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Show HN: Write 500 Words a Day
Hello! I made a web application for my friend and I to use as part of a New Year’s resolution and decided to open it up to the public. It’s pretty simple but I’ve really enjoyed building it and using it so far. I’ve written ~10,000 words, which is a lot more than I used to write. Enjoy and be nice!
- OhNoNotAgain_99 4y ago
- slindsey 4y agoGreat idea. Looks good. It's always great to develop something for your own use. Years ago I used a similar site: https://750words.com/ https://750words.com/
- netsharc 4y agoI think I've been getting daily^W weekly email reminders to write my 750 words for 20 years now... I really ought to stop fooling myself that "I'll make this a part of my routine, soon!".
- zimpenfish 4y agoSigned up in about 2010? Managed about a month. Still getting the email reminders. Still going "Oh yeah, I should do that again."
- thenerdhead 4y agoI’m curious why you gave up on the artists way after one week? The entire program is quite helpful whether or not you do the morning pages or artist dates. Cool app to help build a habit of writing.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bitxbitxbitcoin 4y ago500 coincidentally is around the word limit for a chatgpt response.
- bakugo 4y ago[flagged]
- outside1234 4y agoRust makes for a great topic to write 500 words on every day!
- shtopointo 4y agoCould be very useful for people learning a new language! (consider marketing to language learning subreddits / communities). I would find it useful for that exact purpose, however, I think 500 words might be too much. 150-200 is good enough. Would be cool to be able to change the amount of words required.
- dchuk 4y agoIt would be interesting to combine the daily routine concept, with an AI chat engine, so the goal is to have daily conversations of a certain length/depth, about random topics, between you and an AI, in your target language.
- lesinski 4y agoFor those interested in this sort of thing, I strongly recommend https://new.750words.com https://new.750words.com
- tetrahedr0n 4y agoI love that you took action to make your idea a reality. That's a trait that not everyone shares, from my experience. Writing is a wonderful way to express yourself creatively. I can relate. Essentially, it's a journal. I find journalling to be very healthy for my mind and have journaled online and offline for most of my adult life. Though, I must admit, I don't do it everyday. Personally, I find doing something artistic daily to be the most fulfilling. Whether drawing, writing, playing music, or whatever, it allows me to reap the benefits of exercising those creative muscles. The part about writing a few pages when you wake up is a good idea, IMO. Not that it needs to be a daily structured routine, but what you experience sleeping is a unique experience that is worth writing down, occasionally. I've reflected on earlier journals I wrote when I woke up and have been surprised to read something I almost didn't recognize as my own.
- lumenwrites 4y agoI'm working on a similar project: https://writingstreak.io https://writingstreak.io
- reidjs 4y agoDoes anyone else have the problem where they write a lot, but it all seems to go into the void and never produce any tangible benefit? How do I produce writing that people want to read?
- Octokiddie 4y agoWhat do you notice people reading in your area of interest? You might try emulating that a few times and see what happens. Also, you might try distributing your writing more widely - not to promote it, but to get feedback. Find alternate distribution channels.
- neilv 4y agoMy New Year's resolution, to achieve positive text-writing valuation, is to join the HN 10Karma Club. It doesn't pay the rent, but one can't deny the quantitative validation of imaginary Internet points.
- DiggyJohnson 4y agoI resent you for making me aware of that this could be a goal. Cheers, and godspeed.
- neilv 4y agoI mean, it's right there, in the corner of the screen, like the score in a video game. :)
- Veen 4y agoI’ve been quite tempted to delete my account and start again so getting to 10,000 doesn’t become a goal. It’s fake internet points but I feel the temptation nevertheless.
- yesenadam 4y agoWhat do you write about?
- _9hey 4y agoThis is interesting to me because I have a lot of ideas that get cut short as soon as my bias toward action kicks in. “Write then do” sounds like a good practice, though I’d be more interested in using a foam daily note. The calendar visualization is nice, and the availability of a website is nice.
- k__ 4y ago2017 I had the new year's resolution to write one blogpost a week. Now, I'm making all of my income from technical writing. Consistency is key. With that said, less is more. Stephen King said, he writes 6 pages a day, which is probably too much for most people. But one page a day should be doable.
- sagarpatil 4y agoDo you write a blog? Could you share any links to ‘How can I get better at technical writing’?
- k__ 4y agoNot really, sorry. I just wrote and wrote and wrote and one day companies approached me to pay me for articles. Later, I worked with editors and tried to learn from what they edited in my articles.
- komali2 4y agoOne of my favorite videos is when George RR Martin asks Stephen King on stage, "How the fuck do you write so many books so fast?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xR7XMkjDGw0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xR7XMkjDGw0 Stephen King answers basically with the same advice he's always given, as you said, he tries to write 6 pages a day. In the video, he says he tries to get 3-4 hours of work a day, and get to that 6 pages. He breaks it down, "if the manuscript is x length, it will take y months to finish." George RR Martin goes on to ask essentially, "but what if writer's block? What if internet distraction? What if something comes up?" He goes on to tell a story about Rowling that basically resolves with "nobody really understands what writers do," but based on King's own "On Writing," I think he does claim to understand, and his tips are not really any different from how you generate content in any other medium, methods that those of us terminally online HN types are at this point experts via headlines alone, we see so many posts on the subject. The method is demonstrated in the "6 pages" quote that gets thrown around: define the objective (write a book), break the objective into estimable and achievable goals (write 6 pages a day: this allows for book length x to be finished in y months), and set dedicated, distraction-free time to achieve the day's goal (as I recall from "On Writing," King has a dedicated writing office and doesn't bring his phone into it, and doesn't have internet access in there. I may be remembering incorrectly or mixing up my absurd breadth of reading I've done on the general topic of staying focused). Meanwhile GRRM, for all his undeniable success, talent, and skill, talks about the act of writing in kinda the same way an amateur might, or maybe just the way an artist might, a sort of mystical "waiting for the muse" type style. "What if I just don't wanna write?" King's answer, and the answer of many prolific artists, programmers, etc, that I've read, would be "why are you whether you want to write or not? You have today's goal already, so, achieve it." The wanting is irrelevant, the muse is unneeded, you've broken down the task, go do today's TODO list. Are you going to re-justify for yourself every single day the overall objective? Well, tbh, I do like that as a mindfulness self-affirmation exercise sometimes, but the point is you can't just sit around waiting to want to do the small part of the larger objective, you gotta just put the hours in day after day. I think a lot of us across all disciplines are missing that key skill in production: project management, I think I'd call it. The most prolific artists are the ones who grabbed that skill and added it to the toolset as a discipline-agnostic ability. Hence why when King talks about his method it sounds the same to me as what I've read here from programmers, what I've seen on youtube from animators, and what I've heard on podcasts from musicians.
- Nifty3929 4y agoHow long does it take to write 500 words? I guess I could just try it and see, but that would require, you know, writing.
- drakonka 4y agoI've measured this recently... sort of. I do fiction writing sprints. Writing down as many words as I can in 15 minutes. Word counts range between 400-ish and 600-ish. This is just brain dump writing basically, which will need to be edited after (though more often than not it turns out to be more usable than I expected).
- paulpauper 4y agodepends on quality, i suppose
- andrewinardeer 4y agoThank you. I have signed up and will participate in this exercise. May I kindly suggest that you consider displaying the word count while the user types in their text?
- subjectsigma 4y agoNot saying this tool is bad or won’t help people, but: 1. I spend a large majority of my day reading or writing text. Emails, documentation, white papers, comments in code, Slack messages, texts, PowerPoint. The absolute last thing I want to do when I get home is write more. 2. I type fast and can churn out like a thousand words no problem. It is significantly harder to a) pick an interesting topic and b) form a thought that is coherent, accessible, interesting, and overall worth reading. I imagine people who do this spend years writing stuff that nobody (not even themselves) cares to read
- subjectsigma 4y agoJust the thought of an interesting twist on the topic: a daily writing tool with a “spaced repetition” twist. You seed the tool with a list of writing prompts, e.g. “Write a list of ten things you think would improve your life.” Then, a few days later, the tool randomly selects one of the prompts and asks you to write 500 words on it. A month later the same prompt is re-introduced without showing you the previous writing. Prompts can be interleaved with one another so you are writing about a different thing every day. It happens again and again until at some point you are presented with all the snippets you have written about the topic and are asked to choose whether you would like to keep the writing in the pool or not. If you do then you are only given that text every day to edit until you decide to finish. If you choose to not keep it then all texts associated with that topic are archived and you keep getting differs prompts. Good idea or bad idea?
- karaterobot 4y agoI did this for most of this year. I didn't work toward a word count, I just set up a time between eating breakfast and signing in to work where I'd write instead of browsing the internet. Ended up writing 75,000 words, and it was surprising to me how easy it was. Once I got into the habit, I did it every day, not just during the week.
- layman51 4y agoThis is a nice idea! One slightly-ridiculous thought I had though is, how can I handwrite 500 words a day? Is there an app that might help me with this?
- GrahamL 4y agoNice! I've been writing for a long time as well. I've found writing consistently and in a stream of consciousness manner is very helpful. This being HN, you can bet that I also wrote an app for my practice ;) https://www.indelibleapp.com/ https://www.indelibleapp.com/
- tjstankus 4y agoThis looks really well done! I've thought about writing an app like this and you've got every feature I envisioned and then some.
- yawnxyz 4y agoI've been looking for something just like Indelible! I just tried it out but got the error when I tried to save a draft: "Argument schedule for data.prompt.create.schedule must not be null. Please use undefined instead." — this is from starting off of the tutorial, and trying to hit save.
- tptacek 4y agoJust a note, this is 3 medium-sized HN comments per day. :) You could populate the tracker from people's comments, maybe.
- bricemo 4y agoI had a new years resolution to do a similar practice for writing code. At least 30 minutes per day every night. It's been by far my most prolific year of all time
- tomekw 4y agoOP, you have mentioned the entries are encrypted. Could you please explain how? :)
- nickagliano 4y agoSure! The writings, tags, and prompts are encrypted at the application level (using Rail 7’s ActiveRecord encryption, which is pretty cool). I think that this is about as secure as it could be beyond letting users generate and store their own encryption keys.
- BaudouinVH 4y agoI'm a writer and I say: "Great tool !" - would love to be able to use markdown format (more a nice-to-have than absolute requirement).
- XiphiasX 4y agoWill there really be much value from writing with onset of ChatGPT?
- bambax 4y ago> I have always been very methodical, and when my quota of work is done I break off, even in the middle of a scene. Slightly OT (but not by much): I have read somewhere that one secret to write more is to stop in the middle of something -- if fiction, in the middle of a scene, if non-fiction, in the middle of a demonstration or exposition for example. The rationale is that the brain 1/ hates starting new things and 2/ loves finishing. So if you stop in the middle, you will absolutely want to finish the next day, whereas if you finish, you will not want to start a new scene and you may postpone going back to work indefinitely. Now for the disclaimer, I have tried this but never actually succeeded, and in effect I'm stuck in the finish/hard to start again mode. I'm also afraid I won't remember what I was trying to say, but the main problem is the desire to finish proves too hard to resist. YMMV.
- citizenkeen 4y agoRelated, I've found stopping episodes of television in the middle makes it much easier to stop bingeing. If I finish an episode there's always* a revelation that I want to go on to the next episode to resolve. But in the nadir of the middle I'm usually more satisfied and I can just turn it off.
- ps_singh21 4y agoHave you considered making the website available as a PWA? That would make it convenient to write everyday.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoI found that a good exercise for me, was the idea of a “mini-saga,”[0] which I first heard about, in Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind. It helped me to be more concise (which I need —badly). I have no problem at all, writing a lot of words. The challenge, for me, is writing fewer words. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minisaga https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minisaga
- geekybiz 4y agoMinisaga looks interesting. I have a similar goal - to write more concise stuff (on tech topics) without losing the gist.
- type0 4y agoFor writing about technology one tip I got from someone: set your goal to 10 topics a week, you won't write 10 but it becomes easy evaluation tool for how productive your week was. If you have bigger topics, chunk them up.
- nickagliano 4y agoI like this idea. I have a friend who writes news and journalistic pieces, and I recently asked if he ever writes for fun. He said that creative writing is like pulling teeth. So he could easily write 1000+ words, but writing 500 creative words would be a good exercise. I’ll send him the Minisagas idea.
- throwoutway 4y agoThis reminds me of when (attributed) Ernest Hemingway was asked to write a short story with six words: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_sale:_baby_shoes,_never_worn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_sale:_baby_shoes,_never_wo...
- supercor 4y agoGreat tool, really like the simplicity of it as it just makes me do what I want to do, and then leave.
- saberience 4y agoOr you could just 750words which has been around for 15 years I guess now and does the job amazingly.
- bovermyer 4y agoSomething that people should be aware of with regards to 750words: You can use it to track and graph numeric data, too. If you have something in the following format in your entries, it will get added as post metadata: MY_METRIC: 12345 WEIGHT: 226 pounds The first word after the number is used as a label for the resulting graph.
- dubeye 4y agoI've always found 750 just a little too much. Also 750 doesn't have the same prompt feature. Seems like a valuable addition to me.
- thot_experiment 4y agoStorytime! I used 750 word a lot about 10 years ago and then they lost all of my data somehow, it was my journal and I had used it to process some deep trauma. Losing it made me lose all faith in SaaS as a concept and since that moment I haven't kept anything important anywhere where I don't have access to the bits directly. It's probably kinda like self driving, maybe in reality data loss is really rare, but losing data when it wasn't your fault just feels so much worse. I imagine just like dying when your self driving car malfunctions, even if on average it kept you safer.
- nickagliano 4y agoThat sucks, I’m sorry you lost your writings. That sentiment is part of the reason I built the site myself. But that does make me think that when I build an exporting feature there needs to be a “download a backup” option.
- nickagliano 4y agoTo be transparent, there is database backups on this site, but letting people download their own backups feels like a nice to have. So everyone can have their bytes.
- eric4smith 4y agoMe: ChatGPT please write 500 words for todays essay on the importance of writing 500 words each day. ChatGPT: Ok, here is an essay…
- Zvez 4y agoI wonder what you usually write in these notes? I can understand writers/bloggers who can just use it as their motivation tool to do their job/hobby. But for the rest of us, what would you write there every day?
- nickagliano 4y agoIt depends! If I have energy and time I try to write fantasy stuff. If I don't have time or energy I just stream of consciousness journal, which sometimes turns into something cool, sometimes it's nonsense. I write it usually in the afternoon or evening, so it's fun for me to think of things throughout the day or jot them down as a prompt and crank out the 500 words later in the day.
- citizenkeen 4y agoDo you have a roadmap? Or a ko.fi? I'd love to be able to support this. I'd also love to be able to export my text.
- nickagliano 4y agoHere you go! Monthly support: https://buy.stripe.com/5kA5kn2jd8XV39m144 https://buy.stripe.com/5kA5kn2jd8XV39m144 One time support: https://buy.stripe.com/00gaEH3nhdebfW83cd https://buy.stripe.com/00gaEH3nhdebfW83cd
- nickagliano 4y agoAlso text exporting is the next thing I'm working on :)
- andrewpbrett 4y agoI wrote 500 words yesterday but the calendar date is still blue... any chance you can take a look @nickagliano? The text appears when I click on the date.
- nickagliano 4y agoWhat browser are you using?
- nickagliano 4y agoI made a change which should hopefully fix any calendar date staying blue problems you were having. Let me know if that's not the case :)
- andrewpbrett 4y agoYes that worked!
- RobKohr 4y agoIn my daily task list template in Obsidian I create a task formatted like this: - [ ] [[slop/2023-01-04]] and I go into that and close my eyes and just type stream of consciousness, sometimes about a certain subject, and without editing, until I get to 500 words. It helps to get the flow going with little pressure on doing it right. I call it slop to emphasize that none of it is going to be good.