Make Writing a Habit | Hacker News Reader

Make Writing a Habit

writenext.io

262 pointsstefannn108 comments

Writing is not publishing. If you conflate the two you might not write at all. Having a place to write is as free and easy as:

  mkdir ~/thoughts

Now, after you've replied your quick counterpoints to someone on HN, whip out the text editor and

  vim ~/thoughts/why-writing-is-not-free-nor-easy

Go and expand on your thoughts on the subject there. It doesn't have to be prosaic, some simple bullet points that encapsulate the main ideas are enough. You can revisit later for an in-depth or progressive analysis. Do that even if you didn't actually reply to anyone, but felt merely like jotting down notes about your take on the matter. Write your own thoughts on stuff that people share in real life, on HN, youtube, facebook, etc. Observe a curious phenomenon and write a single line about it in a file. It's easier than Twitter. With the latter you worry about presentation, whereas the former lets you capture the main thoughts quickly, without worrying about form.

You don't have to publish. It's just writing, it's for you first and foremost. Over the years revisit, refine, and expand on your thoughts. Write articles over the course of 10 years. See how clever or ignorant you were 5 years ago. Allow yourself to laugh at your own jokes or to delete some posts in embarrassment. Let your mind be changed as it's meant to, safe from judgment. Some day you may feel wise enough and ready to share some selected pieces that have remained constant all throughout.

I do something similar but with a bit more ceremony. I use a gitbook and keep committing every week or so. Instead of text I use markdown instead of plain text which makes it more readable in my text editor (VSCode). Not able to write too much these days due to wrist pain (possibly due to CTS) but this has been a effective way for last 3 years. I have around 500 files now.

What still astounds me after 2 months of researching this space is that every day I learn about a new way people store what they write. The other day, I was talking with someone about how he stores what he writes in an Excel file. It's like Abraham Maslow said "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail".

Once upon a time, even before the world wide web, darkness covered the land and me but a fledgling was tasked with editing my boss’s business letters. As VP of engineering he was a man of letters. Many letters. Templated letters for my boss was organized in the ways old managing engineers oft are.

Lotus 123 he wielded for engineering calculations and thus Lotus 123 was his weapon for business letters. No spell check of course. No line breaks either. Such was my editorial lot.

Please keep off the grass.

I had a civil engineering coworker send me a flowchart in Excel. I was somewhat impressed.

Jim Harbaugh, a very successful football coach, uses excel for everything.

https://floqast.com/blog/jim-harbaugh-microsoft-excel-fanati... and a funny interview about it https://twitter.com/barstoolbigcat/status/115845032170801561...

Jim Harbaugh advises his quarterbacks not to eat chicken as it is a 'nervous bird,' and is 0-5 vs. OSU. Excel might be the most reasonable thing he does.

What about WordStar on DOS?

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27407502

What I'm trying to say is: it doesn't matter what the tool is. If the process / outcome are worth it, then starting to write is much more valuable than the exact tool (that you choose to get the cool kids nodding their heads in agreement). Productivity is cool.

I don't get it. There seems to be a sentiment in these comments that older → ill-suited; ill-suited being the actual reason why the anecdote about Excel is noteworthy. WordStar on DOS is a word processor. It's old and uncool, sure, but it's not ill-suited for the task in the way that Excel is.

Someone below mentions that Excel is probably an "upgrade" from a typewriter. What. Sure, Excel has undo and arbitrary text insertion, but so does Photoshop. Ask yourself if Photoshop would be an upgrade from a typewriter just because it's newer. At some point, the impedance mismatch wrt the actual task it was conceived for is so great that it will dominate any equation related to suitability for a particular purpose. So even the most recent version of Excel is still more ill-suited for writing than things actually made for writing, like typewriters and old word processors.

I think Excel can be considered an upgrade on the physical typewriter. Yet, some people still write books with those. Whatever gets you there.

Excel is great when you have a lot of small notes you need to reference and you need a quick and easy way to structure them. Write in an editor and then paste in Excel.

I use a AHK(Autohotkey) script which pops up a single input text, and saves my input in a textfile (or a html file) which resides in my Dropbox folder.

That seems unnecessarily contemptuous. Presumably they had some reason to use Excel? If they had Excel, they most certainly were aware of Word...

it is not about hammer and nail, but about infinite plane. You can wrote in one column, like in Word document, then expand on side if content needs it. Second thing is use of images, shapes, arrows, lines, circles - sometimes image is better in conducting thought than words. About plane, if you start with some thinking and it branches out, in excel there is no problem.

My note-taking app is basically this script:

  read text
  echo -e "\n$text" >> ~/Dropbox/writing/notes/stream.txt

I actually wrote my last article this way, paragraph by paragraph. For those who suffer from edit/analysis paralysis (such as myself) a tool that does not allow you to edit (or even see) your previous sentences really help focus on making progress.

I just use M-x doctor

Ah, yes, the doctor :) Do you know if it records the sessions somewhere?

Since doctor is in buffer, C-x C-w should work.

I Agree, failing to acknowledge the difference between them will make you worry about publish quality when you should be writing raw.

how would you even begin organizing all your thoughts?

RoamResearch's approach seems promising: most thoughts are organized by date, plus a bunch of tools that make search easier.

Trying to invent a hierarchy for unorganized thoughts is certainly a waste of effort.

unfortunately, it looks like Roam is a proprietary format rather than plain text

Write them down.

Then try to surface the topology using whatever tools you like.

Directories. Sections inside text files.

grep

zettelkasten

data:text/html, <html contenteditable>

It's a little bit uncomfortable to me seeing lots of empty boxes in the writing history before the date I signed up, and I know I will never have a chance to fill them out. Why not start the history graph from the first day registered? Anyway, nice idea. I think I have some writing needs that can be fulfilled by this product. Please keep your UI as simple as possible no matter how many features you come up later.

I equally love and hate the power of those empty boxes. I use a workout tracker that does the same, however it's not advised to be working out every single day, yet I feel myself going to the gym because I want to see those boxes filled.

I agree, writing or exercising every single day can turn into more bad than good in the long run. I think 4 days per week is ideal.

What's it called?

The app? It’s called Strong.

Thanks for the feedback, noted!

Shane Parrish recently did a podcast on this topic with Brian Koppelman. In the podcast, Brian Koppelman talked about how we wrote a single page everyday, however he did would not stop writing once he started. Rather than writing it was a thinking technique using writing as a medium. It was a way to derive thoughts from the subconscious. He also mentions how maintaining momentum is important in accomplishing tasks such as writing.

Also kind of fun to see how scripts are created and how they are revised from rough draft to final draft. https://fs.blog/knowledge-project/brian-koppelman/

Absolutely, once you start you get momentum and it is difficult to stop. I wrote just today over 2000 words and I planed just for 500. That's why we don't show the writing goal anywhere on the writing page, so that you don't have any limit while writing. I will check the podcast, thanks for sharing!

No problem! I myself actually am a newcomer to writing, but I am excited to see how I develop myself as I continue with this!

3 pages a day I think it was. the Miracle Pages practice from Julia Cameron.

Yes, this is the book that Koppelman talked about. Apologies for not referencing this earlier!

I just don't know what this product does. Your messaging appeals to me but I have literally no clue what features or functionality I'm signing up for.

Thanks for the feedback, it's absolutely more work to be done on the presentation - I will explain here a bit more. We help people that want to write more to stay motivated to write daily. By comparison, we think it is sort of a fitness app where you train your writing muscle instead of your physical body.

One of the main things that I struggle with when writing is a lack of attention or the distractions that get in the way of typing more words. The area where you write is at the core of the product. It is a clean modern space that has no distractions so that you can stay completely focused. At the end of each writing session, you get achievements and stats about what you wrote. Word analysis, writing clarity, readability, and sentiment analysis of the text will be available shortly.

To keep you engaged, there are 3 goals that you should meet daily: writing words (at least 250, by default 500), a writing time (at least 30 minutes, by default 1 hour), and a score that is calculated by using your previous days' writings. Based on how much you write, you get achievements and you compete with other writers in the platform. We're putting together as I write this message a way to sign up for writing challenges, too.

Not yet fully ready, we're working on a system of notifications, where you can set a time when to be remembered to start writing so that you never miss a day.

All the content is double encrypted so it is secure and nobody can steal your ideas.

I hope that clarifies what we're doing. If you have any other questions or suggestions I would be happy to clarify.

>Word analysis, writing clarity, readability, and sentiment analysis of the text will be available shortly.

What languages will this support? I'm interested in Spanish, I only use English for chatting with people online and commenting on forums.

It will have Spanish! We're starting with English, and Spanish is the next one.

Nice, I'd think supporting many languages would be a worthy goal. This could be a nice tool for language-learners keeping study journals.

This is a good idea, we tend to focus a lot on consumption (e.g. Audible), but something to help focus on production of content would benefit people.

That is one of the core reasons we started WriteNext. Here is the blog post we wrote before doing any work on the product: https://blog.writenext.io/your-writing-facilitator/.

> We live in an era where we’re all publishers, we’re all writing something because we all have easy access to a publishing platform. It doesn’t matter if it’s a book, an article, a blog, an email or a personal journal. There’s a lot of content created daily and the problem we are all facing is the noise it comes with it.

> In our vision, the first step to changing the content’s quality is to change the writing process. Yet, there’s no writing tool powerful enough to cope with this problem.

Can you explain more about the encryption process?

Absolutely, the text you write is encrypted using aes-256 before being stored on our servers. We're also considering allowing an option to encrypt once more with a custom password set by the writer - the problem with this custom encryption is that if you lose the password you're not able to get your words back.

Where is the encryption key? Is it possible for WriteNext to access the writing?

The encryption key is generated dynamically and it is not stored together with the encrypted content, thus in case of any leakage the words that were written are safe. The writing is decrypted and shown decrypted only to the writer itself and our team doesn't have access to see the words you've written.

I did find it kind of amusing that their FAQ is a work in progress, makes me think the creators of this product suffer from procrastination issues too: https://www.writenext.io/faq

True about procrastination! We've been focusing more on the product itself which is after login and missed a few (maybe more) things on the presentation. We're on it, now!

Please do! I'm scared to sign-up with all the unknowns in your "Privacy and Ownership" section.

I believe it is a web text editor, with built-in goals and gamification system and email notifications to reinforce those.

While it uses a web text editor and the editing experience is important, it is far from being that.

We're focused on creating a product that helps you to write more and stay fully engaged in the writing process. Yes, it comes with goals that you can customize and some gamification elements that will help you write more than before.

Maybe I've missed something but from reading all the other comments their summary is exactly the one I wanted. What would you say are the actual features that are key which they missed?

It has a github type contributions box as well as badges for various achievements.

We've looked into multiple options for displaying the writing activity and that Github like contribution chart was our favorite one. It's a neat way of showing how active you've been while doing something: writing code or writing words. :)

Agreed. Is this like Dualingo for writing? Seems interesting, but an example would be good

Haven't thought about this similarity - it's a nice one!

Anything that promotes privacy and then offers “sign in with Facebook, et al” worries me.

At the very least offer Github or Ubuntu One or something as a single sign in option for those who don’t trust either your database or BigCorp

Is Github, being owned by Microsoft, really that much more trustworthy?

Yes because GitHub's business model doesn't directly rely on the violation of user privacy. It's just pay-for-features, afaik.

Github doesn't, but Microsoft has shifted from a software licensing company; they make most their money off of subscription services now I believe, but never forget that they added ad tracking and advertising options to their operating system, and only after a lot of pressure do they start your new system up with asking about what privacy invasions you will permit for the sake of advertising.

Thanks for the feedback. We've added those platforms that we believe are most popular for the majority of web users. In my opinion, the best solution would be something similar to what Solid (https://solid.mit.edu/) proposes. Unfortunately, they don't have much traction yet.

Other tools I've used like this:

https://draftin.com/ https://write.as/

For distraction free writing. The latter actually hooks up to a blogging platform if you're so inclined. The former doesn't so, like the top thread on this post talks about, I've used it for saving all kinds of random snippets of thoughts and song lyrics and whatever.

Although there are many other free-distraction tools, we believe WriteNext differentiates from them. Our main focus is to help you write more often and better by creating a writing habit. It is not enough to have a distraction-free tool if you don't return to write there daily.

Okay but when I go to the homepage, don't you think it's kind of ironic that it talks all about the achievements and badges that you can earn, then claims to be "no distractions"?

https://i.imgur.com/Opi7qDV.png

Reminded me of [750 words](https://750words.com/). I have some brief experience on writing 750 words everyday for a couple of weeks, then gave up (just like my other blogging attempts, unfortunately). It seems overall beneficial, but hard to keep on doing.

What were the things that stayed in the way of writing consistently?

Neat project, worth checking out https://750words.com/ for inspiration. It's a great, simple product.

Thanks! Is there any particular feature that you would want to see in the product? Which is the thing that keeps you engaged to write?

You have a typo, I believe: "There is no such thing as bad writer." needs an " a " after the "as".

Or maybe that's your intention? In which case, I find it distracting and could take away credibility for your product IMO.

Thanks for pointing that out, it's updated now!

The site is now unable to serve requests. I signed up, and the loading won't stop.

There was a quick update that we put and the server was down for around 1 minute. I think you accessed just at that moment. Sorry for the inconvenience, please try now.

Congratulations on creating such an amazing app! I´m myself a (brazilian) wordpress blogger, but i needed a place on the cloud to do my personal writings without distractions.

Starting to write right now.

Thank you!

Hello, Marco! If there is anything that you want to be improved or you're missing something, please just drop us a line!

Secret to writing: 200 crappy words per day.

That's what Tim Ferris said, right?

I'm curious about the premium feature "writing export" - is this to say if I sign up for a free account I can write stuff for days, but never get my writings back out?

I used to use writingstreak.io and it just drops you into a box and has you start writing.

I don't know what this one does yet in terms of screenshots or a quick tutorial on how to use it.

Thanks for the feedback - we'll improve the presentation. I put here another comment explaining all the features that are not explained properly on the landing page now. Is there anything that you're missing on WritingStreak? What would you like to see improved?

We have been using Typora and love it. Very simple. Supports md.

I'm using Typora too when I have to write something in Markdown. Though it is limited to being a markdown editor and it's not a platform that would help me to focus on writing more and frequently.

I’m writing a Leanbook in Typora. After trying out nearly every MD editor I could find on Mac, it was my favorite.

sorry, what you mean by Leanbook?

I meant Leanpub.

Any intentions on bolting-on/integrating with a publication pipeline?

    WRITE <=> EDIT <=> REVIEW <=> PUBLISH

Are you asking about book publishing or web blogging platforms (e.g. Wordpress / Medium / Ghost)?

I was thinking about web-blogging / Zettels (https://braindump.jethro.dev/zettels/), but not about a particular platform. Could be under writenext.io/.

We don't consider it as a short-term feature, but it's in our plans to make integrations with Wordpress / Ghost in the upcoming months.

Very cool! I'm intrigued, and might even use it for my next project. Are you planning on eventually monetizing it, and if so, how?

It's hidden at the footer, but https://www.writenext.io/premium

Ah, didn't see it. Thanks! Would say that it's exceptionally well hidden. "Write now. It's free" is too misleading, imo. At least add "Pricing" in the top menu. Doesn't really sit well.

We removed the Pricing/Premium page because we do not intend to make any of the current features paid. What you sign up for is free. Writing in the current mode will always be free!

Ah, that makes sense! Good to know!

And has typos too.

>Can I get a refund of my Premium upgrade? >Yes, you can get a refund if you have been charged a new monthly / anualy payment and you haven’t used the Writing Facilitator since then.

Doesn't sit well for a product that promotes writing.

It's free and we'll keep it all free for the next at least 3 months. We're thinking about a premium model. At this moment we don't know yet which features will be included in the premium, because we want the basic features that help you to turn writing into a daily habit to remain free.

This looks good. Does it offer features similar to hemingwayapp? Like nuances in sentences and such?

We're early yet, but we have in plan for the next weeks word analysis, writing clarity, readability and sentiment analysis.

Talk about over engineering, dang. Is it a journaling app? Day One is the big bear in the room.

But just writing everyday won’t make you better the same way fucking around with a guitar everyday won’t make you any good.

If you really want to become a better writer, try writing a short story or an essay. Or Nanowrimo. That’s always popular

But nobody goes from writing 0 words a daily to Nanowrimo and comes out the other end as a "better writer" without having some sense of discipline and writing regularly. Doing anything besides eating and sleeping every day is hard. If you can get to the point where writing 250, or 750, or 2,000 words a day is a given, then you can focus on actually getting better without having to worry about the effort required simply to put words on the page.

I agree that writing daily doesn't necessarily makes you a better writer, but usually it helps a lot. Also, writing your thoughts as often as possible gives you more sense of clarity.

Is this entirely web based? How are writing records stored? Thanks and great site!

Thanks for the comment! Yes, it is web-based for now. We have in plan to make a desktop app and also add offline writing. The writing records are encrypted before being stored in the database.

I just created a throwaway profile to check-out the platform. The interface is sleek and smooth.

I'm still not clear with the free vs premium plans. It would be better if you create a comparison table for that on https://www.writenext.io/premium page.

For e.g., Writing exports are part of the premium. Does that mean after 3 months of the free trial I won't be able to export my writings?

I also noticed that you are using Hubspot for contact form and auth0 for logins. These are some great free services to get started with your app which I never knew about. Anything else that you are using?

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