750 Words

Looking around the Intertron Tuesday night for ways to improve my writing skills, I stumbled across a website called 750words.

Much different from a blog, the core idea of 750words is that everything you write is private, and that WHAT you write is less important than THAT you write. For me, this was a liberating idea - many of the emails, stories, and blog posts that are rolling around in my mind never go anywhere because I can't get them up to a level of quality that I am comfortable sharing with other people. With 750words, the content itself is invisible to others, but it does give you a way to track how well I'm doing by publishing a very interesting page of statistics - in fact, you should go look at my stats page for 2010-MAY-20 right now.

They also have many "game theory" kind of things going on - there's a point system, and they have a monthly challenge that you can opt-in to where you commit to writing the full 750 words every single day for an entire calendar month - if you make the commitment and you miss even one day, your name goes on the "Wall of Shame", but if you make it every single day your name goes on the "Wall of Amazingness" - and, if you had previously been on the Wall of Shame, getting your name on the "Wall of Amazingness" would wipe out the shameful entry entirely. The site's creator also strongly encourages you to design your own rewards and consequences - it seems a lot of people promise to treat themselves if they accomplish it - imagine my surprise to discover that one of his suggested "consequences" is "If I miss a day or more, I will donate $___ to help support 750 Words." He's a very clever man, this Buster Benson fellow. ;)

You can read more about the project on the About page, or you can just open your own account and start writing!