Creating content
Using Squibler and Scrintal to write and generate ideas
Day 57 of 100-day Creator Challenge
The official tagline for Squibler is The most dangerous writing app. It is indeed dangerous if you like to dawdle and pause a lot when you are writing. But combined with Scrintal, I see it as an idea generator.
Squibler
In Squibler, you can write with a generated prompt, but I prefer to just hit the red button and start writing without a prompt.
Why is it dangerous?
You set the timer. The default is 5 minutes, but you can go as short as three minutes and as long as one hour.
Once it opens up to a writing window and you start typing, you need to keep on typing. If you pause for more than a few seconds, the text starts to fade.
If you continue to write for the length of time that you set at the start then you can copy the text that you’ve written into another app.
When faced with this challenge, most people think that the best strategy is to type as fast as you can.
I suggest you do the opposite.
When you write as fast as you can, you might get to the point where you run out of ideas or words and then you’re stuck.
You flounder.
You pause.
You lose your text.
It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon.
I love using Squibler to freewrite and generate ideas. But instead of typing as fast as I can, I type at a constant cadence. Not too slow for it to be uncomfortably slow, but not too fast either.
While the thoughts form in my head, I type at a regular cadence. My thoughts are a few steps ahead of my typing. I get to the end of my 10 minute block and and copy and paste the text to Scrintal card.
Then I repeat another block of 10 minutes.
And if I’m still warm for writing, another 10 minutes block.
Scrintal
When I’m in Scrintal, I read my freewriting text and then highlight the parts where I want to expand in a new card. Or maybe a thought was already nicely developed that it just needs refactoring and tidying up as a new card in Scrintal.
Below is a screenshot of parts of my freewriting with highlighted text that goes to a new card (the text in purple). I saw that I already wrote a bit about critical thinking after it was mentioned and so I took the text there and put it in a different card. I can develop the critical thinking card a bit more later, and just leave the link to creative thinking in the original freewriting text.
I learned about Squibler and Scrintal from Bianca Pereira. Bianca was one of the Subject Matter Experts on Linking Your Thinking workshop. She also runs her own Prolific Research Community where we practiced more of this idea generating method.
I am not an expert at this yet. But I find the combination of Squibler and Scrintal helpful to get unstuck in writing.
