Why WordPlanet™

Stephen King wrote: “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” He added that there was no way around those two things. There are no shortcuts.

Neil Gaiman offers even simpler advice: “You write. You finish what you write.” And when asked how to finish a story, his answer brought it back to the essential: “You sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it's done.”

It seems obvious. But perhaps that is precisely why we have ended up making it complicated.

Today, there are extraordinarily powerful tools for writing. We can create character sheets, organise scenes, design structures, store research, prepare synopses, classify chapters, customise our environment and keep all our projects permanently within reach. We can do almost anything, except one thing that still depends entirely on us: write.

And to write a story, before all those other things, we need words. One after another.

For centuries, there were no character panels, scene managers or systems for organising a novel. Some of the greatest works of literature were written with a pen. Others, on a typewriter. Those tools had enormous limitations, but they also had a virtue that is difficult to find today: they offered nowhere else to go.

WordPlanet was born from an attempt to recover precisely that. Not the limitations of the past, but the concentration those limitations led you towards.

Many word processors today present themselves as distraction-free environments. And they really can seem that way. The panels disappear, the menus are hidden and the screen is left clean. Until we move the mouse, click, swipe a finger or press a keyboard shortcut.

Then the library returns. The other projects appear. We remember that other story. We check a note. We change something in the interface. We open another application to look up something on the Internet that suddenly seems essential. And half an hour later, perhaps we have done many things, but we have not written.

Hiding a distraction is not the same as removing it.

WordPlanet tries to go one step further. When you enter WordPlanet, you enter your story. You do not have all the stories you have started in front of you. You do not have a library waiting one gesture away. You do not have character sheets to complete, scenes to colour, panels to arrange or an environment to configure until you find the perfect way to begin. Nor is there another application waiting behind the interface. There is only the text you have decided to work on.

WordPlanet is deliberately a single-project environment because it wants to establish a clear boundary: either you are writing, or you are not writing.

If you decide that you need to do something else, you can. Of course. But first you will have to leave WordPlanet. That small obstacle is intentional, because perhaps what seemed so urgent can wait ten minutes. Perhaps you do not need to check that fact right now. Perhaps that other idea can wait. Perhaps you can finish the paragraph first.

WordPlanet takes inspiration from MS-DOS word processors for exactly the same reason. Not because writing in 1989 was better, nor because we want to return to the past, but because those tools understood, even if partly as a consequence of their own limitations, something extraordinarily valuable: when you were writing, you were writing.

The screen was the paper, the keyboard was the tool, and practically nothing stood between you and your words.

WordPlanet recovers that idea, not its limitations. It is built for today's computers, but deliberately gives up many of the possibilities those computers offer.

It works locally. Your words remain on your computer. It does not need a cloud following you while you write. There is no artificial intelligence suggesting the next sentence. WordPlanet does not want to write with you or for you. It does not try to help you design the story before you write it. It does not want to become another project you have to organise. It wants to disappear.

You can spend weeks preparing the perfect structure for a novel, create the most complete profile for every character, and find the perfect typeface, the perfect colour and the perfect environment. But in the end, a story only exists when someone writes its words. One after another. Until it is finished.

That is why WordPlanet exists. Not to help you do more things, but to help you do one: Write.

Jose
WordPlanet™