Some of you will consider this an extension of my April 16, 2017 post “For the Love of a Keyboard” and to some extent you would be correct, but only a very limited extent. There are two things I hear repeatedly from writers and want to be authors.
- I don’t have the time to write
- I can’t seem to get any writing done when I sit down to write
Both of these are excuses worded in such a way as to avoid taking any blame for abject failure. Hey, it is culturally baked into us since the 1990s, the decade when humans stopped taking responsibility for everything. Doesn’t change the fact they are excuses for abject failure, just explains why you are making excuses.
Let us take the first excuse. You _do_ have the time to write, you simply choose to do something else. Do you look at FaceBook? Do you watch television? Do you have a hobby? Do you go out drinking with friends most weekends? Do you read books/magazines? See, you _do_ have the time but you choose to do something else.
Many of you will lie to yourselves saying that you are going to write a how-to book or blog series or you-tube video about your hobby, whatever your hobby is, but you spend more time enjoying your hobby than taking notes or creating a content project from it.
Many of you will lie to yourself saying you need a perfectly quite block of time to write. While it can help, it is certainly not true, at least not for a first draft or coming up with chapter story lines. (Bust up your over all idea into chapters and create a snippet of text describing the story line for that chapter. It is not an outline but some will call it such.) Besides, if you actually had a completely “quiet” block of time you would deliberately screw it up. You would be doing laundry, pre-heating the oven for supper, OR, most likely, surfing the Web telling yourself the lie that it is “research.”
You may have noticed we have segued into the second excuse. An excuse which comes from screwing around on the Internet being more enjoyable than the writing we claim to want to get done. Some solve this by switching to pen/pencil and paper. Others who have a location set aside to write bang it out on a typewriter.
In the late 1980s people weren’t actually thinking about distraction free writing. We only had dial-up connections to Bulletin Board Systems and really expensive personal computers. Brother and a few other companies came out with hulking “productivity improvements” in the form of word processing devices. These were specialized electronic devices which married either a printer or a typewriter with some word processing capabilities and usually some kind of storage so you could pull up a document, make changes to it and print it out again. This was a vast improvement over just a typewriter which made simple changes a near complete rewrite.
The market became short lived. Some of these devices moved into specialty markets like Human Resources and came with canned templates for various Human Resource documents. Even they eventually fell to personal computers as the prices came down and the word processing software got better.
Many years ago I first heard of the Neo and wrote some posts about it on various sites. I wondered if it too would befall the same fate given the falling prices of laptop computers. The company moved into the school market providing various student learning programs. Having no Internet connection, running on ordinary batteries and being highly durable proved to be a big selling point in that market. I don’t know how they fared with the writing community in general. Since it didn’t have a large screen or common word processor file format I could never justify getting one of the gadgets.
There have been various steam punk type devices brought into the market to serve this niche. One such device is a conversion kit for manual typewriters. Yes, I know of at least one writer, not me, who will probably run out and buy the conversion kit or a fully converted manual typewriter as soon as they read this. Of course, what would be a total wow factor is if they could come up with a conversion kit where the “print” function actually prints the document out using the typewriter, either a manual one or an electric one.
Now we have yet another device trying to move into this market providing a larger screen, USB support as well as some kind of cloud connectivity. I first read about it in Popular Science. A good number of people have branded it as “hipster” and that may well be true. I was kind of shocked to learn it was originally a KickStarter project which would give some credence to the “hipster” slur.
I haven’t read enough about the FreeWrite to know how it compared to the recently departed Neo on battery life. Besides weighing next to nothing the Neo had various people claiming the ordinary batteries lasted up to a month. It was also about the right size to use on an airplane or train. Transferring your writing from the Neo to a regular computer always sounded a bit wonky to me. The FreeWrite seems to have solved that issue with both cloud and USB support. The reported 4 pound weight in today’s sub-pound tablet market seems to limit the “portability” aspect of it.
I’ve often wondered why the makers of the NextBook Flex line of computers hasn’t put out a stripped down version of this cheap 2 in 1 computer. A Linux distro like Elementary having nothing installed other than a file browser, calculator and LibreOffice with some kind of pen/scribble support. The thing weighs very little and seemed to have quite a bit of battery life when I tested one.
For too many writers the Internet is a horrible thing. We open a browser to look something up and an hour or more later we realize we have went far into the weeds following links. As a recent article in The Guardian pointed out, there is an ever growing need for a distraction free writing device. The advertising model of the Internet is to provide clickbait which keeps you clicking away on the site, viewing all of those ads.
It is too bad Blogilo quit working. For a time it was a nice product, but, WordPress seems to change its interface on a whim and the tool quit working for me. It was a nice full featured word processor which let you post directly to your blog without opening a browser. As long as you didn’t need to find links to add to your post you could write “mostly” distraction free. I say “mostly” because you still needed to disable new mail and any other kind of message notification on your computer.
Let’s be honest. I have an ancient Acer Aspire One that I love. The keyboard is just about the right size and now that I have boosted it to 8 Gig of RAM and replaced the hard drive with an SSD, it is a phenomenal tool to keep beside the bed. Runs Linux-Lite like a dream. I have a more hulking HP model 355 G2 which has a larger and more comfortable keyboard I’ve written many emails and articles with while in bed. Both of my portable toys have the same sucky problem. Some genetic misfit put that touch pad right there in the front. It is offset a bit on the HP, but still, you all know where this is going, as you let your hands rest you bump it and suddenly are torpedoing some other part of your document. I really wish HP had put that pad on the far right, away from the typewriter keys. Even if I’m in distraction free mode with email shut down, the mental jolt caused by blasting some other part of your document is a real distraction.
