That quote has stuck with us since we first heard it. Unpack it and the core message is this: some chores have to be done every day to keep us alive. They might be menial. They might be boring. They might make your eyes roll back in your head just thinking about them. But for anyone seeking enlightenment, the important thing is that no matter what happens, these chores remain. We will still need to eat, we will still need to drink, and we will still need to survive.

We built our app around a simple belief: for writers, poets and storytellers, what matters most to our survival, our survival of each day, is getting to the page. Many of us understand the world by putting pen to paper and working out what we have seen, even when it is just a pile of seemingly meaningless observations. The accumulation of seeing how we see, and what we see, helps us understand both the world around us and ourselves.

For someone with a poet's spirit or a writer's soul, we believe writing is an essential chore, as essential as gathering firewood or bringing water up from the river once was. That is how ChopWord got its name.

Finding a name for the blog

When it came time to build a home for the things we find interesting, the lessons and observations we think might be valuable to other writers, we needed a name for the blog. After some searching and brainstorming, we looked beyond writing to other art forms, including music.

We landed on The Woodshed.

Woodshedding comes from music, and it carries some interesting meaning in jazz in particular, which is why we were so drawn to it. The OnMusic Dictionary defines it this way: "The act of rehearsing a difficult passage of a composition. This typically is where a single performer rehearses the passage over and over until it can be performed flawlessly."

Saxophonist and educator Paul Klemperer, of Texas, wrote about the idea in an article for the JazzThink eZine. He described the woodshed as "the place where you work out the techniques that form the foundation of your improvisational ability." The same piece goes on:

The term woodshedding in jazz means more than just practicing. It is a recognition of the need to sequester oneself and dig into the hard mechanics of the music before you can come back and play with a group in public. There's something philosophical, almost religious, about the term. The musical treasures of jazz are not easily accessed. You have to dig deep into yourself, discipline yourself, become focused on the music and your instrument before you can unlock the treasure chest. At the same time woodshedding is a process of demystifying the music... It can be learned if one is patient. It is a humbling but necessary chore, like chopping wood before you can start the fire.

A cabin, a studio, a few minutes

When Justin Vernon of Bon Iver needed to break through as an artist, and to figure out what exactly was bubbling over inside him that he had not yet been able to put into anything tangible, he went to live in a small cabin in the wilderness. He spent his days living simply and creating from the soul. It was not an expensive studio, and there was no notable producer. It was about giving himself the time, the space and the solitude to just be, and to commune with his soul.

That is what we mean by the woodshed.

Not all of us can rent a cabin for an extended stay and disappear. But everyone who is serious about advancing their craft has the chance to commune with their inner artist child, as Julia Cameron calls it in The Artist's Way. For even a few minutes each day, getting in front of the page and putting one word after another: that is the woodshed.

More than new sentences

Beyond creating sentences of our own, the woodshed is also about taking time each day to learn from the masters. Read the great works. Do writing exercises. Learn more deeply about the mechanics of language and the structure of sentences. Try our favorite exercise: hand-copying novels we consider great, to understand how they work from the inside.

All of it, to us, is woodshedding. Together it should become some flavor of daily practice, as natural as breathing, and as regular and vital as chopping wood and carrying water once were.

Writing is a big part of who I am, and developing a stronger writing practice is something I value deeply. I was determined to use the time to jumpstart that practice and build it into something truly rock solid.

Then, halfway through my leave of absence, my mini sabbatical, I fractured a bone in my right wrist playing basketball. It was a big bummer. I had been using ChopWord to track my daily word count, and I was excited to see my moving average higher than at any point since I'd started using the app. Once I fractured my hand, everything stopped and dropped to zero, and I started trying to figure out how to keep going.

For a while, I tried writing with my left hand. For the first week, I was even able to keep typing with a few of my fingers and my full left hand. Then I went to a specialist for an assessment, and instead of four weeks to heal, it would be eight. Instead of a light brace, he wanted me in a full cast. And the kicker: he didn't want me lifting so much as a piece of paper with my right hand until it was healed.

At that point, everything truly stopped, and I was forced to reassess my approach. I was stuck with a stack of notebooks and a pile of pens, itching to keep rolling, and my ideas for my stories were stopped in their tracks.

I'm still figuring out the best approach, but I've found a few tools that have been very helpful for getting my word count back in business and continuing to write without my dominant hand.

Tool Spotlight: Wispr Flow

First and foremost is Wispr Flow. For $15 a month, you can use it with an unlimited word count. I have it installed on my phone, and I use its dedicated keyboard instead of my normal one.

Tool Spotlight: iPhone Action Button

If you have a newer iPhone, you can set the Action Button to start transcription. All I have to do is be in my app of choice and hold the Action Button, and it starts recording my voice.

Tool Spotlight: Obsidian

For most of my writing, I use Obsidian. I can pull it up, use audio transcription, and drop in the words twenty minutes at a time. I've also installed Wispr Flow on my main computer, with a hotkey set up so that holding the key transcribes what I'm saying and drops it wherever my cursor is. If I double-tap it, it stays on.

The twenty-minute cap presented a bit of a challenge. I usually write straight through my full session and leave the editing until the end. So here are a couple of options for writers who want to go hands-free. If you want to stay entirely in Wispr Flow, keep your sessions in blocks under twenty minutes. If you want longer sessions and you have an iPhone, you can use the Voice Memos app and record for as long as you like. When I do this, I say things like "quote" before dialogue and "end quote" after it, along with cues like "break," so the formatting is easy to restore later.

Tool Spotlight: Claude

Then I bring in Claude. You can copy the transcript from Voice Memos and drop it into Claude. I'd recommend creating a new project and spelling out in its instructions what you're trying to do: this is a transcription, and you don't want Claude changing the meaning or making broad changes to what you wrote, only cleaning up transcription errors and grammatical issues. The key is to call out the specific words you use for formatting, like "quote" and "end quote."

The downside of the voice memo route is that its transcription isn't as powerful as Wispr Flow's. Even with Claude cleaning things up, it won't fix what doesn't make sense unless you explicitly tell it to make assumptions and change things further upstream. I don't love doing that. I'm trying to avoid AI as a co-writer wherever possible, and I want Claude to stay as tight as it can. Pasting in one long chunk also means a lot of manual editing at the end, which creates friction.

The alternative is to adapt your writing style slightly and go straight to your tool of choice. For me, that's Obsidian, and where I landed is a kind of interval writing. I open a document and tell myself, "Okay, now I'm going to write scene five." Then I use Wispr Flow to speak the scene aloud for five, ten, or fifteen minutes, the way I would have written it, and let it drop the text into the document. After that, I go through and edit.

Working one chunk at a time is like running intervals: a fast stretch, then a recovery, then another fast stretch. I think it also makes it easier to go longer as a writer, because you get some diversity of experience instead of one long stretch of the same thing.

Once all of that is in place, Claude is a great second set of eyes. I drop the full draft into Claude and ask it not to change anything, only to call out passages that are confusing or grammatically incorrect, much like a spell check. You could have it ask whether you want each issue resolved and let it make the fixes. What I prefer is having it list every issue so I can go through my document side by side and decide whether to edit each one or leave it as is.

Pocket Notebook, Voice Edition

Next, I like to use widgets on my phone that point to bookmarked Obsidian pages. You can do something similar in a lot of writing apps, but I keep a few pages spotlighted on my home screen.

I normally carry a physical pocket notebook everywhere, either a Field Notes or something smaller. I just like to write things down. So I now have an Obsidian note called Pocket Notebook. I pop it open, press the Action Button to activate Wispr Flow, and capture whatever I'm seeing. I do the same for other projects, and I keep a note for memorable quotes that I can fill by voice instead of typing each one out.

On iPhone, Wispr Flow works across a whole range of apps, whether you're dictating reminders or doing actual writing.

Tool Spotlight: Sabinetek SmartMike

Finally, I'd recommend a good microphone. I have AirPods Max and a smaller pair of AirPods, and both are fine. But I write best when I'm loose, present, and in tune with my surroundings, so I've really enjoyed using a small clip-on microphone. It has no speaker. It's a dedicated mic called the SmartMike, connected over Bluetooth and clipped to my collar or shirt.

Whenever I hit the dictation hotkey, it pulls audio from the mic, so I can walk around and speak normally. I can also double-click the hotkey to keep it recording, or use it for a longer voice memo and wander wherever I need to go.

Keeping the Streak Alive

Those are my tips. I'm still new to this, so if anyone has other ideas, let me know.

The best part is that between Wispr Flow, voice memos, Claude, and a dedicated microphone, I'm still funneling all my initial drafts and completed work into my normal writing tool. At the end of each session, I copy all the words I got through and paste them into ChopWord. It counts my total, I log it, and I can still see my daily word count, my seven-day moving average, my other metrics, and my streak continue to build.

That gives me hope for the next seven weeks or so without my dominant hand. I'm not giving up on writing with my left, either. I've started doing my daily journal left-handed, capped at 15 minutes. So far that gets me a third to a half of a page, which leaves a lot to be desired in terms of speed.

Tool Spotlight: ChopWord