Quit Worrying and Just Write

Sometimes the words and ideas flow effortlessly. More often than not you need an inspirational kick in the ass.

When I joined Nanowrimo for the first time in 2009 I had less of a lackluster experience. I diligently went to my keyboard every night tapping away until I got to my 1700 words.

The writing was crap. My plot flailed wildly and my characters didn't stay consistent. By mid-November I had little motivation to finish.

I continued to write.

I'd like to say that exercise had a happy ending and what I wrote in November 2009 became an excellent book with engaging characters. Truth is after Nanowrimo (which I didn't win) I left the book unread on my computer for months.

Then in October I revisited the idea and thought of an even better book than what I originally struggled with. Now I'm rewriting the book that once seemed to have so little promise. The story and characters (after months of letting my imagination subconsciously tinker with them) are much better. There still is a lot of work that needs to be done, but if I hadn't taken that crazy leap into writing in Nanowrimo I still would not have a book to work on.

The hardest thing is to delve into the unknown, sit your ass in front of the keyboard and write something, anything even if it seems useless at the time because you never know where that idea might lead.

Focus! I said FOCUS!!

Perhaps a writer's best friend is living in a distraction free environment. I used to live in that world - sort of - when I was about 12-18 years old. Once the Internet became fast and more efficient than AOL ("You've got mail!") and Netscape (which would take 5 minutes to load one page) my writing career took a sharp nose dive. Why slave over writing or cry yourself to sleep from lack of inspiration when you can waste hours surfing the Net while creating the illusion you did something productive with your life?

Well now I can say I'm back to the slaving and the crying again because I found a program that helps me write like back in the old days when my computer wasn't jacked into the World Wide Web.

I have found perhaps the most boring word processing program in the world.

Focus Writer.

It blanks out the screen leaving just you, your blinking cursor and anything you write on the page. Tools, menus and scroll bars vanish unless you move your mouse cursor near them. You can't see any windows that are minimized when you're in the program. You have to either exit FocusWriter or minimize it in order to see any other minimized windows or programs.

FocusWriter is free if you want to try it out. You can customize it to any color font or screen you want. You can even use an image as your background although I find this pretty distracting. One cool little feature I've found oddly conducive to boosting my word count are the typewriter sounds feature. I love the clicking sounds as I write although when I start a new paragraph the sound of the "typerwriter" sliding back still scares the shit out of me. There are a lot of other nice features such as a timer (if you want to write a set amount of time) or a word count goal for the day.

Places you can download FocusWriter for free:

Gott Code

Snap Files

Softonic

CNet

FocusWriter with an image background