I never thought about “distraction-free” because there were not distractions, just the words on the screen. And I wrote dozens of the first stories that I sent out to magazines on that word processor. I transcribed all of my class notes in college into Microsoft Word for DOS. This was back in the days before Word has a WYSIWYG display, and more features than there are words in this post. I’ve often said that my favorite all-time word processor was Microsoft Word for DOS 5.5. They are as much desktop publishing systems as Microsoft Word, and I don’t need a desktop publishing system. I love tools like Scrivener, but they combine many things into one. It gives you the basic tools to write, and you just write. iA Writer seems to be closest to this model. It gives me the basic functionality I need to write, and nothing else. What I need is a tool like the WordPress block editor. That’s just not how I write, so the FreeWrite has sat in a drawer for the better part of two years now, unused. You can backspace to edit, but you can’t go back and insert a word, or correct a typo. The problem was that one of its noted features just doesn’t work for me: there are no arrow keys. ![]() After all, it looks and feels like a typewriter. I told myself this would be the ultimate distraction-free writing tool, and that it would be the thing to get me writing again. The user can type and backspace but not much else, and, with the default settings, only ten lines of text are visible at a time.īack in late 2019 or early 2020, I got a FreeWrite. Released in 2016, the Freewrite Smart Typewriter is a hefty little lunchbox of a machine with a noisy mechanical keyboard and an e-ink display the size of an index card. Later in the piece, Lucas discusses the FreeWrite Smart Typewriter: It dumps all of the bells and whistles and says, just get to work, willya? It doesn’t format my manuscript the way Ulysses or Scrivener does, but then again, if I am not writing, I have no manuscript to format in the first place. On the other hand, I am not writing, I am spending my time looking at tools for writing. Therefore, a tool like Ulysses is alluring: it helps with that stuff. I keep telling myself that if I could minimize the time I spent on all of the other stuff (formatting, tracking revisions, etc.) I could spent more time writing. The former has packaged a lot of functionality and appears to be designed to get you from first draft to final manuscript. I spent maybe an hour last night comparing the features of Ulysses and iA Writer. Why can’t I do that for my fiction writing? Why do I feel compelled to revisit tools that I’ve tried before. I don’t worry about “distraction-free” features. The WordPress block editor let’s me get my work done. I am more professional about my hobby than I am about my professional writing. For some reason, I don’t hunt for writing tools for blogging. I wrote them entirely in the WordPress block editor tool inside my web browser. It is not paid writing, but considering my full-time job and family obligations, 3,000 words is amazing. That’s nearly 3,000 words of writing in a day, which is marvelous. ![]() The other, a post that will go out a week from today, came in at 1,200 words and isn’t quite finished. One (Episode 11 of my Practically Paperless series) came in at about 1,600 words. Yesterday, for instance, I wrote two posts for the blog. The distraction is the search for perfection. In reality, the distraction is not all of the elements on the screen, not the endless notifications, not the array of features, but the very existence of the tools to begin with. If I find the right tool, one with just the right set of features, one that eliminates distractions just so, all of my problems will be solved. I did this, of course, instead of writing, telling myself what I always tell myself. Indeed, after finishing the article, I decided to take another look at both Ulysses and iA Writer. I am constantly fiddling with writing tools, telling myself that this one will be the one to work for me. This seems to describe why I get very little non-blog writing done these days. “An interminable revision, an infinite analysis is already on the horizon.” “With the computer, everything is rapid and so easy,” he complained. I’d fallen into the trap that the philosopher Jacques Derrida identified in an interview from the mid-nineties. ![]() The problem is I am too distracted by distraction-free writing tools to actually sit down and write. I like to think I have the writing skill. But I soon realized that it was likely that I’d be able to do it. How I wish I could have written that piece for the New Yorker. There is an interesting article in the current issue of the New Yorker on “ Can Distraction-Free Devices Change the Way We Write?” The article, by Julian Lucas, initially made me jealous.
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