
Show HN: Writing Streak – write fiction every day - rayalez
http://writingstreak.io/?hn
======
rayalez
Hey, everyone! Super excited to make it to the front page of HN =)

I want writingstreak.io to help people to practice their writing skills and
develop a habit of writing regularly.

It keeps track of daily word count, gives you writing prompts, has a github-
like calendar representing the amount of words you have written each day, and
all sorts of cool features to help you focus on writing.

I think it's gonna be pretty great.

It is in the very early stage at this point, and I would really love some
feedback.

Does the idea make sense, do you think it's useful? What other features would
you like in that kind of tool?

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jtheory
Is this something only for people who want to _start_ writing, and need to
start building the habit to put in time every day? Or can it also be useful
for people who already write?

The main issue that pops out to me is that people who write have projects
(sometimes several, sometimes massive ones), and "writing" daily sometimes
means much more editing/cutting than writing fresh text (I'm married to a
novelist; her first book lost about five hundred pages between the first
"completed" draft and the final result). Or -- writing may mean composing new
text, but it's placed somewhere in a much larger work.

Last thought! Be very careful about having ability to export from the start,
and be very sure you don't run out of time / hosting fees / whatever and let
it die with anyone's work trapped in it.

~~~
rayalez
If you are a professional writer you still might use some additional
motivation or habit tracking. I have not yet put much attention into tracking
number of words on bigger projects, but I definitely will.

If you don't need that sort of stuff and just want to publish fiction - I am
also working on a related project -
[http://fictionhub.io](http://fictionhub.io)

It is using the same platform, it's goal is to be a great place to publish
high quality fiction(and, in the future, sell it as well).

And yes, I'll definitely be very careful with user data. Adding the export
feature is on my todo list.

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harryf
Mobile? Context: my daughter (12) wrote her first 5000+ word story on her
Android phone without anyone prompting her to do it. But perhaps teenagers and
younger are not your target audience?

~~~
rayalez
Wow, that's really awesome!

Regarding mobile - right now I want to focus on improving the website and
making sure that it has everything users want and is really convenient to use.
Currently it does work on mobile(but not throughly tested yet), I'll try to
make it work really well.

At the moment I don't have any plans for an app, but if users will really need
it I can make it.

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wj
First of all congratulations on launching. I like the idea and do hope one day
to write my great American novel. In my past life I fancied myself a
screenwriter (wrote six and produced one).

My three comments are:

* A screenwriting feature so that it counts pages over words.

* If you do support screenwriting then support the Fountain format. (I have a screenwriting/production app and I modified a WordPress plugin for that support.)

* NaNoWriMo is a time to shine. Start gearing up an awareness campaign in September.

~~~
rayalez
Thanks for the feedback!

Yeah, I have been thinking about adding screenwriting support. For now it
makes more sense to just focus on fiction, but it's very possible that I'll
add the Fountain support in the future.

I'll think what I can do for NaNoWriMo. Now I'm focused on short stories, but
it would be really awesome to come up with tools that would help writers to
work on bigger projects. I'll just need to figure out a simple and elegant way
to do that.

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ocdtrekkie
I think this is kinda neat, but I think it's interesting because the GitHub
contribution graph, which I see a similar graph to here, has been derided by a
large group of people:
[https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/627](https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/627)

I am actually a big fan of this "just do it" method of getting better or more
comfortable with something though, and I think this is cool.

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fiatjaf
I think this makes sense for a lot of people here, and that people will be
able to sell books on Kindle store writing like this, but it is surely sad
that writing has become this nowadays.

~~~
rayalez
Can you elaborate? Why do you think that?

(Maybe I didn't make it clear - the purpose here is not to "sell kindle
books", but to practice writing skills. Not to generate as much content as
possible, but to get better at your craft.)

~~~
jagermo
Well put. Wríting for me is more of a trade than an art. You need to work on
it to really get good at it. I'll give it a try, thanks.

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stevewilhelm
> You begin by writng a paragraph describing a settng of your story, and
> continue from there:

> The most actve writers get a place on our leaderboard of awesomeness:

Looks like you may have a sticky 'i' key.

~~~
rayalez
Oh, thanks a lot, fixed!

~~~
jtheory
A few other minor typos I noticed (since this seems to be the typo thread!):

for today(the green circle) (missing space)

On you profile page (your)

~~~
rayalez
Thank you very much! Corrected.

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personjerry
The sprint feature reminds me of this:
[http://www.themostdangerouswritingapp.com/](http://www.themostdangerouswritingapp.com/)

Discussion on ^ link:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11197190](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11197190)

Like the comments linked, I don't like how it just deletes all the work --
what if you'd written something really compelling and lost it all?

~~~
rayalez
Well, that's the point of the game) Otherwise when you stop writing nothing
happens, no stakes.

Of course you can just ignore this feature and simply write without it.

I have also experimented with using a "pomodoro" feature instead of this(just
a 20 min countdown timer), but sprints seem more fun. Maybe I'll add a
preference allowing people to choose pomodoro instead.

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photokandy
This looks pretty cool. I think it would be fantastic if you'd integrate
social logins here. I'd rather log in with Facebook or Twitter than create a
completely separate account just to use the site.

Having a demo of sorts would also be useful, so that I could get a feel for
the sprint editor. Animations are great, but it doesn't give me a sense of how
well it would work for me.

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BoppreH
See also:

[https://750words.com/](https://750words.com/) similar concept, encourages you
to write ~3 pages every day.

[http://nanowrimo.org/](http://nanowrimo.org/) national novel writing month.

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asimuvPR
Could I set my own subject? It looks like a nice UX to help with general
writing too.

~~~
rayalez
Yes, sure! Prompts are there to help people to get started, but feel free to
ignore them if you want.

In the future I will probably add preferences allowing people to disable the
functionality they don't use.

~~~
asimuvPR
Just gave it a try and its fun. I had not realized this is a sort of community
type of place. Anyhow, I like the goal driven GUI. It is really motivating and
works. The title input is buggy in Firefox/OSX (text doesn't show up), and the
main textarea does not scroll down as I type more than what the size will let.
But those are silly bugs. This is fun. In fact, I think this could be turned
into a product if you can package it as a stand alone application (not mobile
app) for desktops. Leave out the public community aspect but keep the goals
GUI.

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jeffmess
Nice. Now if only we could get GRRM or Patrick Rothfuss to use this tool.

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heisnotanalien
The problem I could foresee with this is that all/most writing prompts are
just really irritating. A photo or something would be preferable.

~~~
rayalez
Thank you for the feedback! I am still thinking about the right format for
prompts, I will definitely try to improve them.

Maybe I will allow users to submit their own prompts, or just have a
randomized setting, character, and problem/goal.

Image prompts are an interesting idea, they never worked for me personally,
but I'll think about adding them as an option.

Currently many prompts are taken from the top posts on /r/WritingPrompts, I'm
an active user of that subreddit and I find them really helpful(they are
usually specific and funny).

Do you have any advice on making a prompt good? Is there a kind of text
prompts that you like?

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personjerry
The writing prompts are rather specific; I think a good writing prompt should
be more open to interpretation.

