A Year’s Worth Of Using 750 Words

As of a few minutes ago, I’ve been using the 750 Words site for exactly 365 days!

So what I have found out and learned during this year’s worth of writing?

Well, originally, I started using the site to get back into creative writing – something I discovered I enjoyed over a decade ago, but which I let lapse because of pressures of time, and the fact that my day-to-day work is at the other end of the spectrum in terms of being in a creative mindset, so I was rarely in the right frame of mind.

The technique I used, because I didn’t have a specific writing project in mind at the time, was free-writing, something I’ve discussed elsewhere, including the exact way in which I use 750 Words to do that.

Then, in April 2020, after 259 days of writing mainly crazy, unplanned, off-the-top-of-my-head stuff, I swapped over to using their site in a different way – I started journalling.

I’ve already written about the therapeutic benefits of journalling here, and, quite frankly, I never really thought it would be something I’d want to do.

But for some reason, I’d recently come across something called the WordSmith Deck – I cannot remember how or why I found it, but I was intrigued.

So intrigued, in fact, I bought one, mainly with a view to getting additional ideas for articles for this site. In essence, I wanted to see their full list of 150 prompts and use those to generate articles that would be less personal than a journal, with more benefit and relevance to a wider audience.

According to the website I found these prompts on, they are “designed to inspire journaling, cure writer’s block, and put you back in control of your creativity.”

Once they arrived, I decided it made sense to actually try out the writing prompts for myself – so I replaced my daily free-writing exercise with a journalling exercise instead.

I chose one card at random, from the six categories included in the deck (i.e. Education, Life, Random, Relationships, Self, and World), and answered whatever the prompt was, ensuring I wrote at least 750 words.

With many of these, I was still writing on the fly, while with some, I did spend a few minutes first considering what my broad answer would be about. For example, one prompt is “List up to 5 books or films that have made a profound impact on you and explain why.”, which means I had to spend a while deciding which five books or films I’d talk about.

I’m now about two thirds of the way through this deck, and it has been an interesting exercise.

Although journalling is usually a highly personal activity, there have been a handful of prompts that I thought I would publish on this site because they seemed to have a wider interest.

As I’ve probably mentioned elsewhere, I think the relevance of some of these prompts may be academic for me – I am in my 60s. I live alone (with my three dogs) after my wife died unexpectedly, I don’t go out (either for work or to socialize), and I have few interactions with other humans.

However, I have still tried to answer all of the questions to the best of my abilities, and it has been a useful introspective process.

For example:

1. It’s made me realize how directionless a life I’ve led. Note that I’m not saying I regret that – because I don’t believe in having regrets. It’s more a case of bringing into focus how my life might have been different (either better or worse) if I’d considered some of these questions when I was a lot younger.
2. Even now, it’s helped clarify my thoughts about what’s left of my life, however long that may turn out to be. And it came as no great surprise to me that my life is still largely without ambition – one of the writing prompts was asking what’s on my bucket list, and since I didn’t have one (and never had), I had to create one as I wrote.
3. I’ve confirmed, for my own peace of mind, that writing things down is helpful. I already knew this to be true when, in 2004, I did a brain dump of everything that was going on during my first marriage, and how it made me feel, but I’d not really continued that sort of writing until I started this journalling exercise.
4. If you’re being honest with yourself, as I think you should, then you will be forced to face a few uncomfortable facts – and you can then decide whether those are so uncomfortable that you wish to do something about them.

But back to 750 Words, which is what this article was meant to be about – because what I’ve written about so far could be achieved via other means.

Here’s what I love about their site:

1. The site is simple to use, and the page where you do your writing is deliberately uncluttered – it’s not about turning out perfectly formatted pieces, but about writing 750 words (or more).
2. You receive an email reminder each day so you don’t forget to do your writing (although I also have a task in my To Do list as well as in the habit-tracking app I use). You can also choose when you’d like that reminder sent.
3. It’s fun – they have a large variety of badges you can earn, which act as a kind of motivation to keep writing each day.

1. It’s cheap – after a 30-day free trial, the current cost is just $5 per month.
2. You are provided with plenty of statistics about each story you write (e.g. word length, time, typing speed, as well as attempts at analyzing the type of content in terms of emotions). You can see the sort of stats provided here – note that some relate to that day’s writing only, whereas others (as shown below) are based on everything you’ve done since you started using the site.

1. You can export all of your writing – one text file per month, which includes basic statistics as well (date, words written, time taken).
2. For an added incentive, you can participate in the monthly challenge, where you commit to writing every day for the entire month. You can also commit to rewarding yourself if you succeed, or paying a penalty if you fail.
3. What you write is 100% private – although if you wish to share your creations outside of the site (which I have done with a few articles), then that’s up to you.
4. You can schedule days you won’t be able to write in advance (e.g. if you’re on vacation), so that your writing streak is uninterrupted.
5. Did I mention it’s just fun? 🙂

So, what have I learned in using this site?

Well, first and foremost, I really need to spend more time practising typing.

The goal is not to worry about typos, etc. – but I find it very difficult, knowing I’ve made a mistake, to leave it without correcting it, and that is definitely going to reduce my recorded words per minute.

I actually learned to touch-type way back in 1979 – my fiancée at the time was taking a bilingual secretarial course at the local college and I had just started working in information technology, and she suggested (well, insisted, actually) I learn to type on a keyboard correctly.

However, even after all these years, I still make a lot of the same mistakes – mainly typing letters out of order because I clearly find it difficult to synchronize the use of my left and right hands.

There are sites that can help you learn to type more accurately, and faster, so perhaps I should check one of them out – this is one I saw recommended.

Next, I think it’s probably the case that most people have their own personal set of words and phrases they use a lot – and when you’re typing every day, you cannot help but notice them.

Is that a bad thing?

Not necessarily, but I do think that if you’re going to write for other people (i.e. as opposed to personal pleasure) then it’s worth being aware of those, because readers can pick up on words that appear to be overused very quickly, and it starts to jar.

Moving on, then if I think back to the days when I was free-writing using the random seed words, it is surprising how quickly the brain can come up with ideas.

My fastest time to write 750 words has been ten minutes (according to the site stats), and I’ve never taken longer than 15 minutes, I think.

And that includes writing on the fly, with nothing pre-planned at all.

If I look back, I will find a few recurring themes, but after a couple of hundred days of writing, I don’t find that too surprising.

To me, the benefit of all that free-writing is the work-out it gives your brain, which is why so many writers resort to free-writing in the first place.

I actually first heard about free-writing when I bought Steve Manning’s “How To Write A Book In 14 Days” course back in 2004, which was the method I used when I wrote my one and only (so far) full-length novel, Ring Of Daggers.

Conclusion

Whether you want to develop your creative writing skills, or try journalling, or maybe you have some other reasonsI would really suggest giving 750 Words a try.

As I said (at least once), it’s fun, and I also find it addictive.

I’ve been lucky, maybe because of my chosen lifestyle, not to have missed a single day (yet), but since it only takes me 15 minutes at most, it’s really not that much of a time commitment and easy to slot into my day – I prefer to write either first thing in the morning, or last thing at night, depending on how tired I feel.

And there’s one more thing I love about the site – amazingly, it’s been around for over ten years already, and as with so much that’s great on the Internet, it started life as a labour of love by the site creators, Buster and Kellianne, who have kept it running all these years. My only question is, how did it take me ten years to discover this site existed?

Additional Resources

These are suggestions for those who wish to delve deeper into any of the above:

1. 750 Words
2. Habit Tracker
3. Ring Of Daggers
4. Task Manager
5. Typing Test
6. WordSmith Deck