As I prepare to relaunch Typetrigger, I have been asked by several people why the app is designed the way it is. While my ideas about this continue to evolve (and will doubtless shift as a new cadre of writers join the community), I thought I’d take a moment to share the ideas behind it all.
Typetrigger was created for one purpose: to help writers get their words out. Every other feature has always been intended to support that primary activity. I knew from my own attempts and failures at building a writing practice that I needed a particular set of constraints that would both inspire and goad me into writing. I needed a starting point and an endpoint, ideally with little opportunity for distraction between. In order to consider my writing something other than a personal journal, I also wanted an audience, though I wasn’t keen on the idea of forcing friends and family to be my audience or trying to drum up blog readership when I didn’t even know yet what or how I wanted to write. Specifically, I wanted an audience that might give me light encouragement without an opportunity to comment in ways that might derail my practice. I am very easily distracted and knew that in order for me to really keep practicing and moving forward, I could not be too precious about any particular thing I wrote, either by editing or discussing work I’d already written.
Of course, if I wanted an audience, I realized that the fellow writers would also be my readers, so in addition to being a tool for writing, I wanted it to be a lovely place for reading. All social activity would occur through the acts of writing and reading, and though the model for Typetrigger is based on familiar social media mechanics, prioritizing the writing experience has led me to make some unconventional decisions about how to arrange interactions on the app. What follows is a brief outline of my own take on writing, reading and interaction and how I have attempted to build a tool that facilitates meaningful engagements with each.
The tool I wanted when I first imagined Typetrigger was a set of constraints, but the social nature of the tool required some thought about the experience of experimenting with my writing in a public manner.
Typetrigger offers three primary constraints:
- A trigger, which is a small prompt to inspire one’s writing
- A limit to the writing (up to 300 words)
- A tight deadline (a new trigger is issued every six hours)
The audience, which is primarily fellow Typetrigger members but could also be the non-member public if one sets one’s writing to the public view, is another constraint, albeit more of a psychological one.
If I know strangers will read my writing, I will be motivated to keep working on it and encouraged by their appreciation of it. I will also want to feel safe about it in a number of ways. Several features and design choices in Typetrigger are intended to encourage openness both in the writing and reading processes.
- Pen names, which allow all members to write under the name of their choice. I wanted this to be a place where people felt free to experiment and leave it up to them whether they wanted to share it with their friends and family under their name. (You can add another name and links to other social media to your profile if you wish).
- Design for entering the text. The way our writing is displayed in the feed is intended to make it easy for readers to engage directly with one another’s writing. We all know the trope about judging a book by its cover. I didn’t want my superficial judgments of images to impede my willingness to read someone’s work, so I let avatars remain on writer’s pages but keep the feed view uncluttered. The pen names are located in a slightly unconventional part of the feed (right hand side). Again and again I have found my eye drawn right into the words that members have written, bringing me into work that I might have skipped over if I’d been judging by names and avatars or engaging primarily by genre.
- Getting the words out (and letting it go). I know my impulse as a writer is to delete delete delete, edit, question, justify, which doesn’t get me far. Typetrigger is designed for writing practice and as such requires us all to keep moving along. While this is sometimes frustrating (I’ve rethought sentences and had my share of typos), it is rather encouraging to see other wonderful imperfect writing. You can always delete a piece if you hate it, or switch it to Private if you want to save it for your own reference only, but none of us can edit once we have published. The same desire to minimize tinkering and inhibition led me to the conclusion that commenting would be distracting and overwhelming. I know I could get sucked into a conversation, essentially editing my writing through comments, rather than continuing my practice of writing fresh pieces. Similarly, I felt like comment sections could prevent me from reading other writers’ work openly if I judged them based on the comment section.
On Encouragement and Trust
With such a minimal interaction scheme, Typetrigger is unusual as a social site, though in the first years after we launched it did have a unique and charming sociability, as writers formed what I have dubbed circles of resonance, groups of writers who organically gravitated toward one another’s writing and developed a kind of correspondence with these audiences. I loved these little circles and the sense of gentle encouragement they provided. I know that many members connected beyond the like button and enjoyed conversations through DMs.
It has always been clear to me, however, that in some cases it would be fun and interesting to be able to treat Typetrigger as a writing group, to be able to get and give feedback on writing. With the new release, we have added a private groups feature. Now it is possible to discuss writing with a trusted group. Whether you want to use Typetrigger to form a group with some offline friends or you want to see what happens when these circles of resonance become richer conversations, you can create a group of people you trust and share whichever pieces of your writing you want. On group pages, commenting features appear. The focus of the groups remains on writing practice, but the conversations that flow from there will be as varied as the participants. I really hope this allows Typetrigger to remain a safe place for writers to experiment while inviting them to connect on their own terms.
In order for a trusting community to settle in with Typetrigger, I think it is really important that the community trusts Typetrigger. I have done my best to set a tone of encouragement in service of writing and have participated as an active member. Your writing is your own. While we would love to find ways of sharing what people are doing in this community, our goal isn’t to mine your work for our own purposes. We are continuing with the old-fashioned chronological feed because we recognize that we don’t know how to “optimize” the feed when we are all different people with different goals. Chronology is an intuitive way to engage with what people are writing, though we have search and browse features that allow you to explore in other ways.
I am really excited and curious to see how members use Typetrigger this time around. I hope that new circles of resonance emerge and that people find these tools helpful in getting their words out. We will be interested in hearing from all of you what about works, along with ideas for future features that can help get the words out.