Five or six years ago, I discovered that drafting by hand with scrap paper made me take my words less seriously, and it helped me get over writer’s block. The following year, I started moving my essay drafts to a typewriter whenever I got stuck. I’m not joking—it is so laborious and annoying to backspace on a typewriter, I stopped self-editing before I even got words on the page, and that resistance helped me hammer out first drafts faster than I had done in years. But of course, you can’t bring an Underwood with you on a train (or, I suppose you could, but you would not make any friends).
Enter reMarkable’s ubiquitous Instagram marketing, which makes every work space look like a visual vacation for your brain. I procrastinated buying one at first, because they’re not cheap, and while I was confident it would be a wise investment, it felt expensive at the time: I spent over USD$500 on a tablet, a leather case, and the premium pen, which has a built-in eraser. But the investment was wise indeed: Since then, I have rarely traveled without it, and it has revolutionized the way I work. Instead of having separate paper notebooks for to-do lists, notes, and journal entries—all of which would inevitably devolve into real estate for shopping lists—I can have infinite folders and notebooks all in one place, automatically uploaded to the Cloud and accessible on my phone and computer.
