Show HN: Writing Streak – write fiction every day | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Writing Streak – write fiction every day

writingstreak.io

75 pointsrayalez32 comments

Hey, everyone! Super excited to make it to the front page of HN =)

I want writingstreak.io to help people to practice their writing skills and develop a habit of writing regularly.

It keeps track of daily word count, gives you writing prompts, has a github-like calendar representing the amount of words you have written each day, and all sorts of cool features to help you focus on writing.

I think it's gonna be pretty great.

It is in the very early stage at this point, and I would really love some feedback.

Does the idea make sense, do you think it's useful? What other features would you like in that kind of tool?

Is this something only for people who want to start writing, and need to start building the habit to put in time every day? Or can it also be useful for people who already write?

The main issue that pops out to me is that people who write have projects (sometimes several, sometimes massive ones), and "writing" daily sometimes means much more editing/cutting than writing fresh text (I'm married to a novelist; her first book lost about five hundred pages between the first "completed" draft and the final result). Or -- writing may mean composing new text, but it's placed somewhere in a much larger work.

Last thought! Be very careful about having ability to export from the start, and be very sure you don't run out of time / hosting fees / whatever and let it die with anyone's work trapped in it.

If you are a professional writer you still might use some additional motivation or habit tracking. I have not yet put much attention into tracking number of words on bigger projects, but I definitely will.

If you don't need that sort of stuff and just want to publish fiction - I am also working on a related project - http://fictionhub.io

It is using the same platform, it's goal is to be a great place to publish high quality fiction(and, in the future, sell it as well).

And yes, I'll definitely be very careful with user data. Adding the export feature is on my todo list.

Mobile? Context: my daughter (12) wrote her first 5000+ word story on her Android phone without anyone prompting her to do it. But perhaps teenagers and younger are not your target audience?

Wow, that's really awesome!

Regarding mobile - right now I want to focus on improving the website and making sure that it has everything users want and is really convenient to use. Currently it does work on mobile(but not throughly tested yet), I'll try to make it work really well.

At the moment I don't have any plans for an app, but if users will really need it I can make it.

Wow. I'd be interested to see if kids will come to view typing on a real keyboard as awkward and difficult versus touchscreen keyboard considering they get very little desktop or laptop time anymore and grow up with a tablet or phone in their hands.

First of all congratulations on launching. I like the idea and do hope one day to write my great American novel. In my past life I fancied myself a screenwriter (wrote six and produced one).

My three comments are:

* A screenwriting feature so that it counts pages over words.

* If you do support screenwriting then support the Fountain format. (I have a screenwriting/production app and I modified a WordPress plugin for that support.)

* NaNoWriMo is a time to shine. Start gearing up an awareness campaign in September.

Thanks for the feedback!

Yeah, I have been thinking about adding screenwriting support. For now it makes more sense to just focus on fiction, but it's very possible that I'll add the Fountain support in the future.

I'll think what I can do for NaNoWriMo. Now I'm focused on short stories, but it would be really awesome to come up with tools that would help writers to work on bigger projects. I'll just need to figure out a simple and elegant way to do that.

I think this is kinda neat, but I think it's interesting because the GitHub contribution graph, which I see a similar graph to here, has been derided by a large group of people: https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/627

I am actually a big fan of this "just do it" method of getting better or more comfortable with something though, and I think this is cool.

I think this makes sense for a lot of people here, and that people will be able to sell books on Kindle store writing like this, but it is surely sad that writing has become this nowadays.

> surely sad that writing has become this nowadays.

Why do you say that?

Writing is practice. The act of writing itself is one of the best ways to improve writing. Which is why so many writers stress the importance of regular writing, and not so much that you always have to be doing quality writing.

If this site, and its prompts, encourage folks to write regularly, then that can only be a good thing.

Can you elaborate? Why do you think that?

(Maybe I didn't make it clear - the purpose here is not to "sell kindle books", but to practice writing skills. Not to generate as much content as possible, but to get better at your craft.)

Well put. Wríting for me is more of a trade than an art. You need to work on it to really get good at it. I'll give it a try, thanks.

I am of the belief that writing could be improved by editing. The trouble is getting the idea down on paper so that it could be improved later. First drafts are just that, first drafts, they need to go through many iterations to improve.

Writing has the function of tangible thinking as well, it is when one is writing that we realise we think in certain ways or that we don't know certain things as we imagined.

For me, this would help in forcing me to write something without waiting for the perfect sentence to form in my mind.

You may be right. Thank you.

This is like a way to encourage an athlete to go to the gym and do their lifts each day, it isn't the Big Game in itself.

> You begin by writng a paragraph describing a settng of your story, and continue from there:

> The most actve writers get a place on our leaderboard of awesomeness:

Looks like you may have a sticky 'i' key.

Oh, thanks a lot, fixed!

A few other minor typos I noticed (since this seems to be the typo thread!):

for today(the green circle) (missing space)

On you profile page (your)

Thank you very much! Corrected.

The sprint feature reminds me of this: http://www.themostdangerouswritingapp.com/

Discussion on ^ link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11197190

Like the comments linked, I don't like how it just deletes all the work -- what if you'd written something really compelling and lost it all?

Well, that's the point of the game) Otherwise when you stop writing nothing happens, no stakes.

Of course you can just ignore this feature and simply write without it.

I have also experimented with using a "pomodoro" feature instead of this(just a 20 min countdown timer), but sprints seem more fun. Maybe I'll add a preference allowing people to choose pomodoro instead.

This looks pretty cool. I think it would be fantastic if you'd integrate social logins here. I'd rather log in with Facebook or Twitter than create a completely separate account just to use the site.

Having a demo of sorts would also be useful, so that I could get a feel for the sprint editor. Animations are great, but it doesn't give me a sense of how well it would work for me.

See also:

https://750words.com/ similar concept, encourages you to write ~3 pages every day.

http://nanowrimo.org/ national novel writing month.

Could I set my own subject? It looks like a nice UX to help with general writing too.

Yes, sure! Prompts are there to help people to get started, but feel free to ignore them if you want.

In the future I will probably add preferences allowing people to disable the functionality they don't use.

Just gave it a try and its fun. I had not realized this is a sort of community type of place. Anyhow, I like the goal driven GUI. It is really motivating and works. The title input is buggy in Firefox/OSX (text doesn't show up), and the main textarea does not scroll down as I type more than what the size will let. But those are silly bugs. This is fun. In fact, I think this could be turned into a product if you can package it as a stand alone application (not mobile app) for desktops. Leave out the public community aspect but keep the goals GUI.

fantastic! I'll give it a good try and report. :)

Nice. Now if only we could get GRRM or Patrick Rothfuss to use this tool.

The problem I could foresee with this is that all/most writing prompts are just really irritating. A photo or something would be preferable.

Thank you for the feedback! I am still thinking about the right format for prompts, I will definitely try to improve them.

Maybe I will allow users to submit their own prompts, or just have a randomized setting, character, and problem/goal.

Image prompts are an interesting idea, they never worked for me personally, but I'll think about adding them as an option.

Currently many prompts are taken from the top posts on /r/WritingPrompts, I'm an active user of that subreddit and I find them really helpful(they are usually specific and funny).

Do you have any advice on making a prompt good? Is there a kind of text prompts that you like?

The writing prompts are rather specific; I think a good writing prompt should be more open to interpretation.

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