I had never heard of the site 750words.com until about an hour ago, so I decided to check it out. Here are the 750 words I wrote:
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This is my first entry at 750 words dot com. I don’t really need to use this site, as I have a writing practice, sort of. I write a bunch of words in scrivener. It has goals and whatnot. It’s pretty nice. So, what am I doing here? I don’t know. Trying something new. If it looks cool and feels good, I will keep using it. Quite likely, I will not.
One thing about this that might be a little different from my regular practice is that at the bottom of this, it says “Private, unfiltered, spontaneous, daily.” I can take that as permission to write whatever. Journally stuff. Stuff to shake loose the detritus of the brain before moving on to my other, more structured, writing. If it seems fun, at least it gets me writing in the morning without the pressure of it having to matter or mean something or make me money. That’s worth a try, I suppose.
In all honesty, though, I have the feeling that this sort of writing will get in the way of the rest of my writing. When I should be writing a film review for Odeon, or filling in the spaces of the memoir, or rewriting the novel, I am up in this site writing stupid bullshit about how I feel today or about whether I will actually continue to use the site I just started using or whether it will be another in a long list of accounts I have started but not really used. I sometimes wonder about all the accounts I have that lie dormant around the web. Do they get lonely? Do they connect the various parts of my selves in ways that I don’t understand? Are these forgotten logins and screenames parts of my subconscious? Will they come back to haunt me some day?
750 words does not seem like a lot, but I find myself staring at the bottom (325 words, half way there, that sort of thing. And then I realize that I’m bad at math) wondering how I’m going to fill it in. When I was writing my dissertation, I would try to write 1000 words every morning. Sometimes I succeeded. What happened, though, was I ended up with a lot of disconnected thoughts and a lot of repetition with nothing too terribly deep. It took a long time to filter through that daily writing to string together something coherent, and to attach enough relevant research to deepen the daily thoughts. I haven’t looked at my dissertation in over a year, but that is the sense I get of it — that it is a disconnected jumble of thoughts, some good, some not so good. Don’t get me wrong. I am proud of my dissertation and think it was some decent scholarship, but it’s not the best writing you’re going to find. This ridiculous rant, typed as quickly as possible in a web browser window of site I just discovered, is likely better written than some portions of my diss.
I am thinking about pasting this into my blog for no other reason than to display what happens when I sit down on a Monday afternoon after a dentist appointment and before getting on to other writing and grading and work. As I post new posts this will sink lower, into obscurity. I doubt that anyone will even read this far down, but I sometimes find that when I post a blog post that I am not particularly proud of, I never delete or edit it, but I feel more motivated to post again to move that mediocre/bad/boring post down a bit so it’s not the first thing someone sees.
Maybe that should be my key to productivity: put out crappy material so I am motivated to write more. Great work ethic, there. Some of you might say I’ve already been doing that for years, so what’s new? Ha ha ha. If you thought that, you wouldn’t be reading this, though, would you? Or would you?
I just got stuck. I like how this site is nearly full-screen, in the sense that there is nothing on the sides to distract me. All too often I, like every other writer in the world, feel like I want to anything but write. Any little distraction is enough to stop me or prevent me from starting. A flashing light, a dirty dish, a bleeping sound, a popup window, a faint hunger, or any random nagging thought.
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I stopped right at 750 words. This is pretty cool. It generates a stats page that tells me I wrote at 46wpm, and that I felt Affectionate and was concerned about Success.
