If you were going to write a novel or nonfiction book, what would you use to do it? Presumably some combination of hardware and software. Whether it’s a Macbook with Microsoft Word, a Windows PC using Scrivener, or a Linux box with LibreOffice, the formula is pretty much the same. Heck, you could use a Raspberry Pi and vim if you wished.
Sure, there are some retrophiles who’d still use a manual typewriter or even pen and paper, but 99.9% of authors use a word processor or text editor. The ability to move text around, make notes, cut and paste, jump to a point to make changes – these are all 1980s-era features and table stakes for modern writing.
But there are companies that want to strip these features out because…it’s better?
The Novel-Writing Experience
I’ve written two novels and a nonfiction book, so I have some experience with this process. For fiction, there’s a couple different approaches. The first is to plot everything out ahead of time, and then write your first draft. The second is the “seat of the pants” method, where you just plunge into the first draft.
Both have their adherents. I did one novel each way.
The wisdom among the fiction-writing community is that most works die during the first draft, often due to self-censorship or distraction. The theory is that the author self-sabotages by writing a paragraph, not liking it, rewriting it, still not liking it, throwing it away, writing anew, rewriting that, etc. and after a couple hours has nothing to show for the effort. The solution is to write the first draft without much editing.
Even if the dialogue is stale, the descriptive prose dry, or you can’t remember how to spell Mississippi, just keep writing, sentence after sentence. Writing a novel is much more about rewriting than writing, so you’re going to be going over all the words a couple dozen times anyway.
What’s really death is to think “my character is going to fly to Cophenhagen, Denmark. Hmmm, I’ve never been there, I should some landmarks and where hotels are…” And then all writing grinds to a halt as you spend hours perusing Wikipedia and Expedia. Much better, the theory goes, to just put in a placeholder or blank space than to stop the flow.
In other words, you need a distraction-free writing environment.
For most of us, this means putting on some music and focusing on the work. Right now, Chet Baker’s 1987 classic No Problem is playing on my living room speakers and I’m typing this in the WordPress editor. It’s true that all the wonders and horrors of the Internet are only a tab away, Steam is just sitting there in my dock waiting to be activated, my TV is straining under the weight of streaming subscriptions, and my phone is bursting with social media alerts, not to mention my dog would love to play, the fridge beckons, and I really should call my mother. But if you’re going to write, you need to have some self-control and focus.
There are ways to “focus” your writing environment if it’s a problem. You can full-screen your word processor. Put your laptop in airplane mode. You can use a timer to tell your brain you’re going to write hard for X minutes followed by Y minutes of screwing off. One of my favorite writing books (James N. Frey’s How to Write a Damn Good Novel) suggests that if it’s really a problem, turn off your monitor and type blind. You’ll have a lot more typos to clean up but your output will be uninterrupted.
Or maybe you need a $1,100 device with less features than the first Compaq laptop.
Enter Distraction-Free Writing Devices
How would you like to have a laptop that has a 3-row by 80-column e-Ink display, a mechanical keyboard, one USB-C port, 2.4Ghz Wi-Fi, and costs $500?
That’s what Freewrite offers, and that’s far from their cheapest model. Some range as high as $1,100 dollars (the Hemingwrite, which admittedly does come with a cool leather briefcase).
If you were to sit down and write on a Freewrite, you’d immediately notice how many things are missing. There’s no moving around in the text – only destructive backspacing. In fact, there are no arrow keys at all. While some models support saving to USB, most only allow you to save to Freewrite’s cloud. Forget spellchecking, thesaurus, or any kind of clock, notepad, or music playing app. This device is about writing text and writing text only.
It’s also an e-Ink display so you get that annoying pause between typing a key and having it show up due to the slow refresh.
The pitch is that this limited hardware provides you a distraction-free writing experience.
Now, just on its face, this is a partial truth. People who aren’t focused are still going to get up and raid the fridge, call their friends, or pick up their phone for a quick game of something. And since this is no one’s sole device, presumably the author’s laptop is just an arm’s reach away.
But if you’re really struggling to stop your mouse from wandering to the Chrome icon…maybe…I guess? Throw this in a backpack and head to the coffee shop and write?
Though really, if you’re so easily distracted, how serious are you?
A Gimmick
Writing often sucks. For every magic hour where the words flow like Alph the sacred river through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea, there are a hundred where you’re desperately trying to pull the next word out of your head like a stuck tooth. It requires a lot of maturity to invest hundreds if not thousands of lonely hours in a quest for extremely delayed gratification.
I admit when I first saw the Hemingwrite I felt a momentary pang of desire. Imagine you are working on the next great American novel. You pick up your trusty leather case, head out to some cabin in the mountains, crack open your sleek writing device, and the words flow. The camera pans back as the sun sets, silhouetting the small, quiet building as the staccato rhythm of the mechanical keys echo in the valley. This is creating.
The reality, however, is that no magical writing device is going to change your life as a writer. Over the centuries, technologies has allowed writers to write faster – certainly, no one would argue that writing by quill pen is faster than using a modern keyboard. But the actual gruel of conjuring up words, mercilessly reordering them, and committing them to your manuscript has not changed much from a cognitive burden perspective. The Hemingwwrite or any other FreeWrite model will not act as some kind of artistic amphetamine that blows away all your barriers and lets you blitz out a book.
Even the writing model proposed is a bit of a lie. In the era when typewriters truly were king, people took their pages and edited them by hand, then retyped. Here, you have to take your inputted text into some other kind of editing application like Word or Google Docs to actually edit it. So the FreeWrite is just a one-trick pony that only promises to help you with the first draft. For $500-$1100.
It’s absurd.
Raindog308 is a longtime LowEndTalk community administrator, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.
As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, Raindog runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.
Beyond the command line, Raindog is a lover of German Shepherds, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.
His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.
You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.
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