Increase Your Word Count By Writing With Your Cell Phone

Jill Williamson is a chocolate loving, daydreaming, creator of kingdoms. She writes weird books for teens in lots of weird genres like, fantasy (Blood of Kings trilogy), science fiction (Replication), and dystopian (The Safe Lands trilogy). Find Jill on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or on her author website.

I was never much of a cell phone user. My husband had one, but I didn't need one for myself. Until I started traveling a lot, and my husband felt I should have one in case of emergencies. So I got the freebie phone, which was a phone that masqueraded as a smart phone. But it was not smart. At all.

That didn't matter. I didn't need a smart phone for emergencies. But as time went on and the Square credit card reader came out that could enable me to accept credit cards at events, I began to want a smart phone. So when my contract ended last month and Verizon offered a free iPhone with a new contract, I got one.

My new phone looks like this, but with a Tardis background.

You might ask: "What does this have to do with writing?"

Well, I quickly discovered that my new toy had some nifty features. I can email myself, write notes and email those notes to myself, and I can use the microphone to dictate emails or notes, which I can also email to myself. And I can copy and paste from those emails right into my Word document. This enables me to write in places I've never written before.

I conducted an experiment last weekend with my new phone. I had a trip to Idaho for a homeschool conference, and I wanted to see how many words I could write while away from home. Here is a log of my efforts:

The night before I left, I wrote 331 words of a dance scene with the notepad on my phone while sitting in the living room with my kids, who were watching a Disney channel sitcom that I did not want to watch.

When I awoke at five o'clock the next morning and couldn't go back to sleep, I typed 209 words of a kidnapping scene into the notepad.

I wrote 841 in the car on a long drive to Idaho using the microphone dictation feature into a note.

I typed 395 words into a note the next morning while sitting around waiting to leave for the conference.

I dictated 200 words on the drive home.

And I typed 357 words into the notepad last night while Brad watched The Bourne Identity... again, and I half watched.

So that's a total of 2333 words that I wouldn't have written without my new smart phone. It's not a ton of words, but I liked how it added up.

Stephanie has done several 100 for 100 challenges. Typing 100 words into a cell phone isn't that difficult. And if you can dictate the words, it goes even faster than typing, though it does take a few minutes to clean everything up once you've pasted into Word. I love whipping out a couple hundred words when the scene plays through my head. One negative, even with my phone synced with my car so that I can use the overhead speaker, the dictation feature doesn't always work and I didn't like having to look at the phone while I was driving. (Not a safe thing to do.) Still, using my phone to write has already become a new part of my writing life. I love being able to do this. It's so convenient.

Have you ever used your cell phone to write? Are there any other non-traditional methods you've used to up your word count? Share in the comments.