I know some that visit and subscribe to my site are creatives: writers, journal’ers, and a few who are artists. And I want to share a productivity tool—one that’s a pleasure to use—you might want to explore.
I handwrite all my story planning notes, rough outlines/plot points, and first draft scenes. That works best for me creatively, and that’s how I’ve ghostwritten 32 books (nonfiction and fiction) for clients and dozens of my own stories over the last eleven years. In December 2018, I bought a device I had been monitoring the development of since 2017: the reMarkable 1. And it—with its handwriting conversion—was an instant productivity enhancement over my old process of handwriting on paper—dictate voice-to-text—then edit/cleanup. My use of it came at the end of Book One (150,000+ words) of a four-book project for a client, but the improvement in the process was clear. In early spring 2019, I began the planning, outlining, and then writing of Book Two (just completed at 164,381-words pre-final-edit), and the productivity increase over the course of the project was markedly greater. I start on Book 3 this month (April).
I’ve preordered the reMarkable 2 (video of it follows below), which, as expected, has improvements over the generation one device and it’s less expensive now that development and production costs are more absorbed. And will pass my reMarkable 1 to my daughter who loves to sketch and draw, because the reMarkable is excellent for that too (exporting images in SVG or PNG format).
Whether you write or draw professionally or for personal enjoyment; if you’re looking for something that gives you the benefit of technology without the accompanying distractions… then you may want to take a look at reMarkable.
