Are you a writer? Yes. Do you battle distractions? Yes. Will apps and devices help with that? Probably not.
Phones. Cat videos. Hamster videos. We are distracted. I am distracted. And yet, we love to write. We hope to avoid distractions and just write.
In the battle for writerly focus some choose to fight fire with fire. If our distractions are based on psychological tricks, then why not use psychological tricks to not be distracted?
This is not a catalog of writing advice. This is a short round-up of psychologically-manipulative apps and devices designed to trick you into writing.
I write this based on the excellent New Yorker article, “Can ‘Distraction-Free’ Devices Change the Way We Write?” by Julian Lucas in the December 13, 2021 edition of the magazine. This is an abbreviation of that article, but with pictures that I pilfered from the internet of the actual “distraction free” writing apps and devices (pilfered, of course, with attribution).
First up is Medium. Mr. Lucas writes, “These days, we don’t just write, revise, and lay out our work in one program; if so inclined, we can go all the way from gathering research to monitoring reception without leaving our browsers. (Medium, a writing app that is also a publishing platform and a social-media network, represents the logical extreme of this vertical integration.)”
iA Writer
Mr. Lucas writes that it is “a minimalist word processor designed by the Swiss-Japanese firm Information Architects… The main feature of iA Writer is not having many features. The program is, essentially, a white rectangle, where the user can do little else but type in a custom monospaced font.”
He writes of it, “The feature sounded silly when I described it to friends — like horse blinders for writers.”
Later in the piece, he writes, “After years of iA Writer’s myopically zoomed-in sentence highlighting, I’d become a faster and more careful writer, but at the expense, I worried, of my intuitive grasp of a text’s over-all shape.”
OmmWriter
Mr. Lucas writes, “OmmWriter, a ‘mindful’ writing app with lo-fi music and gauzy background visuals, attempts to lull the writer into a creative flow — an experience akin to being trapped inside an inspirational quote.”
Hanx Writer
Created, in part, by Tom Hanks, who is a popular actor, Mr. Rogers impersonator, and former funny-man who starred in the hit sit-com, Bosom Buddies. Mr. Lucas writes, “A more rugged alternative is the Tom Hanks-sponsored Hanx Writer, a skeuomorphic indulgence that displays the smartphone keyboard as a vintage typewriter, complete with carriage-return bells.”
Freewrite Smart Typewriter
Mr. Lucas writes, “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. 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.”
Mr. Lucas notes that “The hefty six-hundred-dollar price tag has only reinforced its dilettantish aura. ‘Oh, you’re gonna buy something that you can replicate by just turning off your Wi-Fi?’ Leeb said, paraphrasing the naysayers.”
reMarkable
Mr. Lucas writes, “The reMarkable is ‘digital paper,’ a sheet of imitation loose-leaf that approximates the precision, friction, and immediacy of the real thing…The device can decipher handwriting in thirty-three languages, according to the manufacturer’s Web site…”
reMarkable costs 299 Euro, a discount from its usual 399 Euro price.
AlphaSmart
Mr. Lucas writes, “Originally marketed to schools as a cheap alternative to laptops, they are little more than durable keyboards with built-in LCDs, which, unlike computers, kids couldn’t play games on or easily destroy. The final version, AlphaSmart Neo 2, displays six lines of text at a time, and boasts seven hundred hours of battery life.” It was discontinued in 2013, but folks still worship it, as ReRun from “What’s Happening!!” did to a head of lettuce when he was in a cult.
There are many other such apps and devices, and their competitors and knock-offs. There is a rabbit-hole’s worth of blog posts about them (such as this one from Art vs. Entropy).
I would be remiss if I did not put in Mr. Lucas’ best line about writing advice:
“I bought [the iA writer] in 2014, when I was starting research for a college thesis in literature, supervised by a charismatic graduate student with perfect handwriting who warned me that I spent too much time revising my work. He encouraged me to start writing each day without looking at what I’d written the day before — advice I followed about as effectively as Lot’s wife.”
And I offer just a bit of my own.
We are, all of us, distracted.
To write, you do not need special apps and expensive devices.
All you need is you.
The Sociology Place 