Halleluyah! I have converts!

I spoke, others heard, and now they too have experienced the power, the inspiration, the incredible empowerment of the Almighty Sprint.

They didn’t entirely believe me when I spoke. They doubted my words, my conviction. With skepticism in their hearts, they opened themselves only a crack, but experience blew that door wide open and now they too are experiencing the joy of sprinting.

What good could twenty minutes of writing do? What is the purpose of a Discord “bot” saying “Ready? Write!” and then at the end of those twenty minutes calling “Pens up!”? Let me tell you, it’s powerful!

Even if you are sprinting alone—as I have been for most of the past two weeks—it’s extremely motivating. You know you only have 20 minutes. You know that at the end of that time there will be a reckoning that will become a public record for anyone in the Discord Server to see. You had better produce those words! You don’t have time to visit Facebook or check your email. You barely have time to glance at your outline to see what it is you should be writing or read the last thing you wrote.

You have to get writing! Someone is watching and keeping time.

This is, to put it mildly, highly motivating!

I hear from so many authors that they are looking for accountability.

Here it is!

I hear from people that they are having trouble focusing.

The sprint is only asking for twenty minutes at a time.

People want software that will shut off the internet for them, or blank out everything on their screen but the words they type. That’s fine, but sprinting really gives you the motivation to do that writing, to lay down those words.

Many people have heard of or played with the Pomodoro method where you start a timer for 15 or 20 minutes, write, and then at the end of the time get up and take a two-minute break. This is exactly that, only you get a notification on your computer screen when to start and when to finish. The Discord “bot” then does the math to tell you how many words you’ve written (at the beginning of the sprint you put in your beginning word count, at the end you put in how many words are in your document when the time is called).

The only problem with the “bot” is that it doesn’t count pages—so if you’re editing instead of writing, you don’t have a way to track that. If you’re not writing but drawing or painting, or doing something else, there’s no way to track that either. It only tracks words, sadly.

But goodness, gracious me, those words get written!

Have you tried sprinting? You don’t have to join me on my Discord server (which I blogged about two weeks ago) to try it. There are many other places where you can sprint—Facebook groups, the WANA website, and other Discord servers (Melissa Storm has a good one, but it costs $10 to join through her Patreon). Wherever you may sprint, I promise you, you will feel the power, the motivation, and you will see your word count mount up and your book gets done.