5 Alternatives To a Laptop For Writers

We never stopped using it for taking notes, but paper is an impractical format for crafting work for other people to consume. Longhand is slow going and the results are easy to lose in wind or rain. It can't be OCR'd, unless your handwriting is so neat it would have graphologists recommending pre-emptive incarceration. 

But the combination of pen/pencil and notepad can't be matched for brainstorming and the free flow of ideas. It's amazing how many people either fail to do more than basic note-taking, or become so intimidated by the empty page that it stymies, rather than encourages, creativity. 

This may be because you're using the wrong notebooks. Ditch big, lined pads that won't fit in the pocket. Ditch the $12 pocket "journals" that demand perfection from every stroke of the pen. Get something inexpensive, like Field Notes or Moleskine Cahiers and get cracking. 

Typewriters 

Typewriters, with their singular focus on writing, force writers to focus on writing. And with their simplicity, they deny us the ability to endlessly tinker with sentences or get distracted by what's on Twitter. Hip sorts will opt for vintage mechanical ones, but you don't need to be quite so precious. A Canon Typestar, $40 or thereabouts on eBay, makes for a good portable electric machine, with some models not a lot larger than many laptops. Brother and Olivetti still make new typewriters, though they're mostly larger and sturdier old-school affairs. 

Alphasmart 

Offering more of the software options that you get on a computer, but none of the distractions such as email and web browsing, Alphasmart's portable word processors are cheap, durable and have "developed a type of cult following among journalists and writers, who find them easy to carry and appreciate the full-size keyboard and long battery life." 

Obsolete Pocket Computers 

Some old-school gadgets make for surprisingly good writing tools. Too obsolete for whatever business or technical tasks they might once have been designed for, handheld computers like NEC's Mobile Pro ($50 or so used) now more or less work like compact Alphasmarts: good only for firing up the text editor and cranking out some prose. If you can get the internet working, their ancient software lives in a similar limbo: about useful enough to email a story, but of little use hitting today's javascript-heavy modern websites. Again, the concept is focus: you could fork out for a fancy Sony laptop that's no larger, but it would let you access Facebook. 

Many people are especially fond of the MessagePad, a short-lived but useful tablet computer that Apple created long before the iPad took over the world. I'm particularly fond of the tiny Jornada from HP, even if it's too small for most typists. 

Users of tablets and even cellphones can hook up portable keyboards. So if your life centers around an iPhone or BlackBerry, you can pipe long wads of texts into the machine with ease.