David Nicholls has revealed that he tried the unforgiving app to write a follow-up to One Day. So what is it like to write with a virtual gun to the head?

This is horrible! The novelist David Nicholls says that while working on his latest book Us he used a piece of software called Write or Die, which starts to delete what you are writing if you pause for too long. “I was convinced that there was a novel in me and I had to just spew it out on to the page,” Nicholls told an audience at the Cheltenham Literary festival. “I produced huge piles of paper and I saw it was all rubbish. It was as if I was writing with a gun to my head.”

I agree. I can say so because I have been asked to write this article both about Write or Die, and on it and, under the circumstances, the only way I could do justice to the stress would be with a list of swearwords. Having readied that quote from Nicholls, I set a target of 400 words in one hour and activated the evil setting. This seemed the fun thing to do, but in fact it means that if I stop typing even for just a couple of seconds, the screen goes pink, then puce, then red, then crimson … then the last word on the document disappears, then the next, then the next. There is a pause button I can press once, I have just discovered by pressing it.

I have tried adding and deleting spaces, like dribbling a basketball when I want to stand still. I have put some unimportant notes at the end as a kind of buffer. It is interesting to see how much pausing I do, but either way I can’t concentrate. “I want to write and finish a book because I want to be published and make a living as a writer,” says the inventor of Write or Die, Jeff Printy (another quote I readied). In short, he loves writing so much that he wants to do it for the rest of his life – but not quite enough to do it for a couple of hours continuously.

David Nicholls: he used Write or Die to write an early version of what became his Booker-nominated novel Us. Photograph: Sean Smith for the Guardian

Actually, I think the second half of that is healthy. I have been published and I do make a living as a writer, just about, but I know that this is only because I am weird enough to enjoy the years of solitary pondering and nitpicking that writing a novel actually involves – the very things that Write or Die won’t let me do.

In the end, Nicholls had to bin the 35,000 words he had written this way, but they weren’t wasted. In just a few months, he rewrote the same idea in the first person to produce a novel that was longlisted for the Booker prize. For him, perhaps, this terrible torture was itself a kind of pondering time. And look! I have just passed 400 words. Finally, it’s safe to go back and do some editing.