Focused Writing Devices are a Sham
Matty Kerr is co-creator with John Brancaccio of The Working Experience. He is also a filmmaker and published author. Listen to our podcast on iTunes and Spotify and visit our website: theworkingexperience.com for videos, merchandise and more. You can also find us on Facebook, Linked In, Instagram, and Twitter.
Why are people paying hundreds of dollars for devices that help them to not be distracted by the devices they paid hundreds of dollars for to help them write? Wrap your head around that one.
“I can’t write, I don’t have my special pen.”
“I don’t have time to write.”
“I’m too tired to write.”
“I don’t have anything to write about.”
Writers can devise endless excuses for not writing and they are generally bullshit. You have plenty of time to watch Netflix and Hulu. You weren’t too tired to go out to dinner. Everyone has something to write about. What did you do today? Write about that. Why do they do it? Fear of failure, not being able to get the words down on the page. Fear of rejection. Maybe just plain old laziness.
The latest excuse is being distracted. The devices we are using to write, namely our laptops, are distracting us with internet connections and fonts and drop down menus. (Obviously, it is never our fault.) So, there are new devices on the market that you can buy to deal with the distraction of the other devices. The new devices, “focused writing” devices, are designed to be free of distractions.
One is the iA Writer app, which features no features, the developer of which claims that he noticed that his students were being distracted by the fonts and macros and menus in Microsoft Word. The app is supposed to rid the document of all those pesky distractions and allow the writer to focus on just the writing. (If you are distracted by Word you may have bigger issues concerning your work habits.)
An e-ink tablet called re-Markable, which retails for $650.00, seeks to replicate the experience of actually writing on paper with a pen with a “rough resin coated display that can detect more than four thousand gradations of pressure, applied using a special stylus equipped with a replaceable nylon felt tip. It approximates the precision, frictions and immediacy of the real thing.”
$650.00! Why not go to Staples and purchase the real thing? A six pack of yellow legal pads will set you back $12.99 and a packet of six pens around $5.99.
One advocate of these “focused writing devices” opined, “Paper is a five hundred year old invention. Why haven’t we improved on that?”
Because we don’t need to. People have been writing for centuries on paper. How is it possible to not understand that it isn’t the paper, or the pen or the device? What about Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck? Nabakov wrote the first draft of Lolita on index cards.
Another proponent of using tech to focus one’s writing states that he finds, “…paper messy and difficult to organize.”
My goodness, how did Shakespeare ever manage? How was Tolstoy able to finish War and Peace?
There are other devices to help us stop from being distracted by our devices. And they are expensive.
Supernote: $499.00
Onyx: $399.00
The Free Write Smart Typewriter: $600.00
Instead of laying out hundreds of dollars to help keep you from being distracted by the devices that you paid thousands of dollars for, why not try paper? Paper is awesome in its simplicity, its rawness, its endless possibilities. This makes it kind of scary which is why writers choose to distract themselves. But you need paper to get away from these distractions. You need to cross out, doodle, scribble, sign your name over and over. That is how you get the engine going. Paper is messy? Creativity is messy. It is supposed to be. That is what separates it from filling out tax forms. Buy some folders. Get some notebooks. It’s not that complicated.
They, people like the developers of iWriter and re-Markable and Onyx want us to think it is complicated and we can’t do it on our own because they want us to but their products. (This is called “creating a market”.) Is that really what we need? More devices to keep us from being distracted by the devices we already have which were supposed to make creativity easier in the first place? Jesus Christ.
Aside from being way less expensive, handwriting has been proven to have benefits over typing. Handwriting…
- Activates the brain
- Improves quality of writing
- Boosts creativity
- Helps us comprehend and remember
- Helps relieve stress, anxiety and depression
- Enhances focus
Philip Caro, the author of the six volume series The Years of Lyndon Johnson, writes his drafts in longhand. And some of those volumes are over a thousand pages. He says in his book, “Working”, that writing by hand slows his brain down, gives his thoughts time to catch up. Quentin Tarantino handwrites his scripts with felt pens, using a different color for the dialogue of each character. He said he always looks forward to the process; it is fun.
It is fun and engaging to write by hand on a piece of paper. It is meditative. When you handwrite a piece, you have more invested in it, you have put more of yourself into it, it is uniquely yours. It is a physical presence, carved into the paper, not just floating out there in the ether of the digital world. Of course, at some point the piece needs to be typed but that comes later, and it is a lot easier of you already have a draft written out.
Many people like the idea of being a writer but they do not like the day to day drudgery of the creative process. They want to be published and interviewed about their genius. If you want to write, if you have a story that you just have to get out, if it moves you deep within your soul, you will write. You will love the process. If you don’t, you won’t.
