On creativity

When working in any creative pursuit, getting into "the flow" is a period of time where the outside world seems to disappear, you become one with your work, and great ideas and refinements present themselves to you with little effort. The experience is quite pleasurable and can lead to massive productivity gains.

But flow is a skittish friend. It is very easy to lose flow from external distractions. It's part of why I don't like open-floor-plan offices, they are maximally distracting by their very design.

A lot of the types of work I do benefit from flow. Programming is one of the biggest ones, but I also do a fair bit of writing. My photography seems to be best when I've been shooting for several minutes, to the point that I frequently just throw away the first half-hour of any photo shooting session I do. Solving puzzles, painting--even cooking--all benefit from flow. All of these tasks have a shared property, they all require recognition and exploitation of pleasing patterns.

Guard your flow jealously. Perhaps the easiest way is to schedule time specifically for working in a distraction-free environment. Even just an hour a week is enough to make progress on most projects. "The future always gets here, eventually" as my father says.

But a lot of people fail to set aside even so little of time for their projects. People talk about wanting to be a painter or musician or what have you and what they really mean is they would like to be known as a painter or musician or <insert your own pseudo-dream here>. The person who practices 15 minutes a week may not be making very fast progress, but they are making infinitely more progress than the person who practices 0 minutes a week.

I believe that we are what we do. I am a writer because I write, having or not having published books does not change that. I am a photographer because I shoot photos, not having a job where photography is my focus does not change that. I am not a musician, despite the variety of musical instruments I own, because I do not make a habit of playing anything more often than once a year.

So in that spirit, for the last few years of National Novel Writers' Month, I challenge friends and family to put-up-or-shut-up about their dreams of becoming writers. You either are a writer and are writing on a regular basis, or you're never writing and are therefore not a writer. I typically put money on the line: any person I challenge who completes NaNoWriMo gets $100 from me. We tease and heckle each other along the way, fostering a competitive urge to keep working. And we do everything we can to help each other during this ever so distracting month.

Creative distractions

I've personally never finished NaNoWriMo. I haven't finished because I get distracted with that support and help job for my friends. From what little I knew at the time about creativity, I created a program for my friends and family to use specifically for keeping their NaNoWriMo projects laser-focused on what was most important: finishing. I called that program "Just Write, Dammit!", and the logo a pencil, a reference to another one of my father's sayings, "Put the pencil on the paper. Move your hand. Move. Your. Hand." (imagine this directed at a stubborn 10-year-old sitting at the dining room table, refusing to even start a school paper). The three of us used three different operating systems, so I wrote the software in Java. I made a simple Website for it, which you can see here, though I am not sure if the software works anymore. I thought I was the cleverest fellow for combining a beautiful sunset with such an abrasive and polarizing title.

Fast forward to about a month ago. One of my friends has continued to refine his NaNoWriMo project into a full novel. It's a wonderful story about a young girl who is magically stolen away to a land of gigantic animals. But he has found himself in a bit of an emotional block and can't bring himself to finish it, once and for all.

Early in every creative's career lies a self-inflicted wound, the myth of the divine inspiration. People take on the creative hobbies of things they like to consume, and they like to consume those things because they understand them. In understanding the work, we are also able to judge it, as a matter of taste. But judgement is a different thing from creation. Having nascent skills in our hobbies, we lack the fine motor skill to produce works that meet our standards for consumption. Typically, this disappointing realization makes the amateur quit the hobby entirely--perhaps not in their mind--but certainly in their actions.

But the only way to learn is to practice. And in many ways, the best practice involves feedback from other people. Thus, the first skill an amateur in any creative field must learn is to complete projects and get them in front of people.

For the sake of my friend and his need to learn to finish writing projects, I felt the best way to spur him forward would be to engage his competitive streak. I took the last three years of text from this blog you are reading right now and I used Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing to create Three Years, which as a piece of literature could serve as a study of the form and shape of personal growth and progress. But it really only exists to tease my friend.

However, I did not expect the impact it would have on me. The experience was very positive. I sold 10 copies, which is about 7 more than I expected to. One of them sold in the UK, so it is definitely someone I don't know. At one point, it hit the first page of the Amazon Self-Help genre list, which I'm pretty sure was only because my friends and family all bought it within the first hour of it getting pushed out on Amazon. And it gave me a glimpse into a process that was a lot less complex than I had assumed.

The new old thing

So in the spirit of helping and supporting my friends with their writing projects again, and perhaps giving me the sort of tools I'd like to do the same, I returned to "Just Write, Dammit!". I've rewritten it completely, with greater thought in mind for the future and making the program into everything a beginner would need to show up, write, and publish their first few books. And I've given it its own, secure website this time.

The new JWD takes the original zen-writing concept that I cribbed from a slew of other zen-writing programs that had gotten popular around NaNoWriMo 2011 and moves it to the web. It is no longer a Java desktop application. It is now an HTML5, single-page web application.

By targeting cutting-edge Web browser technology, I hope to make the program available to as many people as possible. There is a growing distrust of Java as a platform in the market, and it never truly delivered on the promises of making cross-platform desktop applications easy to write and deploy. Additionally, the latest developments in Web browser technology (largely thanks to Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome) have made it possible to create feature-rich applications in the browser.

I have also developed and will continue to develop a slew of new features to make it a viable book-writing platform.

Main Menu

When you visit the program now, you are greeted by the menu. I drew inspiration from video games in making this menu, that it presents all of your choices to you in a list and then hides away completely once a selection has been made. I felt it was important to make the tertiary elements of the program as simple and compartmentalized as possible. The goal is that, once you are set on a specific task, there is nothing in your view to distract you.

Writing screen

The Writing screen is largely the same. There are now a few buttons in the upper left corner of the screen to be able to return to the main menu (up arrow), save your writing immediately (infinity symbol), move between chapters (left and right arrow), add a chapter to the end of the book (plus sign), enter full-screen mode (4 diamonds symbol), or collapse the menu out of view (double angle quote symbol).

I encourage you to use the Full Screen button--though be forewarned that a defect in Apple's Safari web browser will prevent you from typing text in full screen mode. In the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer, on Windows, Linux, OS X, or Android, you can run in Full Screen mode to block out everything else on your screen and focus directly on just your writing.

The chapter title is editable separately from the body text. An indicator in the footer provides a word count (with a count of the number of words added to the chapter in your current writing session), and the amount of time that has elapsed during your writing session.

Editing screen

The editing screen is a new feature for JWD. It allows you to drag and drop sentences as a whole, to be able to rearrange their position in paragraphs. Eventually, this section will support more editing features, including spelling and grammar check.

Analyze screen

In addition to the basic word count displayed at the bottom of the Writing screen, I've also developed a frequency analysis report for words and phrases used in your writing. You can find this under the Analyze screen. Use it to provide insight into your style of writing, to make adjustments on how often you use certain words or phrases.

Publish screen

The JWD program currently saves your writing data to its own file format that other writing and word processing programs will not understand. By using the "Export HTML" button on the Publish screen, JWD will write an HTML document with a simple format that readily adapts to all screen sizes. The document is standard, minimalist, semantic HTML, so most word processors should be able to read it and make sense out of it.

Eventually, the Publish screen will provide full ePub support.

Configure screen

Here, you will find the option to select different color themes, to aid in your personal eye comfort. Additionally, you can select the Storage system that JWD will use when auto-saving your writing. Here, you can select either Google Drive or Dropbox as your storage provider, allowing you to visit JWD on any other computer and pick up where you left off. When you select one of the options, you will be redirected to either Google or Dropbox's website to enter your login credentials and authorize JWD to be able to store data in your directories.

You can also use the File System option to import and export the raw data file that JWD uses. You can then store the data file in a location of your choosing. This is useful for keeping multiple writing projects going at the same time. JWD will always name the file "justwritedammit.jwd", but you may rename it to whatever you wish. Just revisit the Configure page, select File System as your Storage Type, and click the Load Data button to be prompted to re-provide the file.

Enjoy!

That's about it! The program is still young, but I make headway on it every week. You've already read about some of the future plans for the project. Two that I didn't get to mention are the Creativity Mini Games and the Editor's Marketplace.

JWD will take a more active role in trying to stimulate your creativity. Rather than just defensively doing what it can to keep you away from distraction, it will also provide guidance, exercises, and cues all designed to get you as quickly into writing flow as possible. Some of the games will even be focused on refining your unique voice, and learning how to manipulate raw words to your greatest potential.

And towards the goal of creating better and better writers, JWD will provide a marketplace of vetted editors (which you will also have the opportunity to apply to be an editor as well and earn some money on the side) that you may hire to review your writing and provide timely, quality feedback. All of this will be integrated within the application and streamlined to make work happen. Editors will set their prices based on their skill and availability, writers will select the editor they want to review their work and pay the editor's fee, plus a small transaction fee to JWD to help keep the servers running.

Free, open-source software

And therein lies a hint to the core ethos of my software development. You will never pay to use the JWD software itself. JWD is an open-source, "free as in freedom" project. The only time you will ever pay money for something related to JWD will be for services or physical goods.

Because like the writing in books, software is an idea too great to keep locked up in patents and draconian licensing terms. We all benefit in the bounty of our shared culture. We should not have to repurchase that culture over and over again.

Thank you for reading. I'm Sean T. McBeth, and I want to help writers write more books.