it through on the computer before you type it out for real.

The way they compute the stats are funny, though. Every time I talk about fandom or music I'm listening to, it decides that I'm talking about "religion" - the religion of Aphex Twin would be pretty funny mind you...

Actually I was just reading my copy of "The Artist's Way". Years ago I used to do morning pages, longhand on paper.

So much of The Artist's Way is straight up hippie BS, but I do love them morning pages.

The stats on this 750words site are comprehensive to say the least.

They're not always completely OTM, but I do find them helpful - and sometimes surprising! You learn a lot about yourself, the more you write, it totally incentivises me to do more of it. Though it's sometimes a shock when you view your "most used" words and things like that.

Just C&P'ed 'All work and no play makes snoball a dull boy...' 75 times, and the message popped up 'Did you just copy and paste? That may mess up your stats, but that's OK.' - damn, busted!