Write Beside Other Writers, In the Home Your Book Already Lives In

When the rooms run

Rooms are scheduled, not always open, because an always-open room is usually an empty one. The Midday write-in starts at 12:00 and the Evening write-in at 20:00, both New York time. Each sprint is 25 minutes, and the doors open ten minutes before, so the room starts with everyone in it.

Inside a write-in there is more than one way to sit. A writer who is stuck can open a smaller room within the write-in and ask for company, and rooms are listed in the order they were opened, never by how full they are. From the public room you can also invite writers from that room to a private hour of up to 60 minutes.

What the room shares, and what it does not

Before the sprint, a room can set a shared target, shown as "Together, this room is going for" a number of words. During the sprint, each writer shows up as a share of their own goal, so a writer aiming for 300 words and a writer aiming for 2,000 can both finish at 100%.

Your prose is never shared. The room sees progress, not sentences, and nothing you write is copied anywhere. If you sit the whole sprint without your count reaching the room, the wrap-up says "You sat the whole sprint with the room." rather than showing a zero.

There is no public leaderboard. Putting a 500-words-a-day literary novelist next to a 5,000-words-a-day drafter is the fastest way to make one of them quit.

Room chat

Rooms have a chat. It is the one age-gated part of the product: to use it, you give your date of birth, and chat is for writers 18 or over. Everyone else can still join and write in the room.

Keeping the habit

Your book's Settings have a Momentum section for shaping your writing rhythm, and the Progress page shows the path you are on. A room is easiest to come back to when it is at the same time every day, which is the whole reason the rooms are scheduled.