WriteRoom - Back to the Womb

Focus and sustained concentration are the keys towards prolific writing or any writing for that matter. Some writers have an iron-clad attention span and can sit at their work for fourteen hours straight thinking of nothing else, like the infamous Honore' de Balzac. Others, like myself, have to concentrate on their concentration. Oh, the things you'll see! My mind feels like Poland and distractions are the Luftwaffe. But I think I found an underground bunker in a program called WriteRoom.

Going to school in the Eighties during the rise of the personal computer cultivated an odd sentimental feeling in me towards text-based computing. Computers were so novel and wonderful that I would kill for the opportunity in elementary school to go to the library and fire up Apple Basic and type simple code:

Ready
10 Print "I Love Quiet Riot."
20 GOTO 10
RUN


I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Lov


And so on and so forth. This probably has no impact in this modern-day blog environment, but in those days it was bright white or yellow against a black background. The words were the positive glowing objects in the larger negative space, which gave them much more of a stamp on my impressionable young mind. Furthermore, the only thing that appeared on the screen was my own creation.


Some genius at Hogbays Software must have felt the same way because it is this simple concept that has been turned into an uncanny attention-keeper. By simulating this MS-DOS type situation, your focus is demanded by nothing but your own typing. Plus, there are no other buttons or windows that might draw you away from the task at hand. The only things on the screen are things that you create. It is literally like typing in the womb.

Well, now that that's all taken care of.  Balzac once wrote for forty-eight hours straight fueled by countless cups of black coffee. If you want to attempt this feat, the coffee that I find stirs the passions is this one.