Seattle is full of writers. Walk into any cafe in town and you run the danger of becoming an incidental character in three novels-in-progress at the same time. New open mics and writers' workshops sprout up on what seems like a daily basis—Greenwood's Couth Buzzard bookshop is hosting 13 different events for writers in October alone—and the Seattle region dominates National Novel Writing Month, when writers from around the world sit down to pound out a 50,000-word novel between November 1 and 30. Nearly 120,000 people participated in National Novel Writing Month last year, and out of 550 regions worldwide, Seattle came in first in the number of words produced (as it has every year for the last four years straight).
Prolific though they may be, Seattle writers can always use some help. Aspiring authors spend an incalculable amount of money every year—tens of millions of dollars at the minimum—on how-to-write books and fancy get-published-now classes. But any professional writer can tell you that there is no trick to becoming a good writer. There's only one rule: Every day you have to write something. Even if they're the three shittiest paragraphs you've ever written, they'll get you three shitty paragraphs closer to work you can be proud of. That's the thing that kills most wannabe writers: They don't sit in the chair every day, and so they never hone their craft.
Two Seattleites have created free websites that make the writing process easier and more enjoyable for authors. On the face of things, the two sites are very different—one is designed to be private, the other is very social—but they both work to make the writing process less intimidating.
Buster Benson was a creative-writing major at the University of Washington, but he found himself "sucked into the tech world" after graduation, working at Amazon for a while. (Benson is probably best known as Buster McLeod, one of the primary people behind the late, lamented Belltown artist's cooperative the McLeod Residence.) Though he enjoyed working with websites, Benson still considered himself "primarily a thinker who had to think through writing." The best way to make that happen, he found, was a method in Julia Cameron's "kind of cheesy" book about artistic freedom, The Artist's Way. Cameron's idea of "morning pages" was that you'd produce three pages of private, stream-of-consciousness writing first thing every day to check in to your emotional state.
In February, Benson translated this idea into a site called 750Words.com and made it free to the public. The site offers a private webpage that functions like a normal Word document with a running word count at the bottom. An algorithm "reads" the words and provides insight into the writer's emotional state (common descriptors include Introvert, Negative, Positive, and Self-Important), and charts gauge your time orientation, primary sense used in writing, and your self-involvement or empathy. Then it rewards users for continued use by scoring them. Benson chose bowling as his scoring metaphor: If you write 750 words or more on Monday, you get a strike for that day. If you can manage only 300 words on Tuesday, that's a spare because you put forth the effort. If you don't write any words at all on Wednesday (even though the service helpfully sends reminder e-mails if you wish), your streak is done and you start at zero again. (Users earn digital badges for streaks of three days or longer.) Benson says that 30 users are now past 200 days in a row and 176 are somewhere between 100 and 200 days. Every day, "about a thousand" people do their words.
Lily Pierson started Typetrigger.com on August 23 as a way to get back into writing. Pierson was a freelance writer for Seattle Business and NWSource, but she says she became "frustrated that I wasn't working more and annoyed that I had become assignment-dependent." In order to write for herself, Pierson asked her mother to provide a list of short "triggers" that she could use to write pieces. The idea quickly grew into a website that provides writers with one trigger every six hours.
Inspired by the New Yorker's Talk of the Town section, Pierson decided to limit the writers' pieces to 300 words per trigger because it felt like the right length (it's long enough to develop one good idea, and though it seems too easy to many first-time writers, "It's a little more challenging than it sounds") and to allow the writers to interact. Typetrigger writers can "like" each other's pieces singly or become "readers" of them, subscribing to everything they write.
Social interactions on a site that allows users to express their creativity can be a tricky thing, but Pierson seems to have nailed the role of social engineer. By e-mail, Typetrigger user Shocky praises the way people interact: "What I've liked about the site is how, for the most part, people are only communicating with each other through their writing. A person's profile is their writing. There's no focus on anything else. So the connections are pretty oblique, but in a good way." Now Pierson is working to increase the readability of the site, which is still in beta. She wants users to anthologize their favorite pieces by subject matter and to update each user's profile to display what their top-liked piece is.
Users can also suggest triggers (of up to four words maximum) to the site—roughly half of the triggers now come from Typetrigger's 500 users. Pierson has been pleased to see the site grow (there are users from around the world and the U.S., with a particularly talented clique, weirdly enough, from Georgia) and to observe people's reactions to the different triggers. She theorizes that "I know your secret" was not a hit because it was too intrusive, but "Burnt toast" and "Skirts and shirts" were surprisingly popular.
Pierson has learned a lot about writing through Typetrigger. She says she's always "trying to get to [her] narrative" in order to finish a complete arc in her pieces, but the site has taught her that she can shake off her "obsessive need for honesty and inject fiction" into her pieces. She's learning from reading people's nonfiction pieces that the lack of space doesn't always allow them the room to explain themselves. "You can sometimes look like an asshole" in 300 words, she says. Which sounds bad, but Pierson doesn't see it that way. "You aren't in control of your writing," she says. "It's a great feeling to see that." 
