Episode: 1195
Title: HPR1195: Distractionless Writing
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1195/hpr1195.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 21:23:47

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Hello, my name is Gordon Sunkler, I am known in IRC, an Identica and a HPR New Year.
It's this old whip, for those who have been a while, I've not done an HPR in a while.
I've got one for aspiring writers of fiction, it's basically on the merits and the advantages of a distraction-less writing.
Now, if you're trying to write a fictional story, like a novel, you want to create an environment that minimizes every distraction
you possibly can, and you have control over, you try to find some quiet place to sit at your laptop or the way in at the garage or up in the loft or just a quiet area where you can put a do not disturb sign on, lock the kids out, lock the partner out, lock whoever out and write.
But that only goes, that's about your actual physical environment, that doesn't tackle your environment on your screen, because that's what you're going to be looking at when you're typing.
Now, I see a lot of writers who use Word, or they use Libra Office Writer, or Arbe Word, or basically a Word Processor, and that to me is insane, that's crazy.
Because, think about this, what you have around about your words, if you're using a Word Processor, any word processor,
what you have around about the block of words that you're writing on, and bear in mind that when you're writing, your entire thought process should be concentrating on those words.
That's your story, that's what you're crafting, that's what you're using them and picking the words, the right words, and getting the ideas from your head down into words.
So, surrounding these words, you have toolbars, you have lots of buttons on the toolbars, and even around about the edge, regardless of what view you're in, around about the edge, you have things like paper, sizes, and guides, guidelines for spacing, and you've got options for format, and certain tables, and certain photographs,
and all of that, and all of that is just useless, that's counter to what you're trying to do.
And then, outside of the Word Processor itself, you also have your operating system, the signs of that.
Most people have at least one panel, I work with the, what you could call the Windows look, it's always Linux, but it's the sort of Windows look of the one panel, fill it along the bottom with an apps menu and one corner where the start button is on Windows, and the system tray and the clock and stuff on the other corner where it is on Windows, that's how I work.
And even then, you have the panel, you have possibly IRC open, potentially flashing messages that you've potentially got, Twitter open, you've got the clock just keeping staring at you, reminding you, putting the pressure on, that how much of you've written the clock's ticking away, sort of thing.
You've got all these things that are there distracting you from what you really want to be doing, which is writing.
Now, so many people have got potential to write a book, or to write a story, whether you call it a book or not, I guess is about more about length, but they've got potential to write a story, they've got ideas enough to write a story.
But they get so bogged down by trying to find the right words, and keeping going over and re-editing and re-changing and deleting parts, and in the end, they spend so much time getting very well done that they just give up.
They don't sort of plan it through, and they just give up, and you're forever going through and changing things, and I'll make that italics, and you get tempted into format and options, and format is the last part of the process.
When you're writing, the whole focus of Nanorimal, which myself and Caroline did last year and one last year, was the whole point of Nanorimal is it's focused on writing.
Get a first draft, just sit for one month, and get your word count up, consistent word count, and keep adding it up so that you hit a 50,000 target in one month.
That's just writing, there's nothing else, so anything that can focus you into that headspace, I mean bear in mind that writing a story isn't like writing a blog post, it's not like writing a comment on a website or a post or a forum post or something, it's nothing like that.
You've got to get into the headspace of the characters, and you've got to think, I mean if you've got a role of a teenage pregnant mum who's been kept out at home, only some people can relate an actual physical person to that character, but as a writer, if that's your character, you've got to get into her headspace.
Think like she thinks, and have her act the way that she would act, and when characters are interacting, you've got to keep all these things in your head when you're writing, so that it's not you speaking through the characters, so it's a character speaking.
And all of that is basically a long-winded way of saying, you need time to immerse yourself into writing, and nothing else, just writing, so the advantage of a distraction free way of doing it is absolutely immense, and I really cannot recommend enough for writers.
What I use is this was the main sort of focus of this episode. I use an application on Linux called Focus Writer, now Focus Writer is available on Windows, I think there's a Windows binary, I think there's a Mac version as well, I don't use any of them, I use Linux, but anyway.
Focus Writer is, there's quite a few distractionless editors, and what makes a distractionless editor is that it is stripped down, really stripped down to take everything else off the screen.
When you use Focus Writer, the screen is black, your first one is black, there's nothing, it takes over, it hides your panel, it hides your system tray, it hides your clock, it hides your toolbars, it hides absolutely everything is black.
If you then move the mouse, it's black with a blinking cursor, and if you then move the mouse, you'll see at the top, a menu pops up, like a toolbar with some basic buttons if you mouse to the top, and that gives you things like tools, settings, you can go in and modify the themes.
It does have, when you're modifying the themes, you can set up your writing environment and put up a background in there, if you've got some inspirational image, if you're writing about 18th century Japan, and you've got some wallpaper that evokes that in your mind, you can actually set that up as the background,
you can set up like semi-transparent writing over the top of it, or you can set the writing screen to be at one side or the other, you can change the transparency, how see through that is, and you can write essentially over the top of the wallpaper, if it's not distracting, if it's an inspiration rather than distracting, you can do that.
You can go in and set things like a daily workout, a daily target, and it keeps track of that.
If you close it and open it up the next day, it resets that, it knows it's the next day, and it keeps track of that.
So you can go in and say, I want to write for 30 minutes a day, I think, the default of one of the targets, which is a time thing, or for nano-rimo, it's the daily target is 1,667 words per day.
And you can set that up to be whatever you want, you can set it to use whatever dictionary you want, in my case it's English, British English,
there's a lot of the time these programs here are set up to be American English, which is slightly different.
It's got spell checker, underlines, words that are wrong, you do have basic options as well, you can have it.
In the format section, you've got some really basic options, like alignment, indents, bold, underline that type of thing.
But what I do is disable rich text, I make it all with plain text, so there's no, when I'm writing, I don't want to have to think about putting things in italics or anything like that, it's just text.
Just focus solely on the text, there's nothing else on screen at all.
When you open focus writer, it opens up exactly at the point where you last left it, which is handy for quickness, you don't have to open it and then find whatever documents is.
If you mouse down at the bottom of the screen, this is actually interesting as well, this is the more practical thing when you're writing.
It's got a total word count, it always keeps track of that, which is handy if you're doing something like that or I move where the 50,000 word count is a goal.
It's also got any time you mouse over, it's got percentage of daily goal.
And that's when you see people doing nano rhymo, and that's kind of what they're taking it from.
You don't have to run any extra command, you don't have to go in and build a manual word count, it keeps track of it as you're writing.
All you need to do is mouse to the bottom of the screen.
Also in the bottom of the screen, it's got the time as well, which is handy, you don't have to come out of this full screen interface just to see the time.
Because it is full screen, you don't get any of the system updates, you don't get notifications from Twitter, you don't see any, they're still there.
And when you either close focus writer or switch to a different desktop or something, they're still there, you just don't see them, they're not distracting you.
And it's got tabs as well.
So what I did at one time was I've been experimenting with this is actually having the planning section of my novel where all the characters are all listed and all the events leading to other events and whatever.
That's a separate document on a separate tab so I can flick back and forth between the tabs.
I'm not doing that now because if you modify something on the other tab, it counts towards your word count, which kind of goes against you.
It sets off kind of false, a false sense of security or a false sense of achievement, sorry, with an animal, because you get to, you get to the end, you think I've done like 2000 words today and then you actually check it.
And it's it's actually it's only 200 towards your story and the rest has been in the other in the other file sort of thing.
So the way I've got around that is I've actually got a wiki. So I've just got Firefox open in another, in another desktop, in another virtual desktop.
And I can flick back and forth between the full screen view of focus writer over to the other desktop to check things out in the wiki and check how the story supposed to go and then flick back over again and it keeps writing.
So that's focus writer. I think it's absolutely fantastic for writers and aspiring writers, but focus writers are not the only one that happens to be the one that I use.
There's also I've tried Pyram, which is even more basic. Pyram doesn't allow you the wallpaper.
Yeah, Pyram is actually quite good as well. That's also a distractionless full screen. There's a few, excuse me, a few options for how this how you want to lay the screen out in the color and the contrast between the text and the background and stuff.
I've noticed I've been sort of pondering the idea of a Chromebook for a while for just sitting right and extended battery life and it's light and whatever.
And for that, I would need something that gives the equivalent of of distractionless writing on the Chromebook because I couldn't install focus writer there.
And there is actually a few Chrome extensions that do that are distractionless as well. There's one because I use Dropbox to actually store my stories in.
And there's one actually that's designed to work as distractionless within Chrome designed to work with Dropbox shares, which seems to be it's almost like the red in my mind.
And the screenshots look quite interesting. I've not tried it yet. I can't even remember the name, to be honest. There's a few anyway, but the point is not about any specific one. The point is the benefits of distractionless, a distractionless writing environment
are absolutely incredible. As I said, there's limits to what you can do. It almost seems like it's like a half measure. If you're going to go part way there and say that I want to concentrate, I want to get the story out of my head and into text,
at least the first draft, and then I can leave it a while, come back to it and refine it. And just see if I can do it. There's a sense of achievement. See if I can actually do it. Get the story from conception to something that someone else can read.
Then it kind of seems like you're going halfway there by making a dedicated space within your home, within your bedroom, within your physical environment. That's a half step towards getting you there.
It just seems kind of daft to be honest. If you don't go the extra step and allow your actual screen thing that you're staring at to distract you.
So distractionless everything for the one, as they say. And if you have any aspirations at all of writing fiction, then I urge you to investigate the distraction free environment,
just so that you can concentrate on the text. I know people are going to say, well, you've got to format it and stuff. Yes, you do. You do, but that comes after.
You've got the writing phase, as far as you get the words down. After you've got the words down, you can then work on editing.
And in the case of focus writer actually saves. I can't remember the format for the rich text when I don't use that, but the it might well be open.
I can't remember. But I, as I say, I use the plain text and it's just a text file dot t dot t x t. That's it.
A text file you can open in any text editor and once you've completed your writing phase and you want to edit and add your italics in as necessary and get the format and the just paragraph spacing and do all that fancy stuff.
That fancy stuff is for the publication end. That's the edit and phase. You don't need any of that at the writing phase. And honestly, if you have these options, that's one more distraction that's holding you back from getting it, getting it out of your head and on to onto words.
So I think I'm probably starting to ramble now. I hope this has been of some use and hopefully you find a distractionless editor that suits your needs.
So anyway, I am Gordon Sinclair, I am known on IRC and on identical Twitter as this little bit. Go host on Clivins as well. This is the first HPR I've done since I've been since I've been doing Clivins. So either way.
So thanks for listening and until next time, goodbye.
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