The decision you’re making when you bring the Freewrite into your writing life is whether or not you need – absolutely – the ability to sit in a flow state and just let words come out onto the e-ink screen. For that price you could buy a cheap computer or 40 nice notebooks. The Freewrite assumes always that you will edit somewhere else.Īm I enough of a fan to abandon a computer for a Freewrite? Not completely, but it’s definitely a tool I would incorporate into my daily writing habit. You’ll notice plenty of typos, however, and a few errors. I was able to scroll back and check on character facts as necessary but instead of skipping around I wrote in a sort of daze, one word in front of the other, until I hit my goal. I wrote a bit of a horror novel on the Freewrite just to try it out and I found the lack of editing features quite freeing. I actually did start one and found that the writing was more succinct and focused, a true benefit in an era of distractions. What’s the bottom line? I could see myself writing a novel on one of these things. Thankfully it has a big handle on the back so you can lug it from cafe to cafe. You can’t put this into your laptop bag with your laptop. It is 9×12 inches and about three inches thick – far bigger than any modern laptop. In that case, unless you have a powerful sense of the entire arc of your story, the Freewrite hobbles more than helps. Using computers gives you better, more readable copy faster, which is not a benefit if you’re trying to get your Zombie-fied satire of Remembrance of Things Past out the door before the end of NaNoWriMo but great if you’re trying to write a history paper or non-fiction tome. It’s a strange feeling to use a dedicated piece of hardware to write but it’s a welcome one.īut we moved away from typewriters for a reason. It is a piece of machinery, something less evanescent than a MacBook Air, and the mechanical keyboard offers just the right amount of clickiness to make you remember that you are writing, not putzing on Twitter. In fact that’s exactly what they’re going for with the Freewrite’s hefty design. What you end up with is good if unedited copy, a simulacrum of what you used to get with a regular paper typewriter. It is designed primarily for the word excretion process and has no editing features. However, for serious writing you need to edit as you puke words onto the page. Because it has no filters your words can come out as a torrent. The Freewrite enables a certain kind of, shall we say, violent writing. The fact that it is specifically designed to wean you off of distractions is massively important as a writer and I was able to begin a project quickly and I could foresee myself finishing a novel on this thing without much trouble and with a great deal of pleasure. It may look like a toy but the Freewrite is a serious writing machine. It lasts a few weeks on one charge via USB-C. Your text appears on a fast-refreshing E-ink screen. It has a massive, clicky mechanical keyboard and it’s designed specifically for writing. A small window under the main editing window shows the time, the time elapsed, or word count. There are no arrow keys and the assumption is that you turn it on, select a draft and start writing. You have three draft “folders” – selected by the left arrow crank – and you can connect to Wi-Fi and upload your drafts to Freewrite’s service or almost any other file storage solution including Google Drive and Dropbox. It is a mechanical keyboard connected to an E-ink screen and it has two honking big mechanical switches and a big, jolly power button. The Freewrite looks like a little piece of hipster paradise.