It’s called the Freewrite, it began on Kickstarter, and immediately I understand. It’s a machine for writing on, and only for writing on, like typewriters used to be, but souped up with selected benefits of the digital era. So it has an e-ink screen, like a Kindle, which does away with the need for paper and ribbon and Tippex. And there’s a wifi connection that will save your work to the cloud. That way you will never lose a novel, as Anthony Burgess once did, by dropping his finished typescript into a canal.
The Freewrite costs $500 (£358), but I’m testing a truly free version here, simply by not using the internet. I must say it goes against the grain. That story about Burgess, for instance; I think it’s true but I can’t check. I remember reading it in his autobiography many years ago, and I have his autobiography right here, but there’s nothing in the index about a “typescript, dropped in canal”. True, I haven’t been sucked into Wikipedia; instead, I’ve been sucked into the book. Typewriters were all very well before the internet, because at least then your readers had the same trouble trying to catch you out.
Nevertheless I’m sure that many writers will soon start longing for a Freewrite, provided they use the internet enough to hear about it. I think I remember reading that Zadie Smith writes on a laptop with the wifi disconnected, and Jonathan Franzen is a fundamentalist. It’s his practice, going from memory again, to plug noise-cancelling headphones into his ears, cover them with wadding, cover the wadding with ear defenders, then work on an unconnected laptop in a basement. Some novelists I know go even further, and insist on doing first drafts longhand, although Dorothea Brande says that a book thus made is “usually one long waste motion”. (I have managed to look this up, in Becoming a Writer.)
I don’t think the machine will be a hit with journalists, however. I rarely find distraction a problem when I’m writing journalism, even fully connected. Deadlines are enough to see to that.
