Writer's Resource Review: The Most Dangerous Writing App, featuring Cam Best

With writing schedules packed full of research, drafting, and revising short stories, poems, and novels, it’s easy to neglect perhaps the most important skill: getting started. I’m among those writers who normally bum around in life until inspiration hits them between the eyes and they hit the ground running, no stretching beforehand.

Tell any athlete to just play a game of sport ball while expecting them to win all the points without warming up, and they’d understandably laugh in your face (I’m assuming this, on account of I don’t associate myself with people who willingly sweat for fun. They don’t find me all that exhilarating either).

Artists need to warm up beforehand just as much as athletes do. The brain is a muscle too, and we’ve got to stretch it (though gym teachers don’t exactly equate hard thinking to hard workouts, much to my dismay) And if we don’t know how to start writing, we’ll struggle more when we don’t know what to write about. The dreaded Writer’s Block will strike again, and we will be slave to this dark, soul-sucking obstacle.

So wouldn’t you know that I was on my lazy ass browsing through Facebook, when I saw that my friend had tagged me in a post advertising a writing app. This app is called The Most Dangerous Writing App. Aptly named, The Most Dangerous Writing App demands that writers write for a continuous period of time without stopping… or else all their work is deleted.

Deleting a writer’s work is arguably up there on the list of Horrendous Things to Do, next to “hitting someone’s dog with your car” and “castration”. It’s the stuff of nightmares. Creator Manuel Ebert comments that “ ‘tis better to have written and lost, than never to have written at all” in the Help section of the app, which nearly motivates me to hypothetically delete any Microsoft Word documents on his laptop and see what he says after that.

But here’s the thing: no one is asking you to pen the next Wasteland in this app. No one’s stopping you from writing “John Tucker must die” 100+ times just to get that word count. But here’s a suggestion on how to find a happy medium between creating a masterpiece and copying monotonous nonsense. 

With this in mind (and not nearly enough alcohol in the stomach) I decided to give the app a try. I started off with 5:00 on the clock and practiced writing down whatever came to my head. I found that while I was writing, I instinctively wanted to slow down or stop writing. I’m used to taking a fraction of a pause, often to find the right word I’m looking for or to further formulate an idea before jotting it down. The app forced me to be reactive and–just as Ebert notes – “shut down [my] inner editor”.

For my second go at the app, I turned on hardcore mode and settled on writing for 5:00 about a topic I knew about. I expected this round to be much more difficult, since I would have to actually make sense. I still found that I completely lost my typical writer’s voice – I was writing the way that I speak, which is very informal and rambling. I’d also learned that ‘hardcore mode’ meant that none of the writing would be visible: you’re able to see one letter at a time, which can almost make you forget what word you’re writing. Gods forbid it’s “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”.

Let’s look at a breakdown of biggest pros & cons for the app:

PROS: 

• break through your writer’s block – write about anything that comes to mind, transition into any topic
• increase typing speed
• forces writer to complete designated time to solely writing

CONS: 

• hard to stay on topic or have writing seem coherent –feels like throwaway writing
• focus is on quantity, not quality
• hardcore mode breaks down the writing process into such small pieces that words feel more like letters – feels too removed from idea-generation portion of writing process

Considering that I was initially against using this writing app, I’m glad that I gave it a try. It’s a useful tool for the kind of writer who struggles to get their fingers moving, who feels so much pressure on getting the exact words and ideas down on the first try; I don’t necessarily think that this is the best app out there for helping to generate ideas on what to write about. Still, The Most Dangerous Writing App is definitely something to consider adding to your writing arsenal.

IN ACTION: 

Round 1 (5:00)

Round 2 (5:00 hardcore)

Read more of Cam's work on Floodmark here.