A question to write from

The hardest sentence of the day is the first one. Everything after it has somewhere to go; the first has to arrive out of nowhere, and it asks you to already know what you think. Which is backwards. You write to find out what you think.

A spark is a small answer to that. You ask for a question, and you get one:

What can you do today to change how you'll feel tomorrow?

The page is no longer blank. There is now something to agree with, argue with, or tell where to get off — and any of those is a first sentence.

How to ask

On an empty day, the links above the page include spark. Later in an entry — three hundred words in, when the thread runs out — type /spark on a blank line. Either way the question arrives where your cursor is, and you write underneath it.

Three small things, which together are the whole design:

• The question stays while you answer it. It doesn't fade, and it isn't a placeholder that vanishes the moment you type over it. You can look up at it mid-paragraph and remember what you were doing.
• It doesn't count. The 750 counts what you wrote, never what you were asked. An unanswered spark is still a blank day.
• Ask again and you get a different question. Sparks are cheap; if this one is wrong for today, take another, or delete it and write what you were going to write anyway.

Three ways it lands

Say it's a Tuesday. Nothing happened. You sit down out of habit rather than need, and you'd write "nothing happened today" and call it three pages if the app let you. The spark asks: What's the smallest thing that made today better? Forty minutes later you have four hundred words about a colleague who brought you a coffee without being asked, and what it is about being noticed that undoes you slightly. Nothing happened, and it turned out to be worth a page.

Or it's one of those weeks where you know exactly what you'd write, because you wrote it yesterday, and last Thursday. The loop is comfortable and it is going nowhere. The spark asks: What are you pretending not to know? That is not a question you would have put to yourself. It is also not one you can answer dishonestly for three pages — the performance gets tired somewhere in the second page and wanders off, and what's left is closer to the truth.

Or you're four hundred words in and the thread simply stops. This is the moment most days die. /spark on a blank line: What felt easy today that used to be hard? The entry doesn't resume — it goes somewhere else instead, which is better than stopping, and you finish.

What it will not do

It will not watch you pause and offer help.

We considered that version: notice the writer has been still for a few seconds, slide in a question. We decided against it, firmly. The pause is the writing. Staring at the ceiling for ninety seconds is not a failure state to be rescued from by software — it is the part where the thinking happens, and a journal that interrupts it has misunderstood its job. A spark is something you reach for, in the same way you'd reach for a pen. It never reaches for you.

Questions, not advice

The list is short and hand-picked, and everything on it is a genuine question. Nothing on it can be answered yes or no. Nothing tells you what to conclude, or implies that a better person would conclude something specific. What are you tired of explaining? doesn't know your life and isn't pretending to.

That distinction is the whole thing, and it's why this is not a prompt-of-the-day app with a motivational calendar. Advice arrives knowing the answer; a good question arrives knowing only that you have one. A spark is a door, not an assignment. You can walk through it, or note that you don't want to and write about that — which is often the more interesting page.

It comes with you

When you export your journal, the question sits on the line above your answer, in plain text, exactly as you saw it. A year from now the page still makes sense: not four hundred orphaned words about coffee, but the question that got them out of you, and then the words.

Which is all a spark is for. It doesn't know anything about your day. It just gets you to the second sentence, where the writing actually starts.