Welcome to 750 Words!

★ What is 750 Words about?

This little website is about helping you practice one of the most important habits in life: private journaling.

I've long been inspired by an idea I first learned about in The Artist's Way called morning pages. Morning pages are three pages of writing done every day, typically encouraged to be in "long hand", usually in the morning, that can be about anything and everything that comes into your head. It's about getting it all out of your head, and it's not supposed to be edited or censored in any way. I've used the exercise as a great way to think out loud without having to worry about half-formed ideas, random tangents, private stuff, and all the other things in our heads that we often filter out before ever voicing them or writing about them. It's a daily brain dump. Over time, I've found that it's also very helpful as a tool to get thoughts going that have become stuck, or to help get to the bottom of a rotten mood.

What I can say is that if you can get in the habit of writing three pages a day, your mind will be clearer and your creative ideas and true feelings will flow more freely the rest of the day. It comes down to this: the rest of your day may require you to consider the needs and thoughts of others, but this can be your little corner of the day that is all yours. ALL YOURS! *maniacal laugh*

750 Words is the online, future-ified, fun-ified translation of the infamous morning pages exercise. Here's how it works:

★ It's super secure and permanently private

In order to write what's really on your heart and mind without censoring, it helps if you feel pretty confident that others won't find your journal of secrets and start reading it back to you as you have a heart attack. Here your writing is secure and password-protected and will never include an option to become public in any way (you can cut and paste the words somewhere else if you really want to do that).

★ It's not blogging or content creation

I've tried writing my 750 words a day on all kinds of websites (Wordpress, Facebook, LiveJournal, Tumblr, etc) but it's a bit nerve-wracking having my private brain dumps out on various sites that have sharing and publishing options. I don't need to title my entries, or tag them, or enable comments, or any of that other stuff. This is writing, and it's online, but it's not blogging, or tweeting, or status updating. This is only between you and you, and everything here is built with that assumption in mind.

★ 3 Pages = 750 words

I looked this up. 250 words per page is considered to be the standard accepted number of words per page. So, three standard pages are about 750 words. Of course if 750words.com hadn't been available, I would've totally found a way to prove that 249 words per page was the accepted standard. It really just comes down to the fact that this amount of writing feels about right. You can't just fart out 3 pages without running into your subconscious a little bit… 750 words takes a bit of effort, and it never fails to get you typing things that have been taking up space in your brain without you realizing it. And that's the point.

Because 750 words is a not-insignificant amount of writing (the opposite of a hot take tweet), it's also nice to have an easy way to know how many words you have to go. This site of course tracks your word count at all times and lets you know when you've passed the blessed 750 mark. And it gives you a nice big screen to write on, automatically scrolls as you write (like a typewriter), and automatically saves your writing as you go.

★ It's fun

Every month you get a clean slate. If you write anything at all, you get 1 point. If you write 750 words or more, you get 2 points. If you write two, three or more days in a row, you get even more points. It's fun to try to stay on streaks and the points are a way to play around with that. You can also see how others are doing points-wise if you're at all competitive that way. How I see it, points can motivate early on, and eventually the joy of writing will kick in and you'll be writing without any external motivation at all.

★ Learn about yourself in the process

Learn about how often you get distracted, and how fast you write.

Every day you write, you'll get beautiful stats that analyze the feelings, themes, and mindset of your words.

Free-writing, in my opinion, is like a cheap, easy form of therapy that can improve the quality of your life in many ways. If you're interested in the connections between free-writing and meditation, read this article: Better than meditation.

★ It's about writing, and getting into your brain

Everything else is just a bag of tricks to help us get there.

★ Who made this?

Buster and Kellianne. Tell us what you think of it or how you want it to improve by talking with us over at on Twitter or Facebook.