If you want proof that a maleficent force exists somewhere in the universe, I offer for consideration the fact that scientists are forced to write.
Obviously there is a stereotype around scientists and their communication skills. Our education pathways value, above all else, the language of mathematics and systems—you can succeed through school if you understand physics, even if your command of English is weak. It is a system that initially values the pop-psychology “left-brain thinking”.
And then, suddenly, after 18 years of education promoting and encouraging this way of thinking, budding scientists are forced to sit down and write down their ideas and findings to share them with the scientific world. But I wasn’t trained to do this. I did not take a formal composition course. At best, I was (lovingly) handed books on how to write by professors in my graduate program because they knew that we all suck at writing.
Unlike many of my peers, I love to write. If you give me the option of going into the lab or sitting down to write, I would choose writing every single day. But oh boy do I struggle with the process; and I especially struggle with getting to that first draft.
My main problem that I self-edit while writing. Anne Lamott’s Shitty First Draft feels like a beautiful but unobtainable concept. It is just too easy for me—a preacher of keyboard shortcuts—to move my cursor somewhere else, or to delete the last five words. Or sentence. Or paragraph. Worse, instead of writing, I can concern myself with appearances after writing only a single page. (How is that font? Would Garamond be better here? Oh no, those italics look awful though…what about Adobe Garamond? Hmm…) Even in beautifully minimal editors like iA Writer I develop the intrusive thought to turn on syntax highlighting every paragraph or two, which inevitably transitions me into editing mode, switching mental gears to remove my passive voice, debate whether this adverb adds value, contemplate sentence structure, and so on. These things, on their own, aren’t terrible; but I hate that I do this only paragraphs in, without any real idea of where the whole thing is going yet. It isn’t the moment to be editing. I should be striving for that shitty first draft.
This self-editing is so bad and so distracting that I started doing drastic and idiosyncratic things just to get to a first draft. For years, I have written almost all of my first draft content by hand with pen (or more recently lovely wooden pencils). This method does not completely solve the self-editing problem, but boy does it help. There is something about the slowness of it all…Crossing out a paragraph’s worth of work is emotionally painful—it took me a long time to write those many lines! And seeing a handwritten draft helps set expectations in my head. It is obvious I’m not writing a near-final draft. It cannot be. Nobody should be subjected to my handwriting. This means it is okay to be sloppy. I will fix it later.
Realistically though, this slowness of handwriting is also a curse; it hurts my productivity.1 Not so much getting words on the page initially—it turns out I think far slower than I can type—but sitting down to transcribe two dozen hand written pages is tedious. It is a great opportunity to edit and get to a solid second draft, but it takes a long long time. I wanted something, somehow, to take these parts I liked the most about hand writing and bring them to a digital tool. Something that turns off that desire to self-edit, but leaves me with an already typed draft.
This brought me to create and build 19:22, a writing app that does not let you delete (beyond the current word). The inability to delete, cut, copy, paste, move the cursor, or see spell check enforces a forward momentum. The lack of user-configurable settings (fonts, themes, and so on) removes the temptation to change how the editor looks; this is a place to write, not tinker. It is a place where mistakes are inevitable and immutable. Seeing these imperfections—the misspelled words, the poorly placed punctuation, or the superfluous spaces—tricks my brain into that “first draft mode” I get while handwriting. What I see on screen is a draft that should not be seen by others; that is obviously not final; and that will need to be fixed later. And in the end, I have convenient typed text ready to be imported into my full-fledged, albeit overwhelming, text editing app.2
19:22 was made to fit my idiosyncratic writing behavior. But I decided to push this app, refine it, and release it publicly because I have seen other graduate students, scientists, and creative people struggle to write. Perhaps you also outline for days to avoid writing, constantly second guess yourself, or maybe you spend too much time early on adjusting how things look. Perhaps you’re sick of leaning on AI tools to refine your ideas before you’re able to fully understand them yourself. Or maybe you just benefit from a new environment every so often. If any of these thoughts and feelings resonate, this app is made for you too.
19:22 is available for Mac® and can be found on the Mac App Store for $5, less than you’d pay going to a coffee shop to try breaking your writer’s block. It is extremely lightweight and fast. There are no subscriptions or in-app purchases. Everything you write is stored locally and no usage data is collected; your writing is deeply personal, and I don’t need to see that. I want to do more with this app—bring it more places (like iPad or Vision Pro, platforms that are great for focused writing). Eventually, I’d even like to port it natively to Windows. By purchasing the app, you’ll help me escape the lab for a bit to continue developing and pushing this (and other ideas) further.
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I really wish productivity wasn’t so important—that I could take the time to write all drafts by hand. But in reality, science is a strong winner-takes-all market. And being productive, especially as a young, hopeful scientist, matters a lot.↩︎
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Right now, this is a custom built emacs, which I love.
But you can see why the tempation to fiddle is strong.↩︎
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