Websites as Crutches

For the most part, I aspire to keep away from distractions. However, I find that good ambient sound works well for creating a cone of privacy around me while I'm writing. Especially when there are noise cancelling headphones involved. Therefore, I usually have YouTube up in the background. I'll run 3+ hour dark scifi, dystopian, or horror ambient tracks. I have specific needs for those - they need to run long and not allow ads. They can't have a ton of melodic line. These things are more a vibe than they are music, and they're just enough to keep my critical brain busy and out of the way of drafting while they also provide cover for the other noises of the household.

I'm a big fan of Wordhippo.com for word finding. My rule for this is that I must open and close the browser window for every single look up. It's an attempt to keep me from sheering off of making words with rando look ups. Some days, I don't open the site at all. Other days, I may need a little mental jog or two. Those days, I need to find just the right word before I can unclench and move on.

My final favorite website while writing is a website for writing. Consider this my ongoing plug for 4theWords.com. Timed writing, gamified, stripped down to a basic text editor so I can't get too precious about how stuff looks while trying to get x amount of words before time runs out. It's a great place to fast draft and a great place to write about writing. It's a perfect venue for doing a bunch of the prework of writing - compiling research / noodling how that research impacts plot and characters, getting characters hashed out, getting GMCs worked through, etc. I'm on the site every single day.

Once I have a draft, no matter how skeletal and bloody, I shift out of websites into Word. Edits and rewrites happen with fewer website interruptions. By the time I'm in edits, I pretty much know where we're going and how we're going to get there. I no longer need to anesthetize the critical portions of my brain like I do with drafting.  Until that point, though, websites are my crutches, and I lean on 'em.