I found out about The Most Dangerous Writing App from a Twitter thread a few weeks ago, and besides a curious first look I haven’t tried it. Until today.
I had my biweekly writing group with some coworkers today, and I tried it out.
The rundown of how this works: you set a time interval and you have to keep writing the whole time. Or you lose all your progress. I think it’s about five seconds and then your work just fades before your eyes. It’s high-stakes writing.
I chose to try it out with a 5-minute time limit (you can do 3 minutes up to a terrifying 60 minutes). That first session was the most anxiety-filled five minutes of writing I’ve had yet. But I did get a lot of words down. So I tried it again, and again. I did seven 5-minute sessions, with a few minutes break in-between, and wrote 2200 words. That’s over double what I’d normally write during a good writing hour.
To be fair, the words are all awful. True trash draft material. You don’t have time to polish or overthink when you could lose all your progress if you hesitate. Which had me producing *gems* like these:
- We trip on a wine bottle. Both of us. Absurdly.
- Back in the Lavender House. Where we found that stupid body. Stupid body. Ruining everything.
- I give her one of my best looks. Something that says both that I remember having my fingers down her underwear and no I don’t care if she remembers it but I know that she does and that if she ever says anything to me about it I will push her off this dock and hold her head down with my very sensible boating shoes. But like, in a very aloof way.
So yeah . . . could use some polish. But as far as getting words on the page and quickly exploring scenes and plot points, I think this is a good tool to keep in my back pocket.
With Love,
Natalie