A while ago I mentioned some distraction-free, full-screen word processors, namely Write-Or-Die and Darkroom. Well, though both applications had elements I liked (and Write-Or-Die was downright amusing with its incorporation of ‘punishment’), neither really did the trick. Well, I may have found something that does.

FocusWriter, available free from Gott Code, may just be the first draft writing software I’ve been looking for. It’s small, simple, and doesn’t burden the user with a lot of extraneous options and menus. It’s full screen when you want it to be, and by simply moving your cursor to the top or bottom you can summon the tucked away menus. And the display options for text color and two levels of background are completely customizable — you can stick with bog-standard black on white, or do light text on a dark background, even put an image or photograph in as your background. As a fan of white text on blue I was really pissed-off to see the latest MS word no longer offered the option — unless you wanted to screw with display options that had to be tweaked back to standard before ever sending your file out.

FocusWriter also keeps a running tally of your word count and time spent writing. What’s more, you can set either of these things as your daily writing goal, which FocusWriter displays as a percentage. It’s a pretty nice feeling to be typing away and see that you’ve achieved ’128%’ of your goal for the day.

So, full-screen, great customization, simple functionality — even has a good running spell-checker. FocusWriter does however save its files as text documents, so I find it necessary to paste a rough draft into another program to format the line-spacing and headers before saving again as an .rtf. But, that minor piece of busy work aside, I have to say I’m loving the process of writing in FocusWriter more than any other software I’ve used, and I’m even contemplating creating different theme backgrounds to compliment what I’m working on.

Especially when compared to the clueless behemoth that is the latest incarnation of MS Word with its acres of esoteric menu functions, FocusWriter is the lean, mean writing software that you’ve always wanted. And it’s available for Mac users, as well as PC.

Following up from Monday’s post linking to Cory Doctorow’s advice for Writing in the Age of Distraction, I thought I’d mention two free writing applications designed to confront just that: Write or Die and Dark Room. Both operate on the principle that the less opportunities the writer has to break-off from writing, the better.

Write or Die is a free online application based around the philosophy that immediate punishment is a far more effective motivator than distant, intangible rewards. To that end it is customizable to present several types of punishments to the writer who stops typing, ranging from a warning message all the way to the actual deletion of the text you’ve been working on!

I’ve played a bit with Write or Die, going for the maximum penalty and least forgiving grace period (the time you may go without actually typing). And, while I got a kick out of it, I can’t really imagine it being all that practical for something longer than a blog entry — I certainly couldn’t approach writing fiction with any sort of artificially imposed limits such as this (which I can envision becoming distractions themselves). Still, if you have the attention span of a gnat, or a masochistic streak, have a look. And, even if it doesn’t sound useful to you,  the site alone is worth investigating for its humor and attitude.

Dark Room is of a more practical nature. Apparently based on a Mac application called Write Room (Ryan Harvey’s blog entry about it on Black Gate lead me to Dark Room, he also blogged about Write or Die here), Dark Room is basically a full-screen, green text on black, text editor with very simple interface. The page width, font, and colors are all customizable, but I like the default just fine. While it doesn’t seem like much, having a full-screen blacked out with no other menus, tabs, or task bars peeking out at you does help to reinforce concentration. Dark Room saves files as text documents.

Dark Room is a bit like an Alphasmart Neo, it’s a ‘first drafter.’ Meaning, when I’m done working with it, I still have to jump through hoops to open my file in a word processing program for formatting and spell checking. Maybe that trade-off in efficiency is worth it sometimes but, frankly, often it seems like a hassle. As much as I like the working environment of Dark Room, I still don’t see it as being that one application that can suit all my needs.

But when I do find that application that final lets me part ways with Microsoft Word, I’ll let you know.

Over at Locus online an interesting article by Cory Doctorow (they’re always interesting, actually) deals with writing in the internet age. You know how it is — never before has it been easier to write copy with our ultra-portable laptops, spellcheckers, online encyclopedias, and laser printers stuffed with cheap paper, yet matching pace with these advances is our ability to distract ourselves from the work at hand. I know I’ve wrestled with this myself, and even bought myself a piece of kit, the Alphasmart Neo, as a help around some of my distractions. Doctorow offers some good advice, some of which I very familiar with and can endorse from experience, and some of which is new to me.

Probably the two biggest ways to ensure steady production is to create an unflagging, but manageable, work schedule and stick to it even when you can write more, and to leave the day’s work unfinished. Combined, these two rules ensure your mind is propelled forward toward the next day’s writing and, that when you sit down the following day to pick up in the middle of a sentence or scene, you have a much easier time getting started.

Then Doctorow suggests we don’t research as we write, a sin I’m guilty of. While sometimes I have no problems googling a quick reference for a story I’m writing and then jumping back into the flow of things, other times I’ve fallen into what Doctorow warns against: “an endless click-trance that will turn your 20 minutes of composing into a half-day’s idyll through the web.” The times I have successfully and by necessity pulled this off were for very small projects in which my enthusiasm far exceeded my knowledge, and I more-or-less researched and wrote simultaneously. But I can’t imagine that approach working on anything other than a very short story. Doctorow shares a tip used by journalists, inserting ‘TK’ into the the text where you are unsure of the content, as it’s easy to pick up with a search later ( the letters TK only rarely appearing next to each other in English words). I use brackets for the same reason, as they stick out and don’t get used much for anything else.

He talks too of the worst distractors on our computers, the IM, chat, and RSS feeds that give us up to-the-minute distractions. But the one tip he gave that really intrigued me, as I’ve been thinking the same thing, is to lose the fancy word processing software in favor of simpler programs. He recommends text editors, but I’m not sure I want to go that far — especially as I’d have to go through the process of copying the text out of them and into whatever spell-checking and .rtf file generating software I’d use to prepare the manuscript. I’d love to find some middle ground, something with the stark simplicity of a textpad (or, preferably, dark room) and some of the functionality of a word processor. This demands further experimentation on my part, but I’m open to any recommendations.

In a search for a writing tool more portable (and not as damn hot!) as my monstrous 17″ laptop, I stumbled across the Alphasmart family of products. Essentially portable keyboards with a built-in memory, they looked exactly like what I needed; they are cheap compared to a laptop, very portable, have a nice keyboard, and are geared only for writing. I ordered the Alphasmart Neo about a week ago and, having received it today, this is the first thing I’ve written on it.

These things were originally designed for use in schools, so they are both simple and tough. I’m impressed with the build of it — it’s definitely a no-frills device, and positively primitive by today’s computing standards, but it feels like a quality piece of kit. I’m really enjoying the keyboard, it’s better than most laptops I’ve tried, and has a nice responsive feel.

The screen on the Neo is pretty small — I’ve got it displaying six lines of text which seems to be the maximum — but thus far I’m not having any real trouble using it. Clearly this is not something I’d use to edit a document; it’s essentially a first draft machine, and for that it seems ideal. This little device does not replace a computer, rather it lets you work away from the computer and return to upload your text in whatever word processing program you wish (or directly into your blog’s post window, as I just did for this post).

Since these are early days yet for the Neo and I, I can’t yet gauge if it will be the productively-enhancer I’m looking for or not. You see, the biggest selling point of the Neo for me was that you can’t do anything else on it but write — no web, no emails, no games, no time wasted. That alone could make this a revolution in the way I approach writing, making this little device at least as valuable for the things it can’t do as for the things it can.

I’ll be featuring some more impressions of the Neo in the coming weeks, and I’d love to hear from anyone that uses Alphasmarts or similar products. The Neo is currently available at a discount through the NaNoWriMo website.