Here, Take My Ballet Mistress. Please.

Like many young girls, I started out doing ballet classes at a young age.  I took to them with a passion, though, and despite my parents’ reluctance, attended several more years of ballet before they pulled the plug on the training.

Although most of that training is a dim memory now, what I still retain strongly is the basic positions, and that’s because I had a ballet mistress that used to walk up and down the aisles as we practiced, tapping a long, slender walking stick.  If she noticed any body part on any dancer that was out of alignment, the body part was tapped back into line with the stick.  If she was in a bad mood the body part was slapped back into line.  If she was in a really bad mood, the stick was applied more liberally.

My ballet mistress was in a crabby mood more often than not, but I have almost perfect posture these days.

I tripped over the writer’s equivalent of my ballet mistress today.  Write or Die looks both awful and fascinating.  It appears to be a fairly simple web-based program that gives you a few options to set up, once you’re registered.  You tell it how long you want to write, or how many words you need to get down, and how hard a task master you want the program to be, from easy, to medium, to hard.

Then you start writing.  As soon as you get distracted, the program starts nagging you.  If you’re on the soft option, you get gentle reminders.  If you’ve got the equivalent of my ballet mistress, the program starts backspacing over your manuscript, deleting your writing.

That ought to unblock anyone’s creativity.

The front page of the site mentions that it’s a useful way to push yourself through a NaNoWriMo challenge, which I thought was a bright idea.  It is a great way to haul yourself through a manuscript really fast.  If you were facing a killer deadline, this program would be one way of making sure you got the necessary wordage down on paper.

First appeared on Anchored Authors in April/May, 2009

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Tracy Cooper-Posey © 2009. Cannot be copied or distributed without permission.