Your Creative Companion

There is this myth in our society of the tortured writer. Along with it comes the notion that writing has to be an almost superhuman task. Compare what you just put down on a page to what you see in your favorite book. It’s crazy difficult to be that good, isn’t it?
Of course that’s like comparing a block of marble to a beautiful statue. A lot of work passes between those stages. Work happens one day at a time. We know that.
Still the bizarre notion of perfectionism is stuck in our head and our inner critic is happy to rub it in our face again and again.

Yesterday I wrote about creativity being my lifeline. About how your writing can be a lifeline for others as well. The most important goal should be, to keep writing and not get discouraged.
However sometimes it’s difficult for me to find the motivation.

I’ve developed the Creative Companion (#Creacom), a tool for Windows that somehow helps me in small and unexpected ways.

First of all, I noticed after getting a mechanical keyboard that the clacking of keys is strangely motivating to me. I wanted that feeling even when I was somewhere else and couldn’t drag a heavy (and expensive) keyboard around.

Second I wanted to keep track of my writing count and words per hour, but coming up with a fair count is difficult. Imagine you spent hours turning a problematic scene into something you’re proud of, then you look at the word count in your word processor and the feeling turns sour.
It says you’ve got less words than before. How can this wordcount be any measure of your progress?

Third it’s easy for me to lose track of time. I have two and a half hours of valuable writing time each morning before I have to get ready for my dayjob. If I get distracted by wrestling for the perfect phrase to describe something or I decide to just quickly look something up and lose half an hour on it, that’s not helpful. Other times, on a weekend, I have all the time in the world and write for a whole morning. What I don’t see right away is that my focus gets all over the place, because I don’t take any breaks.
My wife who is also a writer, introduced me to the Pomodoro technique. A way to divide your writing sessions into chunks of focus time, small breaks and longer breaks. It’s a simple structure and it has proven to be very useful.
But I don’t really want to use my smartphone for the pomodoro rounds, or an app with limited settings. And I wanted to have an option to track my word count.

My Creative Companion helps me with all of that.

Let me walk you through a typical session

Upon startup my Companion greets me. I move it somewhere on screen or into the background, open my favorite word processor and get started.
Now even if I’m just writing on my notebook keyboard, I hear a rich clacking of vintage typewriter keys as I type. Maybe it’s just me, but this silly thing really makes a difference to me.

I get a beverage and with a click my Companion keeps track of it for me.
I take some time to think about what I’m going to write. Maybe I already have a quick summary written down somewhere and I go over it.

Now that I know what I want to work on, I can click on the little pencil in the top left corner and give my session a title and a task type I want to work on.

When I’m ready; I start the Pomodoro timer that is shown. It has remembered my prefered settings for focus time, breaks and the number of rounds I want to do. Also after how many rounds I want a longer break.
Now I can focus on my writing as if the Companion wasn’t even there.

After 25 minutes I hear a typewriter bell reminding me to take a look at my Companion. A short 5 minute break just started. I can stretch, open a window, get some fresh air and another beverage. Focus time starts again, I get back to work.

When I’m on a long break of 15 minutes, but feel eager to continue, I can just click a button a skip ahead. That juicy scene doesn’t write itself and I can’t pry my thoughts from it anyway. Of course usually breaks are useful and shouldn’t be skipped.

All the while I’m typing my Companion is counting the words I type. It knows about all the hard work I put in, while my word processor only knows about the ones that remain in my document.

When I complete all my Pomodoro rounds three bells remind me to look at my Companion again. There is a screen congratulating me on my progress and I see the statistics of my writing session. If I decide to finish early, I can click the »I’m done« button and get there as well. (Make sure you click the lock first.)

Now I feel confident and want to share my progress with friends online. There is a paper plane button that opens a text file a message for social media. Or if I’m using Twitter, there is a button that fills a tweet automatically. I just have to press send.

Before I leave the Stats screen, I click on the paperclip button and get a text summary of my session that I can save somewhere. (It’s also stored in the My Documents folder.)

I can close the Companion anytime now. It keeps score of my progress, which may come in useful in a later version. On the welcome screen, I can click the version number in the corner, to check if there is an update.

Of course I can also use the Pomodoro timer for other things than writing. There is a checkbox to turn off word counting.

There is no installer. The Companion doesn’t get that deep into your system.
You just download the Zip archive and extract it where you want. On the settings screen you can create a shortcut to the CreativeCompanion on your Desktop. When there is an update, you just replace the old files.

That’s pretty much it already. Simple, easy for you and encouraging.
I hope you will find it useful.

A note on information security:
No information leaves your system. The Companion notices what you type to determine word boundaries to count. It ignores what you usually don’t need when writing, like numbers and most special characters.
However, you should not type sensitive information such as passwords when the Companion is running.

I’m excited to share my Creative Companion with you. If you like it, tell your friends.

Happy Writing and until next time.

You can download it on itch.io.

DEUTSCH

Mehr zum Creative Companion findet ihr inzwischen auf Buch und Spiele.