The Internet may be a revolutionary boon for the modern writer, but it has also become a bane to many a writer bombarded by its endless source of distractions.
Enter Flowstate, a writing app that deletes your writing if you “take a break” from typing for over five seconds to say, update your Facebook status. Coffee be damned. This might be what you need to keep your eye on the prize.
If you’re brave enough to be confined in a time-pressed writing existence, take your pick between time frames of five minutes and three hours. You can breathe a sigh of relief after your set cutoff time because you are allowed to edit your work afterwards. Other features include viewing word and character count, changing the font, and downloading or sharing your work.
Caleb Slain, the creator of the software with co-founder and best friend Blaine Cronn, said the technology developed by their company Overman somehow operates on the adage, “The ultimate inspiration is the deadline” where you experience the “flow state,” hence the app name. Caleb also revealed that the app was inspired by the late Emmy award-winning American screenwriter Stewart Stern who conducted training sessions on timed writing.
“You as a person want to keep the things you own, it’s your natural instinct,” Caleb noted. So if you make a sentence, you make a paragraph, you don’t want it to go away, but the only way to keep it is to write more … Before you know it, you have page, or two pages,” he said. “Nothing in the world matters anymore except for keeping what’s yours,” he added.