The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron is a self-help book about becoming a more productive artist. Cameron introduces a series of exercises and techniques that improve creativity. But the main thing that stands out to me about the book, in regards to writing, is something she calls "Morning Pages."
Cameron mentions, "to retrieve your creativity, you need to find it." She offers a way to do that by bringing forth the Morning Pages, which is to write 3 Pages or 750 words every morning. The writing can be whatever comes to mind or something that you want to work on. But the main takeaway is to write and get your thoughts on paper.
I have done the morning pages in the past, not necessarily in the morning, but I still got the pages done. There are many benefits to doing it. A few that I immediately noticed were a quieter mind akin to a 20-minute meditation session that comes with less stress and anxiety.
750words
750words is a very complex and innovative web app that drew inspiration from The Artist's Way. It added to the Morning Pages' original purpose by dissecting your writing tone- thus giving another great perspective to your daily thoughts by providing insightful stats. Stats provided are the tone of your writing, frequently used words, and even the length of time, among many others.
After you are finished writing, you can submit it and keep it within your account privatelyfor your eyes only. Throughout time the app shows you where your daily thoughts lean towards-whether that's through excitement, anxiety, anger... a plethora of feelings. It also provides a great reward system by giving out badges for consistency.
At first, I used this web app as a gateway to get my thoughts out and become a better version of myself. Throughout my coding journey, 750words was a company that inspired me back in my early days of learning the basics of HTML and CSS. I always wondered what powered all the tools. I aim to create a project just like it and keep it updated because I have always resonated closely with the simple idea of writing. I can honestly say 750words inspired me to want to learn javascript, along with any technologies needed for such an app with just as many features.