NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) veterans will have grimaced with recognition to hear David Nicholls admit to experimenting with Write or Die while writing his new bestseller, Us. Nicholls abandoned the tyrannical app, which deletes what you’ve written if you pause for too long, when he realised it was causing him to write “rubbish”, preferring the more benign dictatorships of Freedom and SelfControl.
These productivity apps, which lock you away from the internet for hours at a time, may soon be discarded in favour of a much trendier gizmo: the Hemingwrite. This “distraction-free writing tool” – which is causing a stir despite not actually being on sale yet – is a word processor that looks like a typewriter, with the 21st-century bonus of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity so writers can back up their work to the cloud. Despite the cringeworthy name (online wags have already pointed out that Hemingway actually wrote in pencil), I’m sure by next November it will be a familiar sight in east London cafes.
Before crafting their latest #amwriting tweet, NaNoWriMo writers aiming for posterity are advised to read Jeremy Schmidt and Jacquelyn Ardam’s fascinating essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books on Susan Sontag’s Born-Digital archive. The writer and intellectual, who died 10 years ago, gave her laptop to the University of California, leaving academics struggling over how to interpret her Word documents and emails: “Is there anything of value in the article on the ‘low carb craze’ forwarded to Sontag by her son in August 2004? Was Sontag perhaps flirting with an Atkins diet? Does it matter? How much information is just too much information?”
Mercifully for her scholars and archivists, Sontag missed the age of Twitter, leaving the conundrum of how to preserve Twitter conversations for someone else to solve.
