My life is a mess.
I live in a mess.
Stacks of books, boxes, papers, bags, wires, chargers, remotes, controllers, toys, board games, clothes, coats, shoes… stuff. There’s stuff everywhere. It’s a mess. When two full-time writers, three kids, and a cat live in a three-bedroom terraced house, this is what life is like.
Then, of course, there’s winter and lockdown and homeschooling, and the kids not being able to play out with friends, or go to stay with grandparents for the weekend. It’s a mess, and it causes a mess. Stuff piles up. Both physically and metaphorically.
There are not enough hours in the day, days in the week, or weeks in the month. It’s a mess.
Wouldn’t it be nice if things were less messy? If even one single aspect of life was less messy.
“Distraction-Free Writing Tools”. I read the words at the top of my screen as I wade through the mess, drinking my fifth cup of coffee, children screaming about Fortnite from the adjacent room. “Distraction-Free Writing Tools”. That’s what Freewrite offer. That sounds good. Maybe that’s what I need?
I have been fascinated and a little bit obsessed by the idea of the Freewrite since back in 2015 when it was going to be called the Hemingwrite, in reference to Ernest Hemingway’s “sit down at a typewriter and bleed” strategy of writing. While there’s an undeniable truth in that quote and that approach, I think we can all see why they made the shift from “sit down and bleed” to “distraction-free writing” in terms of marketing. Fair play.
Occasionally, when looking at pictures of the Freewrite and reading about them got too much for me over the years, I’d take to Twitter to demand to know who had one, or had tried one, and were they any good, and could I have a go, please. Please?
Anyway, after five years or so of wondering what it would be like work on one of these beautiful, magical machines, the lovely people at Astrohaus finally took pity on me and sent me one. Not to keep. Just to borrow. “Would three weeks be okay?” the very nice person on the email asked. Yes. Yes, it would. That would be perfect. Perfect. I could not wait.
Imagine what I could achieve if I had a Freewrite for three whole weeks…
In the afternoon of Friday the 4th of December 2020 the doorbell rang. The hall was a mess and I tripped over some mismatched wellies at the foot of the stairs on my way to answer the door. It was a parcel from Astrohaus. Much sooner than I had expected.
I’d imagined I might be laying my calloused fingertips on those beautifully designed keys sometime in the New Year. Maybe February 2021. But no, here, at last, was my Freewrite. Exactly three weeks before Christmas.
Three weeks.
Inside the box was a Freewrite smart typewriter (2nd generation), a USB lead (for charging and manually exporting files to a computer), and an instruction booklet. That’s it. That’s all you need.
So, here’s how you set up a Freewrite brand new out of the box:
You go to getfreewrite.com and you click on Log In, and you create an account using your email and a password. This means that everything you type on your Freewrite will be uploaded to your account (called a Postbox account) as a Draft. You can also set these Drafts to be backed up to your own Dropbox, or other cloud storage site.
You sign in with your account details on the Freewrite itself.
You set up the WiFi (using a three-position switch lets you select Off, On, and New) on the Freewrite so that it can upload your Drafts. The Freewrite saves everything on board anyway, so you could just leave it so that it only connects to your home WiFi when you get home, or you could add the WiFi details of wherever you’re typing at the time if you wanted to make doubly sure you didn’t lose anything.
You select a folder (using a three-position switch with A, B, and C on it) to create your new document in, and you start typing. You’re away.
You navigate between existing Drafts and creating New ones using keyboard shortcuts.
You can adjust things like the screen backlight, the font size on the main e-ink screen (which shows ten nice clean lines of text on Medium), and the display on the little strip secondary e-ink screen to show date, a clock, current word count, etc.
In terms of the machine itself, the Freewrite was exactly as lovely in real life as I’d imagined it would be. The size and weight and feel of it. The chunky, clicky cherry switch keys. An absolute delight to look at, to type on, and to ostentatiously carry from room to room by its little handle.
However, it soon became apparent that (for me) what the Freewrite can’t do is more significant than what it can.
You cannot import ANYTHING to the Freewrite. The Freewrite creates its own new documents. Want to export the document and work on it off the Freewrite? No problem. You can never work on that edited version of the document on the Freewrite ever again, however.
The Freewrite writes in plain text ONLY. There is no Bold, no Italic, no underline, no Tab, no nothing.
There are NO cursor keys (or shortcuts which act as cursor keys). You can navigate up and down in what you’ve written using Page Up and Page Down, but you cannot “drop-in” anywhere else in the text other than at the very end.
You cannot edit the text AT ALL, except by physically deleting the last thing you typed and then retyping it. Spotted a typo a paragraph back? Well, you’ll need to delete that entire paragraph to correct it. Or just leave it. It’s fine. Fine. FINE.
In truth, the Freewrite is less a wordprocessor, more a typewriter. A very, very beautiful, lovely, hi-tech typewriter with the added function of being able to suck words back off the page in reverse order, one character at a time.
Could I write comic scripts on a Freewrite? I use headers, footers, Bold, Italics, Tabs, multiple returns. I have to embed links to reference stuff, keep a strict count of words of dialogue, move things from one page to another, and so on. No, I could not write comic scripts on a Freewrite.
Could I write articles on a Freewrite? I use notes, citations, footnotes, and quotes in my articles. I refer to online archives and other articles while writing my articles. I re-order my articles, moving sections around while I’m writing them. No, I could not write articles on a Freewrite.
Could I write prose on a Freewrite? If I already knew what I was writing. If I had notes and ideas already, and I was just looking at bashing out the first draft of something… A short story. A novella. That novel which I’d already started! Yes! I could work on that! I could finish my novel in those three weeks.
Reader, I did not finish the novel.
Of course, I couldn’t import the chapters I had already written on to the Freewrite, but that was fine. Fine. No problem really. Anyway, I just needed to finish the work stuff I already had going on before I could get going on the novel, because I couldn’t work on anything else on the Freewrite. Also, we just needed to get everything sorted for Christmas before the kids broke up. Also, things were being delivered and the phone was ringing and the cat was throwing up and we’d run out of bread. Now, somehow, the kids had broken up from school, but that was okay. We were pretty much sorted for Christmas, so I could just do a bit of typing on the Freewrite in the hall. The phone was ringing and the kids were fighting and there was someone at the door, but it was okay. It was all okay. It was. It was Christmas Eve.
800 words. 800 words of Chapter Three of my novel is what I managed in the three short weeks I spent with my beautiful, wonderful, lovely Freewrite. I am so, so grateful for the time we had together, but it was never going to work between us.
Distraction-Free Writing™, it turns out, only really works for people with distraction-free lives, or at least with some distraction-free time. People who have garden offices, or who work in a corner of a coffee-shop listening to ambient rain-forest sounds on their noise-cancelling headphones. I am not one of those people. In many, many ways I really wish I was. Instead, I’m a mess. My life is messy and loud and chaotic and filled with distractions.
It is with a genuinely heavy heart that I type these words: the Freewrite is not right for me. It’s not right for the type of writing I do, the way I work, or the way I live my life.
My life is a mess.
There are, however, definitely people out there who it will be right for, and who will be right for it. I hope you find each other, and I hope you are very, very happy together.