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Revert to type to free the inner writer

Khoi Vinh

Ever suffered from writer's block? The key to success is to forget word processors and take inspiration from the typewriter.

MOST WRITING happens under the duress of constant distractions: phones, emails, colleagues, and a vast and unending Internet full of tantalising ways of wasting time, to name just a few. When we write, we have to devise strategies to thwart these and to ensure concentration, such as headphones, soothing music, sequestering ourselves away in rooms away from the office hubbub or even joining "writing centres" where quietude is guaranteed for a monthly fee.

By and large, these strategies fail to address the very source of most distractions that fill a modern working day: computers. Even disconnected from the Internet, a computer is a Pandora's box of time-killing baubles: music libraries, bundled games, archives from other projects, photographs, movies, popup reminders from your other software programmes nagging you to do this or that, and more settings, preferences, and opportunities for tweaking than you can shake a stick at. You can spend a whole day at the keyboard on vaguely productive tasks and still emerge with nothing to show for it.

In recent years, I have noticed some serious writers have set aside their computers — at least in the draft stages — and turned instead to a tool that is so old it is new again: the manual typewriter, that mechanical beast of burden that dominated office life in the first half of the last century without the aid of spellcheck, word processor-style features or even built-in corrective tape.

It is a brilliant solution, because a typewriter is the ultimate single-tasking productivity application. When you are sitting in front of a typewriter, you do not have the option of reviewing your email, launching a browser to check on an eBay auction, or even preoccupying yourself with learning some superfluous software feature that you will probably rarely need.

The manual typewriter is a powerful antidote to authorial dawdling, that propensity to continually re-edit a sentence or a paragraph (and thereby imparting the feeling of productivity without actually being productive) when you should be forging ahead, writing new sentences and paragraphs instead. Unlike word processors or even the simplest text editors installed in most computers, a manual typewriter does not allow you to revise a single character once you have committed it to paper. It makes for an entirely different kind of writing experience, one in which the ideas come first, and the act of "wordsmithing" or finessing them comes after all of those ideas have been set to paper.

Major drawback

This strong desire to undo the distractions of modern innovations fascinates me; not so much its Luddite-like approach to casting aside digital technology, but more the profound simplicity of the brainstorm. It did not take a modern day James Joyce to realise that a manual typewriter could be a powerful new tool again, but it is a realisation so effective that seems worthy of a genius. There is a major drawback, though: this is a hardware solution to a software problem, and it is not exactly a convenient one for every situation. What if you want to do some writing away from the office — say, on an aeroplane, or sitting in bed?

There is nothing, in fact, that the hardware of a manual typewriter can do that cannot be done in software on a computer, including giving you fewer choices and distractions while you write. A programme that functions just like a typewriter would easily be able to shut out other running programmes, so that you can view only the document you are working on. It would be able to mute the system sound and suppress popup reminders, so there are no intrusions. It would even be able to fully disconnect the computer from the Internet, so there are no temptations to surf.

The typewriter emulation need not stop there, either. We take for granted basic text editing features in almost every application we use such as copy, paste, insert, move, etc. But what if this programme eschewed most of those and only allowed you to type forward? What if it were not possible to make revisions too easily, and what if the only way to delete a word or sentence, as with a typewriter, was to move the cursor backwards and actually strike out that text, character by character? With these limitations, you would be more inclined to continue writing forward than you would to going back and revising.

As a creative tool, this kind of software holds a lot of promise for those who already use manual typewriters, but as a business tool, it has the potential to make the writing that we do in offices much more productive. Certainly it would help me make better, faster progress with the writing that I do every day as a manager.

In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I realised that I wanted such a tool. Not being a programmer myself, I decided to work up a visual prototype of the application to work out the ideas for myself, and to float the idea to see if others might find it useful, too.

Using Adobe Photoshop and cobbled-together screenshots from a half-dozen programmes residing on my own computer, I managed to create a mock-up of my idea, a visual draft of the way it might look and function. I decided to call it Blockwriter and in May of this year, I wrote a post about it on my blog (subtraction.com). Judging from the positive response, it seems to me like an idea that strikes the right note with lots of people, and not just in cyberspace. Many, "in the real world," have told me that Blockwriter is something that they want, need and in some cases demand.

Unfortunately, none of this amounts to an actual application such as Blockwriter that is available online or in the shops today. As is typical, we are waiting for a programme that is simpler, and that does less, while the publishers toil away on programmes that are more complex and that do much more.

But there is a little glimmer of hope: several weeks after my post, I got an email from a friend of mine, Jesse Grosjean, who runs a one-man software company, Hog Bay Software (hogbaysoftware.com). I had not spoken to him for quite a while, but apparently we still think alike: he told me he is working on a piece of software called WriteRoom. This programme shuts out all other running applications and allows its users to focus only on the act of writing. I installed an early draft of it, fired it up and was faced with a completely empty, black screen and a blinking cursor.

It is not quite Blockwriter, because I can still perform the traditional features of a text editor, but as I wrote with it, it felt very much like what I had imagined: simple, focussed, and very comfortable, almost cozy, to work with. In fact, it felt a lot like tapping away on a typewriter. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

(Khoi Vinh is the design director of New York Times Digital.)

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