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It took a little while to get used to it, I must say and it is really, really hard. Have you used The Most Dangerous Writing App or Flowstate? Would you? Could you risk losing all your work just trying to write faster? Maybe The Most Dangerous Editing App is next. I wrote a journaling app for nerds a while back, and it has still thousands of users. Are you developing anything else at the moment for the creative community – or have any plans to do so? Frankly, that alone made it worth writing this app and releasing it for free.
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The most heartwarming email I got however was from a father who told me that he introduced his teenage son who’s struggling with ADHD to the Most Dangerous Writing App, and it cut the time he needed to write his essays for school from several hours to 30 minutes. Teachers use it with their students for writing exercises. MDWA is enjoying a lot of use in classrooms. How do you hope people will use it? Do you think it can make you become a better or faster writer?
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Writer and literature professor Jonathan Olson said “Finally someone figured out how to combine the plots of Speed and Misery.” I think that nails it. What has been the best / funniest feedback you’ve received about the app? That means even less editing, more writing. It hides the text you type and only flashes the last letter until you hit your time limit. Hardcore more only works in Chrome and Safari, unfortunately. What’s the idea behind the ‘hardcore mode’? I couldn’t get into it, but should I persevere and if so, why? Yet, every week users of The Most Dangerous Writing App create the complete works of Leo Tolstoy – in terms of quantity at least, I don’t know what people write on there. It confronts some writers with an ugly truth that corrodes their self-identity : they can’t even write for 5 minutes straight. I think a lot of writers have a profound love / hate relationship with this app. Did you set out to infuriate writers everywhere? How do you feel about Wired calling it the most ‘sadistic’ writing app ever created? It forces you to act as if you were in flow, and one of the things I heard from users over and over again is the more they use MDWA, the less they actually need it. Traditional word processors use one and the same interface or mode for editing and writing, when in reality those should be to separate steps for writers. Without a certain level of competence it is impossible to get into a state of flow as Csíkszentmihályi would define it.
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In writing, and particular in free writing, this skill is to separate the creation from the editing process. So on the surface, in many ways, writing with MDWA is the opposite of being in the flow. Flow is activity for the activity’s sake, and includes absence of fear and lack of awareness of time passing. MDWA very explicitly uses fear and a sense of passing time to “trick” you into writing. The concept of “Flow” was coined by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, a Hungarian psychologist. Do you think it’s hard to get into the ‘flow’ when writing in a traditional word processor, for example, and if so, why? I did totally absolutely not expect that. I released it to the public for fun on Monday morning, and a week later had over 100,000 users and got featured by Wired, Lifehacker, The Verge, Forbes, HuffPost, and, uh, Popsugar. However its $10 price tag turned me off, and I wrote the Most Dangerous Writing App on a Sunday afternoon in a coffee shop simply because I could.
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I wish there was a glorious story of despair and ingenuity here, but frankly, I wasn’t the first person to create a self-destruct writing app – “Write or Die” and the Mac App Flowstate has a similar concept. What inspired you to create this app? Are you a sufferer of writer’s block yourself? (Yay!) So, I decided to track down its creator, Manuel Ebert, a data science, designer and ex-neuroscientist, for a little chit-chat about his dangerous little writing tool.
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I’ve been using it for a week now and have a heap more work off my desk. Which is, as you might expect, totally bloody infuriating.īottom line? I love it. It basically offers you a distraction-free blank screen, a timer and a warning: stop typing for five seconds and your work will disappear. The latter was cured by having a baby, but I still get the former from time to time, and when I heard about The Most Dangerous Writing App through a LinkedIn group I thought it might be worth a go scare the pants off me enough to help me to get some work done. I’ve done a lot over the years to bust my way through writer’s block, or procrastination. We chat to the creator of The Most Dangerous Writing App