Show HN: WriterKata – a site for writers to practice their craft

I am a (web) programmer by day, writer by night. I've written a couple novels, unpublished so far. A few weeks ago I sat down to sharpen the saw and after struggling to come up with something to write about, I realized I could use a tool to give me random writing exercises so I can focus on the writing itself. Something like a writing prompt, but more compelling and interactive. Inspired by the practice of coding katas, I decided to create WriterKata. It has a hundred or so exercises so far, a social aspect, and some slight gamification features. Any writers in the HN sphere are invited to check it out, give feedback, etc. It is 100% free.

Of technical interest, this is my first Node/Express site, coming from the Rails world. I enjoyed the low-level nature of it but did miss a lot of the built-in features Rails gives you. Don't know what you got til its gone, I guess. :-)

It's a cool idea. It reminds me of a writing exercise we used to do in a journalism class in high school. The teacher gave us an assortment of facts about a story, and from those facts, we'd compile ledes (opening sentences and/or paragraphs).[1] As many strong ledes as we could muster from the same pool of information.

A strong lede is compelling, informative, and brief. Those goals are tough to reconcile. You'd spend 5-10 minutes nailing the "perfect" lede. Then you'd go through it carefully, cutting out anything extraneous or sloppy. Then you'd toss it out and start again, approaching the story differently.

Despite the nature of the exercise, it never felt boring or repetitive. It was great practice, too.

[1] Don't ask me why journalists spell it "lede," when "lead" is perfectly fine. It's a quirk of the trade, sort of like the journalistic use of "graf" for "paragraph."

Oh this is neat. Would be super cool if you could view how others did the same exercise.

Hi, thanks for checking out the site. When you complete a cycle, you will be presented with the choice to make it public or private. Public will earn you some experience.

LOVE IT!

Not sure I'll use it, but I love it. Reminds me of that time I did NaNoWriMo and we gave random little challenges to each other to spur us ever onwards in that quest for 1666 words per day.