More Than One Word (.com) With Brian Kessler

So I did an article in November, titled, How One Word Can Lead to Thousands More. I didn’t specifically speak of the website that inspired the post, but many Fuel readers asked what it was, so I shared. And enough people were interested that I hooked up with the creator of the site on Facebook, through his page there, and he agreed to do an interview with me — to explain how the site started and learn some other fun stuff. Here are the highlights of my conversation with Brian Kessler, the man behind oneword.com.

(Oh, and I got a little excited and asked more than one question within a question, so I hope you can keep up.)

Fuel Your Writing:

Let’s get the big questions out of the way — What prompted you to start oneword.com? How did you go about doing just that? And (if you did) how did you market the site?

Brian Kessler:

It is a prompt site, which was prompted by prompting in a verbal prompt exercise. So there was a lot of prompting involved. A friend of mine had done a similar exercise in a writing group where one person would call out a word, then the group would write about it until the moderator would call out “stop!”
I really liked the idea and wanted to create an online version of the exercise, but had no clue where to begin. This was back in 1998. In 2003, I started blogging and was using the Movable Type publishing platform, and I realized that I could tweak it and make it work, so I tweaked away and it was up and running within a week. At that point, I really was just wanting it for myself, and didn’t really imagine anything else happening with it. I sent it to a few friends and they all dug it, then within a few weeks it got listed as Yahoo!’s site-of-the-day and sorta blew up. Sorta. It simmered back down to a cool 200-300 posts per day, which was good, because it was mostly serious writers, and very few cut-and-paste-the-F-word entries.

Oh, and no marketing whatsoever.

FYW:

I heard that Demi Moore tweeted about your site a while back. Do you know what types of people you reach? And how many visit the site on a daily basis? Do you even care about the stats? Is it just a service, for lack of a better term, you provide, and what the writers get out of it is satisfaction enough for you?? What DO you get out of all of this?

BK:

Yes, [Demi] did and her tweet generated a lot of new fans . . . I certainly appreciated the props. … The site averages around 1500 visits per day. Though there have been up to 10,000 visits in a day—that’s the average lately. …
What I get out of it is the satisfaction of knowing that I’m helping others to be creative. I love it when people leave comments on the Facebook page about how it got them out of a block—that really makes my day.

FYW:

[So,] you’re up and running now and you have great prompts all the time. I use them myself just as a simple writing exercise for the day, or I even take it further sometimes. I expand on what I’ve written in the sixty seconds allotted for anything from my books to flash fiction to just random ramblings. It seems you’ve struck a chord with a lot of people, and I’m wondering what your plans are for the future of the site…

BK:

Right now, it has already exceeded all of my expectations. I love that people like you use it to kick-start your creativity. That really makes it all worth it.

There has been discussion of revamping it and adding new features, which has garnered a lot of “NO!!!!! Don’t change it!!!!’” multi-exclamation-point responses. But really, the changes would be unobtrusive, and the simplicity of the site would remain intact, as I believe that has been what has kept it afloat all these years. It’s really a no-nonsense site. It does what it does, and does it well.

That being said, we’re taking suggestions in the discussions section of our Facebook page.

FYW:

(I asked Brian if there was anything he wanted to tell me I may have missed asking, and this was his response — his question to himself…)
–The only thing I know you wanted to ask, but were too afraid was “where do the words come from?” to which I added: Are you the only one involved, or do you have people who help you out? Are all the prompts yours? Do you think you’ve ever unintentionally repeated a prompt, or do you keep a list of some sort??

BK:

A lot of times (thanks to the iPhone) I’ll be out and about and will just look around for inspiration. Other times it has something to do with what’s going on in my life at the time.
Yes, it’s just me. Now and then I’ll be with someone and say “give me a word,” to which they usually say something like “sesquipedantilism!” or [something a bit more risqué] — depending on who I’m with at the time. And I like to keep it clean and simple. Even so, I still get the occasional “wall? what’s that? wtf? I don’t know what that means!”
I try and keep it to words that my 6-yr-old niece can understand. And, no, I don’t keep a list, and have most definitely repeated one or three words over the last six years. I’ve been tempted to do the same word twice in a week to see if return writers would be inspired to write something totally different, though I’m pretty sure I’d get a lot of “hey! we already did this one!”. Really, that’s what flow is all about, letting those fingers fly regardless of any would-be obstacles.

FYW:

Another part of the follow-up included this: I actually did have one more question based on what you said:: Do you read through the entries to see what people are writing? You mentioned a couple times that you were aware of the content and quality, so I was just curious.

BK:

I don’t read every entry, but I do browse through them, usually . I will be going more thoroughly through them over the next few months as I am thinking of doing an annual book “365words” or something like that. And it will be a good time for me to go get rid of all the useless entries.

* * *

– There was so much more we discussed, but this was what I thought was the coolest and most interesting info that you might want to learn. Head on over to the site, oneword.com (I do all the time — one of our writers even has it set as his homepage (after reading my first article) and I guess be on the lookout for a future book. We’ll keep you updated!!