So this is fascinating: the world’s first ‘smart typewriter’.
Typewriters have romance, but they’re hopelessly impractical these days. You can’t juggle text around in the way we’ve become used to on our laptops and PCs, and they are offline relics in an online world. Many writers like the idea of using one, just like Hemingway, but most accept it’s impractical.
Laptops and PCs are what writers use, then, but they too are flawed. Or rather, they’re not specialised, and WE are flawed. With the entire internet just one click away, it’s powerful hard to stay focused on your book.
The solution? One of these:
1. Willpower (free)
2. An internet blocking app (free)
3. The Freewrite (https://getfreewrite.com/). All you can do on it is write, but unlike the Mark 1 typewriter, your words display on an e-ink screen not paper, and the document is automatically saved to the cloud and synced with your document store of choice. ($499).
What’s really fascinating is that even though I CLEARLY don’t need this piece of kit, I want it so bad. All those years of stuffing more and more features into our devices, and now the most desirable gadgets are those that allow us to do only one thing, with the promise that they will help us do that one thing really, really well. (Or at least look more like Hemingway, which is nearly the same thing.)