How Writing 750 Words Every Day Changed Me As a Person
We have all heard of writer’s block. We also know creativity can’t be forced. Curious about how I could overcome the challenge of feeling stumped while trying to write creatively, I gave the 750 Words blog a try.
People are encouraged to write 750 words, as the name of the website suggests, every day. Since October, I have been keeping this new habit of writing 750 words first thing in the morning. After a month of doing this exercise, I realized some positive changes, though whether these are due to the placebo effect I’m not sure.
The 750 Words website was developed by Buster Benson, a senior product manager at Slack Technologies, who previously worked at Twitter, and his wife Kellianne. The couple were inspired by an effective routine called “morning pages” in Julia Cameron’s self-help book titled “The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path To Higher Creativity.” By writing three pages about anything that comes to mind, unedited and uncensored, people think out loud and unleash their ideas for the rest of the day.
“It’s a daily brain dump,” Buster Benson and Kellianne wrote on the 750 Words site. “Over time, I’ve found that it’s also very helpful as a tool to get thoughts going that have become stuck, or to help get to the bottom of a rotten mood.”
Keeping my personal diary on the 750 Words website, I trust that my morning pages there are private. This means I can unload all my thoughts and illustrate some of my crazy ideas without worrying that someone else would read them. What’s good about 750 Words is that its analytics function tracks my progress and distills my mood from I what write. For example, it shows what my mindset is when writing (introvert/extrovert, positive/negative, certain/uncertain or feeling/thinking) and my current feelings (affectionate, happy or upset).
In my first morning of blogging, I spent 18 minutes typing without any distraction, which the website measures by tracking minutes I stopped typing to browse other sites. I took the time to do a recap of my week, recalling unique experiences I had from attending business school classes, conducting interviews for my journalism assignments, meeting up with friends and speaking on the phone with my parents in Hong Kong. It is almost embarrassing to dig deep into the specific details of my personal reflection on 750 Words, but I must say the process of writing freely was fun and even therapeutic.
Verb tense in English language allows the 750 Words statistics to detect throughout my writing whether my focus lies on the past, present or future. Based on my first few entries, the website told me that I was lingering on the past. I am grateful for this insightful statistic, which prompts me to think ahead and not look back. In the following entries, I encouraged myself to shift focus to the current moment rather than dwelling in regrets or anxieties about the future.
I kept up the habit for the rest of the month. Over time, it became easier for me to notice interesting things about my day and take time to feel grateful about each moment. While I’m not sure I have become a better and more creative writer, 750 Words did help me find self-improvement every day.
