A couple of months ago, we revived Typetrigger, releasing this new-old app into the world again. It has been wonderful to see old members flutter back and write with us again, as well as seeing new writers who are joining for the first time. I will admit something: I was afraid that Typetrigger might not work for me anymore. It has been a long time since I’ve written this way. I’ve written for work and kept in touch with a few people via email over the years, but my writing practice hasn’t been regular. I was ready to write under a new name so that if I really hated my work here it wouldn’t be too public. Instead, I found that the constraints made it easy to just jump back in. I can’t say I like everything I post a whole lot, but I love trying. Some pieces are personal, things I want to get right. Others are total freeform experiments. Either way, I get the words out.

I’ve enjoyed reading in this community again, too. I love the range of styles and topics addressed by writers here. I love the serialists who get deep into the adventures of a character, and I love the poets. The memoirists. Those who blend and bend the personal and the fictive. I hope to see more writers join and push the range of genres that we see on a regular basis. I have long resisted tags, but recently I started using the tag ‘300’ to mark posts that hit the exact word limit. There is something about writing exactly up to that edge, composing the last line to fit exactly (often skimming for places I could trim a word or two to give me greater possibility in that last few words). It feels like a minor achievement, though not one that always adds to a piece of writing. Maybe I’ll start tagging my final word count whatever it is, just to get a sense of what 227 words, or 129 words looks and feels like.

I’ve also started to experiment with collections, adding pieces of writing that I’d like to revisit to a couple of different anthologies. I want to do this more frequently, so that other members can see which pieces I’ve enjoyed, such as this collection of pieces that mention Typetrigger.

Finally, I’m still just testing out what it looks like to create and write in a group. I am wondering how many of you have started your own groups and whether you have found any favorite ways to use them. We would love to hear from all of you about ideas on how to start and use groups in interesting ways. We will continue to improve this feature as we get a sense of what our members want out of it.

We will be launching our mobile app very soon and can’t wait to share it with everyone. If you have any friends who might enjoy Typetrigger, invite them to join now and they will enjoy a free account for life!

Hi! I’m so excited to see you again! Sit down! Have an orange, or a cookie, or a coffee or…make yourself comfortable.

As I write this, I’m looking forward to the end of a pandemic, eager for the near future when I can invite friends into my home and catch up after far too long. This feeling is similar to my excitement today about inviting writers on Typetrigger to share stories with me again on this funny corner of the internet.

Over ten years ago, a lovely writing community emerged on Typetrigger. I enjoyed the stories people shared, but what really brought me endless delight was the way that community emerged on the site. Everyone was so supportive and kind. Writers of all types were sharing their words and finding connections, whether through the small kindness of liking the works of others, or through direct messages or get-togethers in coffee shops.

I’m really excited to share Typetrigger again. There are some great new features, but it won’t really matter unless a community as generous and supportive as before comes to share writing again. I really hope to see your words in the feed again. Bring your friends!

So, what does Typetrigger have to offer?

The same features everyone knew and loved:
A trigger every six hours, with a 300 word limit
The ability to read and be read, without needing to be “friends” first
Community support without the overwhelm of public commenting

New and improved features:
Private groups with commenting allowed!
We are really excited to see how people connect when they can chat about their writing with trusted companions. Anyone can create a group and invite other Typetrigger members. Once you are in a group, you will see the option to share your writing with that group. Your writing will then appear on the group page with the ability to add comments, which will only be viewable by group members. Don’t want to share all your writing to a group? That’s fine! You get to decide what to send to which group.

Easy downloading of ALL of your writing
From your Settings page, you will now see an easy download button which will export ALL of you writing so you can do what you want with it! Go add your pieces to a photo album, or mail them to your granny. It’s your writing to do with as you wish.

Reading collections
I read so many pieces I adored over the years on Typetrigger but would soon forget what they were or who had written them. Now we allow anyone to create a collection and add the work of other members. Collections are shareable, though if some of the writing on them is set to members-only, non-members won’t be able to see them. Whether you want to make a collection of your favorite poetry or your favorite examples of dialogue, you can keep track of things you’ve read and enjoyed.

Improved reading experiences
It used to be challenging to find new writers to follow, but the new site makes it easier to navigate between the writers you already follow and those you haven’t discovered yet. Search is also improved, so you can find more to read.

Coming Soon

Typetrigger mobile app for iOS and Android
In the next month or so we will be introducing the mobile version of Typetrigger. All the same writing and reading opportunities in a convenient form! We are really excited about the new ways that people might use Typetrigger when it is easier to access from your pocket (we know people used phones to write to the web version before, but it wasn’t always easy).

Once we launch the mobile app, Typetrigger will become a subscription-based service. We realized that it was really important to be able to continue development and maintenance of the site but we were not happy with the advertising model for supporting a community like this. In recognition of the foundational importance of the original Typetrigger community, all members of the original site are ‘grandfathered in’ with a free account. Additionally, everyone who creates a Typetrigger account before the mobile launch will have a free account for life. So get on, get writing, and invite your friends!

Sheesh, I can’t believe it’s been ten years. What a crazy time this is. Thank you for supporting Typetrigger then and now. I hope to see you in my feed!

-Lily

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.

As long promised, we have built a little survey to collect the thoughts and feelings of our community members. We would love to hear from you about your experiences with the site as we look ahead. Please let us know if you think there are some other interesting questions we should be asking. Even if you haven’t been on the site much in recent years, if you are reading this you might have something you want to share. We would love to hear from ALL of you.

(Survey is closed now. Thanks for all the great & appreciative feedback!)

Slowly, slowly, Typetrigger is figuring out a path forward. For now, the site is stable. The logins are all fixed, so if you were locked out of your account you should be able to get back in again. Direct messaging is up and working again. Triggers can now be longer than ever. Until the site can be given a major overhaul (on the horizon still, but coming into sight), we won’t be changing anything major. There is one minor difference, however, that most regular users probably won’t notice: the Dude has retired. Dude? Which dude? This one, in the middle. And his pals.

What began as a small inside joke (that really made no sense) when Typetrigger was in development nine years ago became the default avatar of the company. We still appreciate the graphic sensibilities that friend-of-a-friend-of-Typetrigger, talented tattoo artist Jason Minauro, brought to the site. With so little else going on style-wise, we were happy to install the Dude as the default avatar. Things change. Turns out this whole mustache thing became a real trend in 2010 (and still seems to be holding on in the decorative item market AND the facial hair market, as evidenced in the latest season of Queer Eye). We weren’t trying to be part of that and not a one of us had a mustache–or has since. So the inside joke is over, which is one reason to retire the Dude. The other reason I am retiring him now, before I have even begun to rebuild Typetrigger, is that I don’t look like the Dude and no one who has worked with Typetrigger has looked like the Dude. We’ve all been women and folks of color. I felt like the community would be a bit more welcoming if we didn’t all have to enter the room looking like a critical, dapper white guy. If you do happen to resemble the Dude, that’s great! I’ve got nothing against people who look like him (adore many, in fact). But we writers have lots of different looks and want to present ourselves in myriad ways. While most people are quick to personalize their avatars, I wanted a new community member’s first experience to be more of a blank slate. For now, the default avatar is an extraordinarily boring Typetrigger T:

That will probably change when the site gets revamped, but for now it holds space for the image and words we share on Typetrigger. P.S. If you like the dude and his pals and want a t-shirt featuring their handsome faces, drop me a line and I’ll send one to you if I have your size. They dudes are on the front, while the back of the shirt reads: What is Typetrigger.com?

Hello, Dear Typetrigger People, My apologies for the spotty service lately. We had some major issues with logins and the site was half down for a while. As far as I know, everyone should be able to log in now, as well as reset passwords and start new accounts. I hope the site is stable for now and that I can keep triggers coming. Please let me know if you cannot access your account. As I have had some fixes made, it has become abundantly clear that the site needs major redevelopment. It makes little sense to continue patching things along in the current configuration. I am actively working to figure out what that looks like and how to make it happen. Thank you for your patience and your continued love and support of this funny little site. Happy Almost-Spring! -Lily

As I think about what might change with Typetrigger in the coming months, I am also considering what should not change. Here are a few things, in no particular order, that I really consider fundamental to this tool and community. This is not a complete list, but some things that strike me as central this week.

Your Writing

Typetrigger is nothing without the writing that everyone has shared here. Rest assured, we will not be removing any of it in any updates. Whether you have written somewhat recently or way back when we started, no one’s going to delete your stuff but you. I am considering the possibility down the line of making it easier to export your work in bulk in case you want a backup for peace of mind.

The Possibility of Anonymity

I started Typetrigger because I wanted a way to practice writing for an audience without putting my name out there or having to publicize my stuff amongst my friends. (That backfired entirely, of course, since I did write on TT under my real name and picture so that the community could understand that I am really invested). I think it is important that people be able to write without sharing too much about themselves, as long as they follow our community guidelines.

Minimalism

It’s time for a visual cleanup of Typetrigger, but the plan is to keep things basic. The focus should be on the writing, with few flashy distractions. This includes the basic social interactions: following (Reading) and liking. While I am thinking of more ways to facilitate discussion amongst writers who want to share thoughts on writing and reading practices, I will not add commenting to the site. I think it makes people more self-conscious and prone to explain their writing. I also am not interested in moderating comments or setting standards for what is appropriate to say. The direct message feature allows everyone to engage in longer conversation, and I think the one-on-one nature of it sets a higher standard for mutual respect. The point on Typetrigger is to get the words out and let them stand on their own. In this age of crazy and inscrutable newsfeed algorithms, I also plan to keep Typetrigger basic, with a priority on chronological display of the trigger responses of those writers who you follow. There might be some other interesting approaches for browsing other writing later on, but it’s not a priority. What are your favorite features or aspects of Typetrigger? I know that Typetrigger has been a beloved and effective tool for many people but I’m not exactly sure what makes it so special for each of you. I would love to hear from you about what you don’t want to see change, as well as what features you’ve been quietly hoping for. Comment or drop a line via the contact form, or let me know on Twitter or Facebook.

The fixes are coming in and this one is the most exciting to me. This actually can’t be properly called a fix, since there was never anything broken. When we launched Typetrigger, for reasons I cannot remember (nor comprehend) we had a 17-character limit for triggers. I know, this makes zero sense, especially since we invite everyone to submit triggers of up to four words. The interesting options for four words in 17 characters or less (including spaces!) are quite limited—or my thinking is somewhat limited in creative approaches to that problem. As of today, we have a lot more room to work with. Things may still look a little funky for a while as I think about cleaning up the interface a bit, so forgive me if the spacing strikes you as less than elegant. I think you will still enjoy the possibilities presented by a greater variety of creative writing prompts. Other things that got fixed this week, which may not have been known issues to anyone: our sign up had quietly crashed, but now is fixed. If you are signing up and don’t see your account validation email, check your spam filter. We are still having problems with lots of notifications from us going to spam. We also had some crashes in some of the direct message accounts, including mine (Lily’s). If you wrote to me in the past couple of years and I didn’t reply, chances are something went wrong and I never got it. More little things to come. But for now, Write Now!

Hi. It’s Lily, the founder of Typetrigger. It’s been way too long. A lot has changed for me and for Ernie, my original TT partner, over the past eight years. Great stuff and terrible stuff, living stuff. We have had these things to tend to and neglected this project. This year we had to decide whether it was time to pull the plug on Typetrigger. We almost did. Some stuff started crashing (I couldn’t access any of the direct messages anyone sent me) and it was time to get some technical fixes or just shut it down. But I still occasionally get messages from users who ask what happened, who want to see this back up and running. I looked at everything our community had put into Typetrigger over the years. It seemed like it might be worth a fix. People still write! And after a lot of excitement about endless features on social sites, a lot of us have come to appreciate a more limited set of tools that work well. So I decided to a bit more time and elbow grease into this. We are working now to fix some things that were broken. We might do more significant changes if we can get some community back to writing here. I would love to hear from you.