The Ultimate Writing Hacks Test

As a writer, you may have seen things that claim to help your writing--most of which sound odd. Like, writing in Comic Sans? Change your font white? Put something over your computer screen? If you’re like me, you’d probably be thinking: how in the world will these crazy things help improve my writing productivity?

So in this blog post, I’ll be experimenting with some different writing hacks and seeing how productive they really are, and evaluating them on three different ratings. Then I’ll be ranking them from my top favorite (which were the most productive) to the least favorite (the least productive).

Now I just want to clarify, results will vary depending on the difficulty of the scene, my setting, and distractions, but I will try to eliminate any factors that will affect my results.

Without further ado, I present to you. . . the Writing Hacks Ultimate Test!

Running~

The hacks in the running are:

• Writing in Comic Sans font

• Turning my font white

• Using the Dangerous Writing App

• Putting something over my computer screen

Evaluation~

The points to be evaluated are:

Availability. How easy it was to get a hold of what was needed for this hack.

Ease. How easy it was to actually accomplish something using this hack.

Scene. How easy/difficult the scene I was writing was.

Tests~

1. Writing in Comic Sans Comic Neue font

I do have to say, I was pretty excited to try this after hearing horrendous things about Comic Sans. Okay, I’m not a big fan of Comic Sans at all, but hey--it’s a writing hack. I have to at least try it.

Availability: I use Google Docs, but unfortunately Google Docs no longer has Comic Sans. So that led me to do some research, download an add-on for Google Docs--all to find that Comic Sans wasn’t available on that add-on, either.

Long story short, I settled for Comic Neue, which is apparently the “new Comic Sans”. Maybe if I had been a little more tech savvy, I would have figured that out earlier. Anyway.

On a scale of 1-10, availability would be a 1, because, well, Comic Sans apparently wasn’t available at all. XD

Ease: I found that as I was writing, my brain somehow got curious about this new font and the words flowed out faster. There were a couple moments where I was like, What I’m writing is trash anyway, but I didn’t stop or go back to edit. My sole purpose was putting words on the page, and honestly I can’t say I didn’t succeed.

Scene: I decided to write the next scene of my work-in-progress, Operation Endurance, on a completely new Google Doc. I already knew where it would go--my MC would get attacked by a new girl in her Trial, a death maze.

Process: I set my timer for five minutes, prepared a clean white document with the Comic Neue font, and began to write without editing. When the timer rang, I stopped and looked over my work.

Conclusion: I actually enjoyed this. It could just be me, but I think this hack actually does work. There’s something about this font that just turns off the “writer-perfectionist” part of my brain and just kind of nudges me to have fun with it. And I don’t know about you, but this font is rather fun. In total, I got 319 words.

2. Turning my font white

I’ve actually never encountered this writing hack until a couple weeks ago. I had my doubts (like, how does one even edit when everything’s white?), and because the perfectionist in me just cringed.

But we’ll see how this goes.

Availability: In my opinion, there’s very little that goes into this actual challenge. You won’t be able to actually see the font you’re writing, so any will do. For this challenge, I’ve decided to go with my go-to font, EB Garamond.

Ease: It was actually really difficult for me to get used to this challenge, but for not being able to see even where your cursor is on the page, I think I did a relatively okay job writing.

As for spelling, as I was writing, I could see red underlines in a sea of white and I knew I was misspelling words. I found it really difficult to switch to italics and back to normal font without knowing which word I was on. I found myself looking down at the keyboard a lot, to try and figure out whether I was typing something right.

However, I did find it easier to concentrate--until those red underlines showed up and those drove me nuts, kind of distracting my brain so it was harder to get words on the page the more words I misspelled.

Scene: I decided to write more of my work-in-progress, Operation Endurance. I honestly had no general idea where this scene would go.

Process: I set my timer for five minutes, prepared a clean white document with my font turned to white EB Garamond, and began to write. When the timer was up, I moused over what I had written and changed it back to black--and then cringed so badly at all the misspelled words.

Conclusion: This worked relatively well--I found it easier to picture the scene and my MC’s reactions when I wasn’t staring at words (and instead, just a white screen). However, those misspelled words annoyed me and sort of distracted my mind while I was writing. I’m sure I could have turned spell check off, but my memory fled at that moment. In total, surprisingly, I wrote 339 words.

3. Using the Dangerous Writing App

Okay, I admit it. I probably cheated by throwing this in here, because (spoiler alert) I’m pretty sure it works. I’ve used this writing app (which is really only a website) multiple times during competitions to get as many words out, and even ended up writing 1000 words in a little over an hour.

But for fun, I’m going to try this again.

Availability: The one con about this website is that the internet is needed, which could be a problem if I’m working offline. But overall, it’s relatively simple. All I had to do was type: https://www.squibler.io/dangerous-writing-prompt-app and it came up. Basically, it deletes my words after a couple seconds of inactivity (or editing), forcing me to just write.

Scene: I decided to write another scene from Operation Endurance, but again, I had no general idea where this would go.

Process: I headed over to the website and clicked the timer button (which automatically sets a writing session for five minutes). Then I started writing. It automatically stopped after five minutes, and I looked over my work and copied and pasted it to a new Google Document.

Conclusion: Once I got over the couple times where my computer was so slow, the dangerous writing app threatened to delete all my work, I eventually got over it and was able to write my scene just as well. I did edit a couple times (oops!) but overall, it was relatively easy to get something done with this. In total, I got 255 words.

4. Putting something over my computer screen.

I’ve actually never tried this challenge before, but it sounded intriguing (and similar to the white font challenge), so we’ll see how this goes!

Availability: This challenge could definitely vary depending on what you have on hand. For this, I decided to use a sheet of paper that fitted over my computer screen, but you could use a pillowcase, piece of cardboard, book, clipboard, the list goes on and on.

Scene: I decided to write the next scene from Operation Endurance. I had a rough idea of where this was going to go, which included a lot of dialogue (which is not my favorite part of writing).

Process: I started a timer for 5 minutes, I headed over to a blank Google Doc, turned my font to EB Garamond, then covered my screen with a sheet of paper. Then I started writing.

Conclusion: My brain was honestly fried by now. Just like the white font one, I particularly didn’t enjoy this because I couldn’t see what or where I was writing, and for some reason that just drove me nuts. XD

However, it was easier to just let myself write instead of seeing anything to edit (no red underlines here!) but I probably lost a couple minutes on my timer since I couldn’t see when it went off.

The Results

This was honestly a lot of fun. It’s not every day I get to test all these things in one sitting. XD

Looking over all my results, here are my official favorite writing hacks, rated from favorite to least favorite:

First place: Writing in Comic Neue font

Second place: Using the Dangerous Writing App

Third place: Turning my font white

Fourth place: Putting something over my computer screen

So that basically wraps up my ultimate writing hacks test! Is there a writing hack that has helped you? Have you tested any of these before? Let me know in the comments!