K Sawyer Paul

I think in the second half of 2025, I want to take more stabs at first-draft writing. I too easily get bogged down in details. I think about if everything makes sense before I even build the thing. I think a little too much and write a little too little.

Every now and then, people ask if I still write.

I still *think* about writing.

Recently, I remembered a bit of writing advice. I don’t remember where I first heard it, but a quick search revealed a good number of results. Still, I think I’ll credit Derek Sivers, who writes the advice succinctly:

My advice to anyone who writes: Try writing one sentence per line. I’ve been doing it for twenty years, and it improved my writing more than anything else.

This seems to help people with writers’ block, flow, and other issues. Sivers mentions that it helps you “move” sentences around, which is really easy to do in OneNote specifically. OneNote is where I do a lot of my first-draft writing. There’s a little arrow on the left of all lines in OneNote; grab it move sentences wherever you like.

And sure, it might be easy to hit Enter at the end of every period. I do not find this. I begin well enough, hitting enter and writing line by line. After about two paragraphs’ worth of sentences, my run-on sentence tendencies catch up to me. After the tenth or so sentence, I’m already thinking about where to group them. I go back up. I forget about the line-by-line writing.

So I thought, this is a computer: I should be able to tell it what I want.

I use Autohotkey for keyboard shortcuts.

I haven’t used it for much more than that. I know it’s a powerful enough tool. You can potentially get banned in professional gaming circles for having it running. I thought maybe I could bang something together with it.

Through a lot of trial and error and some outside help on Reddit, I put together a script that works like so: after hitting ctrl+\, the computer makes a beep and activates the script. Once activated, hitting a period or a question mark will automatically fire the return key. Type ctrl+\ again to turn it off.

This is how I’m writing my first drafts now. It forces the habit very well.

This saves me exactly one key press: enter. But it also keeps me on the tracks. It doesn’t let me compound sentences into paragraphs until I’m ready to edit.

Here’s the code snippet if you think it’d be useful to you:

; === Period/QuestionMark + Space Sends Enter Script ===
toggle := true ; Start enabled

; Ctrl+\ to toggle on/off
^\::
toggle := !toggle
if (toggle)
    SoundBeep, 1000 ; High beep = ON
else
    SoundBeep, 500 ; Low beep = OFF
return

#If (toggle)  ; Only activate hotstrings when toggle is ON
:?*:. ::.{Enter}
:?*:? ::?{Enter}
#If