WHY: 

The purpose of this app is to be a catalyst, enabling some creative juices to start flowing during any sort of creative writing. The methodology I use here is adapted from Pat Pattison's book Songwriting Without Boundaries, and the idea is simple.

There will be an object based prompt. You will spend either 10 minutes, 5 minutes, or 90 seconds writing about that prompt. You will only use your five (actually seven) senses. The five you are familiar with—see, hear, touch, smell, taste—and two you may be less familiar with: organic (sensation from internal organs, e.g. heart beating or stomach rumbling ) and kinesthetic ( sensations relating to the world around you, e.g. being seasick or blurriness from not wearing glasses ).

Theoretically you will do this exercise every day, ideally doing a separate prompt for each length of time, but at the very least one of them. It is designed to help build a habit of writing by doing it every day.

Time constraints are integral to habit building. It is nearly impossible to build a habit if you don't have a set of boundaries around what you're trying to accomplish. For example, let's say you spend 3 hours one day writing about a specific object because it comes naturally and it's something that excites you. The next day if you start to write and the prompt isn't something as exciting or familiar, you may have a hard time mustering up the motivation to write anything. Inevitably you might not think you have the endurance for another 3 hours, since in your head that is now a standard.

With that in mind, this exercise is not intended to create a masterpiece, or even full and coherent sentences. It is meant to be scrappy and for you to practice diving into your senses. After spending time doing this every day, when you actually spend time with your more focused writing—whatever that may be—you will be well equipped to draw upon your senses to help enhance whatever that piece may be.

HOW IT WORKS: 

1) Generate a prompt with the 'New Prompt' button until you find one that's suitable.

2) Enable 'Fullscreen mode' if you want your writing to be distraction free.

3) Choose the length of time you want from the dropdown.

4) Click the 'Start Writing' button to open the text editor and to begin the exercise. In the top right, there will be a timer that indicates where you are. It will turn red the last 10 seconds. As soon as the timer is up the exercise will end and it will cut you off immediately. This is intentional, this is the point of the app so you can't just keep typing for 3 hours.

5) The editor will automatically exit and your stored entry will be visible on the left, if you want to revisit it, click on the entry to have it displayed on the right.

DISCLAIMER:

The entries are stored locally in your browser and there is no guarantee they will be there forever. If you find you wrote something particularly meaningful, I would highly suggest either saving it in a text editor of choice, or jotting it down on some good ole fashioned pen and paper.

Otherwise this is an exercise in ephemerality and there need not be too much focus on the substance of content.