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Write five hundred words a day.
It's a simple place to build a daily writing habit, with a calendar to keep track of your days and a quiet page to write on.
I got the idea from Graham Greene, while reading The End of the Affair:
Over twenty years I have probably averaged five hundred words a day for five days a week. I can produce a novel in a year…
He ended up writing 24 novels. A friend of mine and I decided to try it ourselves, and right away five hundred words felt like the right amount, enough that you feel like you really wrote something, but small enough that you'll want to sit down and do it again tomorrow.
If you keep it up for a whole year, you'll have written 182,500 words, which is about 730 pages.
Each day gets its own square on a calendar, and when you're ready to write you just click on today and start typing.
| Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
When you reach five hundred words, the day turns green.
If you write anything at all, it turns yellow.
Your writing saves automatically as you go, and there's a word count at the bottom of the page so you can see how close you are (you can hide it if you'd rather not look).
You can write whatever you'd like, whether that's a journal entry, a flash essay, or a scene from the novel you've always meant to get around to. Your writing from one day to the next doesn't need to be connected, but it can be.
You can tag your entries to keep track of the different kinds of things you're working on, and if an idea comes to you in the middle of the day, you can jot it down as a prompt and come back to it when you sit down to write.
Your writing is encrypted and private, and the site has been free since October 2020. I'm not paywalling anything, and I'm not collecting your email for advertisements or anything like that.
If you'd like the longer story of how this all started, you can read the original beta announcement.
— Nick