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TIL a weird trick for getting past a blank page
I was totally stuck on a story last week, just staring at a blank doc for an hour. I remembered a tip from a writer's blog, Write or Die (the site), and set it to the 'kamikaze' mode for 10 minutes. It starts deleting your words if you stop typing, which sounds scary, but it forced me to just put anything down. I ended up with 400 words of pure nonsense, but buried in there was a line about a character finding a key in a loaf of bread that actually became my whole plot. Has anyone else used a pressure trick like that to kickstart a story?
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emery_craig2mo ago
Oh man, that kamikaze mode sounds terrifying! My version of that is just opening a new email draft and typing to myself. I'll write stuff like "okay so the guy is sad because his car broke down and maybe a dog shows up?" It's all garbage, but sometimes the act of explaining it to nobody, in the wrong app, shakes something loose. Once I wrote a whole email about a haunted toaster and then just copied the least stupid part into my actual doc.
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kaiblack2mo ago
The haunted toaster email is a great example. It feels like the wrong app gives you permission to write the bad version first. What was the least stupid part you ended up keeping?
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