Anyone who follows me on twitter… Or has seen me speak on a panel… Or has sat beside me on an airplane…
Has heard me wax poetic about my Alphasmart.
What’s an Alphasmart, you (and 98% of the people I meet) might ask?
Well, it’s an old-school word processor on which I’ve written the first draft of every book I’ve written since CROSS MY HEART AND HOPE TO SPY.
So that’s…10 books, one novella, a short story, and countless other things that may never see the light of day.
It’s a lot of words, in other words, and as a result, the Alphasmart has become essential to my writing process.
Why do I love it so much?
Well, a lot of reasons.
–It is a zero-distraction zone. No internet. No games. No old files to peruse or critique. Nope. You sit down. And you type. Then, when you’re finished typing, you connect the Alphasmart to a real computer and download what you’ve done that day. The next day, you do it all again.
–The battery life is AMAZING. I measure battery life in books. As in, I can get 1-2 books per set of batteries. I never, ever have to worry about finding an outlet when I’m using my Alphasmart. It’s always charged and ready to go.
–It’s light.
–It’s tough. I’ve dropped it, kicked it, smashed it in the bottom of my backpack and still it’s nearly perfect.
–It doesn’t let you move forward and it doesn’t let you go back. Well, you can. But it’s cumbersome and awkward, so when you’re working on the Alphasmart you have almost no choice but to plow forward and just write. It’s the best way to get to The End and give yourself permission to make mistakes along the way. (Which would drive some writers crazy but is essential to my process.)
–It’s cheap. The company that makes them has gone out of business, so now you can only find them used (which is the bad news), but they’re usually less than $50. (I have a couple extras because they’re so integral to my process, and I think I paid $36 for the most recent one.)
So, that’s why I love my Alphasmart. Would you love one too? Maybe. If you need a way of writing faster and eliminating distractions, it might be worth $50 to experiment and find out.
Hope this helps,
Ally
Trisha F says
July 1, 2016 at 3:28 pmThat’s actually really cool.
And almost like in “You’ve Got Mail” where the boyfriend has to have his typewriter and a backup one. 🙂
I love your description of the abuse you’ve given it as well
Erica says
July 2, 2016 at 6:40 pmI’m no author but I gotta say… this would be AMAZING for getting through all my college papers.
Celine says
July 3, 2016 at 11:15 amMy mom and I heard you mention it during one of your visits to St. Louis! It was such an awesome surprise when I found it under the Christmas tree later that year 😀 I used it quite a bit, then unfortunately slowly fell out of the habit of using it as what little writing I continued doing happened more and more on my laptop. Recently I’ve been complaining about how easy it is for me to get distracted on YouTube (especially after having discovered the BookTube community…) and also how many times I’ve been hitting writer’s block and just putting stuff to the side. And then opening the Internet. Thank you for writing this blog entry! Now I remember that I have this awesome writing tool that kind of solves these problems that I’ve been complaining about…
couplelife says
July 4, 2016 at 3:35 amI really love this post. Thanks for your sharing. Hope that I could read more and more useful article like this. Keeping moving forward!! <3
Gallagherheist9803 says
July 13, 2016 at 3:59 pmGreat. Now I want one haha???
Juliana Q. says
July 14, 2016 at 12:02 pmHello, I just wanted to let you know that your link to sign up for Ally Ambassadors by email was broken.
Steve High says
October 5, 2016 at 9:34 pmGreat to see something written in the past tense. Almost every Alphasmart Neo article stresses the author’s high hopes of finally getting something done.
In other words, heavy on the auxiliary verbs: will, shall, may, might, woulda, coulda, shoulda.
I’ve been an on-again, off-again user for, lo, these many years, mostly when I had some sort of gun to my head, such as a 12-hour United flight to Hong Kong with no AC power.
I really liked, “When you’re finished typing, you connect the Alphasmart to a real computer and download what you’ve done that day. The next day, you do it all again.”
The Neo really started working for me when I built the necessary data transfer into my daily routine.
Thanks for a great read!