Are you ready for fighter’s block?

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This is my weekly installment of “writing about writing,” in which I scan the world to find websites, books and articles to help other writers. Today I discuss a new app for writers called Fighter’s Block….

I’m feeling slightly nervous as I write today’s column. My fear arises from my writing method — I’m producing this post in an app called Fighter’s Block. Here’s how the developer describes it: “Fighter’s Block is a writing app that exploits conditioning to overcome writer’s block and sheer laziness. Rewards for writing and punishments for stopping are wrapped in a battle system inspired by turn-based RPGs.”

While I disagree with the comment about “laziness” (I think people are far more likely to have bad habits) and I don’t know what an RPG is, I decided to give the app a whirl. I chose a little girl in a red hood as my avatar —she made me think of Little Red Riding Hood —  and an egg-shaped evil eye as my monster.

Fighter’s Block seems to be similar to Write or Die by Dr. Wicked, which I’ve written about previously. Back in my own Write or Die days (I used to use that app when I was working to beat my editing-while-I-wrote habit) the software punished me with a loud sound whenever I stopped writing. It gave me a car alarm sound, a crying baby or 70s disco music.

Now that I no longer suffer from that problem, however, I’m going to have to stop Fighter’s Block, deliberately, to see how the new software punishes me for not writing. [Pause to let the software do its thing.]

Yikes! Nothing happened! I think this is because I didn’t use the settings properly. I’ve now redone the settings and selected a “monster attack – strong” level in the hope that I’ll see something interesting.

Sadly, nothing happened again. Although I haven’t suffered any punishment, I’m guessing this app is a good way to train yourself to focus on producing as many words as possible without having any concern about the quality. It certainly made me write this post faster than I normally do.

My thanks to reader Wendy Kalman for alerting me to Fighter’s Block.

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