This is a really cool site you can use to check your work for things like filler words, adverbs, passive voice, and lexical illusions .
It’s not a substitute for actually editing your work, but you can use it to point out features of your writing that you find difficult to spot on your own.
So as someone with more than a bit of ADD i’ve picked up a number of tools to help me focus and get to work, and I thought I’d share:
The Pomodoro Method – This is a way of narrowing your focus and breaking your time into manageable chunks. Traditionally it’s 25 minutes of work followed by a 5 minute break, then a 15 minute break after 4 sets. I generally do 15-5 because my focus can be short, but I find this is a great way to stay on task with something. Even 10 minute spurts can be useful. Which leads me to…
Timers – your phone has a timer (you can ask Siri to set one), there’s a million on the internet. If I don’t want to do something (cleaning) or need to sit down and write a paragraph or a fic or a paper, a ten minute timer is my best friend. My unofficial motto is “I can do anything for ten minutes”
FocusWriter – It’s free. And the simple thing it does is take over your entire screen real estate. You can minimize, but there’s no making it smaller. When I need to really focus on writing, this blocks out everything, especially if I’ve turned off IM notifications.
NowDoThis – This website is my favorite to-do list. I like lists, but tend to get overwhelmed if I see a whole bunch of stuff that needs doing. What this does is, once you’ve put in your list (one item per line), it only shows you one at a time. So instead of seeing 15 things I need to do, I see one thing. And when that’s done I see one more thing. It helps narrow my focus to one thing at a time instead of doing a little bit of everything.
MyNoise – Also free, though you can donate, this is my go to place if I need some noise to block out the world. I like combining coffee shop, rain and traffic sometimes when I’m writing. Or lately i’ve just been using the Rain magic generator (you have to have donated to use the magic generators, but it’s $5)
Reminders – I’ve only recently started using this on my iPhone, but damn if it isn’t helpful. So if I remember when I’m going to sleep that I want to do something in the morning, I can pick up my phone and tell Siri to remind me at 8am of X. It’s supposed to be able to remind you of things when you leave the house but I haven’t quite got the hang of that.
DO YOU KNOW THAT KIND OF WRITER’S BLOCK WHERE YOU ALREADY HAVE A PLOT, YOU KNOW WHAT TO WRITE BUT YOU DON’T KNOW HOW TO WRITE IT AND YOU JUST STARE AT THE COMPUTER SCREEN FOR HOURS UNTIL YOU FINALLY CLOSE THE DOCUMENT AND CURSE YOUR ENTIRE EXISTENCE
CAUSE I DO
The best thing to do when that happens (trust me I know) is to use a program like yWriter that separates everything into chapters and chapters into scenes, and just start making a summary of every scene.
Just basic stuff like “Okay, here’s where they find the book and this guy freaks out“ or ”Oh here’s the big reveal part. Things I want: This kid to cry when he says he lost the key, the other guy to say he knew the whole time, and maybe they talk about that thing from ch1?? I’ll decide later.“
One of my favorite parts about yWriter specifically is the time, locations, POV, and characters function. Like you can just look at a scene and see that it’s from Sally’s perspective, it takes place in the garden at midnight, and Joey and Bob are there with her.
When I have that kind of writer’s block, I just go through and create the scenes I want to happen so when I actually have the mindset to write, I already know what I want tin it, I just need to make it nice and pretty.
Not sure this would work with the way I write, but it sounds very useful! And yWriter is free too.
I’ve found this website to be a very useful tool, so I thought I’d share it, in case it might help anyone else.
NowDoThis is very very simple. You take your to do list, paste it in the box and hit ready. Then it simply shows you one item at a time.
For me, if I see a list of ten things to do I start to feel overwhelmed and a little panicky. With this, since I only see one thing at a time, it’s easier to focus on the one task on the screen until I hit done.
Do A, now do B, now do c, etc.
The site works on mobile as well as desktop.
What I’ve been doing is using notepad on my phone and jotting down anyting I need to get done when I get home as I think about it. When I do get home I put it in the order I want to do it, copy and paste into the site.
And then I get stuff done.
Edit: they have a tumblr (@nowdothis )and there’s a couple more useful tricks
Putting a colon will create a new tab so you can have multiple lists.
If you put a time in an item like say ‘clean 10 minutes’, it’ll have a timer when that item.
