Here’s a unique site I keep in my writing bookmarks.

If you don’t keep typing it will erase what you’ve done. If you hesitate, the font turns reddish-brown and fuzzy but it returns to normal if you begin typing again. If you don’t start typing as it is becoming fuzzier, a popup blocks you from adding any more words.

https://www.squibler.io/dangerous-writing-prompt-app

But, don’t worry; even after the popup there is still an option to export what you have typed to a Word document. It’s not lost, you just can’t continue working on it on that site.

There is also an option to allow it to generate a starting line for you and it will paste that line into your document. You can start typing from there, or edit it or delete it if you decide you don’t like it, or you can start with no prompt. The default writing period is five minutes but you can change that before you begin.

This pressure can be good for warmup writing, or for stream of consciousness exploration of a topic or situation or character, or for forcing yourself out of the habit of too much editing during a first draft. I wouldn’t use it for NaNoWriMo except in small bursts; that level of pressured writing to get a daily word count of 1,700 would be too much.

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That writing prompt website is provided by Squibler. Squibler is not a product I use. It’s cloud and subscription based. Instead, I use Scrivener because it gives me total control (and backup responsibility) so I can use it offline and it’s not expensive. It took a while to get used to it but I love the way I can dump research and character investigations and ideas and analysis and cut or rewritten texts into side documents. In Word I tried to use comments and track changes and footnotes and separate documents to accomplish this (I don’t know why Word doesn’t have an ability to group documents the way Excel allows multiple tabs) but none of those alternatives are as easy to manage as the multiple folders within a single Scrivener document.

 

 

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