Plan five. Then write.
A room with a clock in it. Five minutes of planning where the page stays shut, then the writing time you choose — and a piece that either lands inside the limit or teaches you what it costs not to.
The writing surface stays locked for those five minutes. That isn’t a gimmick: planning first is the single habit that most reliably separates a finished piece from an abandoned one, and it only becomes a habit if you can’t skip it.
Why the page stays locked for five minutes
Because the planning is the part that gets skipped, and skipping it is what produces the two most common failures in a timed piece: a story that runs out of road at the twenty-minute mark, and an argument that arrives at its real position in the final paragraph. A writer who knows the ending can spend the opening on something other than working out the plot. Five minutes is not long — it is simply longer than nothing, which is the usual allocation.
How long should you set the clock for?
Match it to the assessment you’re preparing for. Most scholarship and selective-entry writing tasks allow thirty minutes per piece — the three-packsets two pieces at thirty minutes each, so thirty is the honest default. Twenty is a useful discomfort once thirty feels manageable; forty suits a longer school task. The number matters less than the fact that it’s fixed before you start.
Where does the writing go?
Nowhere. Everything typed here stays in this browser — there is no account, no upload, and nothing sent to us. A draft is kept in local storage so a closed tab doesn’t destroy the session, and you can print it, copy it, or clear it by starting again. If you want a piece actually read, that is a deliberate second step: send it to this month’s Prompt Season with a parent’s consent, or ask for a paragraph reading.
What to do with the piece afterwards
Read it once against the plan and ask a single question: did it end where the plan said it would? If it didn’t, that gap is the most useful thing the session produced. Then take one sentence — the weakest one — into the Sentence Clinic, or run it through the twelve questions. One sentence rebuilt properly teaches more than a whole piece reread vaguely.