by Rachel Smith
17 June 2016
I’ve done a lot over the years to bust my way through writer’s block, or procrastination. The latter was cured by having a baby, but I still get the former from time to time, and when I heard about The Most Dangerous Writing App through a LinkedIn group I thought it might be worth a go scare the pants off me enough to help me to get some work done.
It basically offers you a distraction-free blank screen, a timer and a warning: stop typing for five seconds and your work will disappear. Gone, kaput, never to be seen again. Which is, as you might expect, totally bloody infuriating.
Bottom line? I love it. I’ve been using it for a week now and have a heap more work off my desk. (Yay!) So, I decided to track down its creator, Manuel Ebert, a data science, designer and ex-neuroscientist, for a little chit-chat about his dangerous little writing tool.
I wish there was a glorious story of despair and ingenuity here, but frankly, I wasn’t the first person to create a self-destruct writing app – “Write or Die” and the Mac App Flowstate has a similar concept. However its $10 price tag turned me off, and I wrote the Most Dangerous Writing App on a Sunday afternoon in a coffee shop simply because I could. I released it to the public for fun on Monday morning, and a week later had over 100,000 users and got featured by Wired, Lifehacker, The Verge, Forbes, HuffPost, and, uh, Popsugar. I did totally absolutely not expect that.
The concept of “Flow” was coined by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, a Hungarian psychologist. Flow is activity for the activity’s sake, and includes absence of fear and lack of awareness of time passing. MDWA very explicitly uses fear and a sense of passing time to “trick” you into writing. So on the surface, in many ways, writing with MDWA is the opposite of being in the flow.
However, flow is also a matter of skill. In writing, and particular in free writing, this skill is to separate the creation from the editing process. Without a certain level of competence it is impossible to get into a state of flow as Csíkszentmihályi would define it. MDWA is free writing on training wheels. It forces you to act as if you were in flow, and one of the things I heard from users over and over again is the more they use MDWA, the less they actually need it. Traditional word processors use one and the same interface or mode for editing and writing, when in reality those should be to separate steps for writers.
I saw that as a ringing endorsement. I think a lot of writers have a profound love / hate relationship with this app. It confronts some writers with an ugly truth that corrodes their self-identity : they can’t even write for 5 minutes straight. Yet, every week users of The Most Dangerous Writing App create the complete works of Leo Tolstoy – in terms of quantity at least, I don’t know what people write on there.
Hardcore more only works in Chrome and Safari, unfortunately. It hides the text you type and only flashes the last letter until you hit your time limit. That means even less editing, more writing.
Writer and literature professor Jonathan Olson said “Finally someone figured out how to combine the plots of Speed and Misery.” I think that nails it.
MDWA is enjoying a lot of use in classrooms. Teachers use it with their students for writing exercises. The most heartwarming email I got however was from a father who told me that he introduced his teenage son who’s struggling with ADHD to the Most Dangerous Writing App, and it cut the time he needed to write his essays for school from several hours to 30 minutes. Frankly, that alone made it worth writing this app and releasing it for free.
I wrote a journaling app for nerds a while back, and it has still thousands of users. Maybe The Most Dangerous Editing App is next.
Well, probably not. As they say, write drunk, edit sober.
Have you used The Most Dangerous Writing App or Flowstate? Would you? Could you risk losing all your work just trying to write faster?
Interesting article as usual, Rach. I’ve been a user of Write or Die in the past and I did get a lot of writing done but I got out of the habit of using it. Probably the extra step of having to cut and paste what I’d written into Word for safe keeping. Nevertheless, there was on days when I was working on the first draft of my first novel using Write or Die and I’d usually write 2000 plus words in an hour which was pretty productive. Using Word I’m pushing it to get 1000 down in an hour.
You’re a braver writer than me Darren. I can’t stand the idea of watching all that hard work go up in smoke, which I guess is the point. Instead prefer to use Toggl to keep me honest about where my day really went.
Thanks Darren. I have to check out Write or Die. I think for me, I’ll always return to the comfort of Word with all its bells and whistles but I do like the novelty of this one and the way it blocks out distractions so there’s nothing to do but write! Harder than it looks. (For me anyway.) Did you get the novel published?
It took a little while to get used to it, I must say and it is really, really hard. One real disadvantage with both is that sometimes you just can’t think of what to write next and you need to put in all these xxxx to stop it deleting your work. But, it does discipline you to just write crap and fix it up later which I think was the most valuable lesson it taught me.
I used “The Most Dangerous Writing App” to bash out a short story in response to a call for submissions but it was very hard going. Burnt quite a few words before I got back into the swing of it. I think I’m getting a bit old for it now and I’m trying to use Scrivener more and more now.
I sent the novel out to a number of agents and got a lot of interest but in the end no one signed me up. Maybe one day I’ll revisit it but I’ve pretty much just written it off as my first attempt at mastering the form.
I’ve got something on my hard drive now that my guinea pig readers like and have given me some good feedback on. Once I’ve finished the first draft of the tree change memoir I’ll get back onto it.
I didn’t know such things existed until yesterday when Ommwriter was recommended to me. It was so simple I thought I was missing something. It’s very calming and helps focus, unfortunately it does not have a feature that blocks out my children asking for food.
Gap in the market, Kylie? 🙂