Fieldborn

If you look on YouTube, it’s full, and I mean, chocca, of folk eagerly unboxing their Remarkable2 e-ink tablet dramatically, or having some sort of epiphany that, now finally they have found the Grail and their lives will be organised, tasks done and time fruitfully, meaningfully used. I’m not one of those people.

I bought an rm2, because I wanted to explore writing freehand, and, having written, being able to convert that into text. The reasons are a little complicated, because some of it is embarrassingly artsy for a guy who thinks of himself an engineer (that bit of me certainly likes the neat tech).
First off, let me set out my stall. I’m a hobby-writer on the cusp of retirement. Writing flash-fiction, longer stories and like everyone, I’ve a WIP spawned from a past NanoWriMo that I fiddle with. All this happens on various computer screens, in editors with spell checkers. All good:

My brain constructs a story, like the bit of flash above. I move this sentence, change that, rewrite. But, the few times I’d written with a pencil on paper, trying to get some idea or phrase down while cursing a dead phone, I’d get a hint of some flow that’s not there when I type. Now it might be that on a computer, worse not being able to touch-type, I’m getting caught up in the mechanics. Maybe it’s the engineer in me, I’ve no idea. But I experience it differently using the two mediums. (I said it was artsy).

So, back to the RM2. My £400 experiment, to merge freehand writing with the computer I need for everything else. I’ve a few folders for Stories, Flash etc. Saturday morning, I’ll find myself a nearby cafe and a coffee, open a new page and write for a couple of hours. It might be part of the WIP a prompted piece for a site, some plot. All written in my broken and mostly-forgotten italic [though my handwriting is improving now it’s getting an outing]. And in there, sometimes, I get something almost prose-poetry. Here’s an example, as I wrote it on the rm2:

I could never have written that in Google Docs! It’d look too loose, but it’s saying something (or at least it is to me). With the rm2, I can use convert-to-text to grab that idea and work on it at my desk. Final version here:

Sometimes it works, sometimes it peters out after a sentence and I lose my thread. And it’s not all striving for meaning, sometimes I just need a change of scene to get an idea fleshed out around a latte. But it’s interesting to see what happens, without pecking at a keyboard, or Grammerly tutting in the background, without a spell checker popping up. To draw one word after the other and let go.

B.