Why I Built AUTEUR
It wasn't lack of ideas. It wasn't writer's block. It was friction.
I hadn't completed a screenplay in over a decade.
I'm a camera operator by day but storytelling is what got me into film in the first place. Every year or two I'd start something and stall out. It wasn't lack of ideas. It wasn't writer's block in the dramatic sense. It was friction.
Final Draft was fine until I couldn't open files I'd written in 2011. WriterDuet was solid until I realized I was renting it. Google Docs with a screenplay template is a special kind of hell.
The dedicated distraction-free devices appealed to me on paper. The Freewrite, the Pomera, the Zerowriter. A purpose-built writing instrument that does one thing well. That's what I wanted. The reality of using them was something else.
What was wrong with what already existed
I tried the major writerdecks. Each one had a fatal flaw for what I was actually trying to do.
Latency. This is the one that broke down first. On the Freewrite, you press a key and the character shows up a moment later. Sometimes three moments. If I can feel the lag between keystroke and character, I'm completely taken out of the flow.
Small screens. Most writerdecks ship with displays that are fine for a paragraph and inadequate for a scene. Screenwriting in particular needs vertical space. You're holding parentheticals, dialogue, action lines, and scene transitions in your head simultaneously. A four-inch screen makes you scroll constantly, which breaks the flow you came here to find.
Jagged fonts. Several of the smaller writerdecks render text in pixelated bitmap fonts that look like a 1990s feature phone. For a writing device this is unacceptable. You're going to look at that text for hundreds of hours. It needs to be beautiful or at least serene. Anything less is a constant low-grade insult to the act of writing.
Subscriptions and clouds. The Freewrite locks you into a postbox service. Your work syncs to Astrohaus servers and there are workarounds but they're workarounds. A writing instrument should not require an account. It should not phone home. The file should be on the device and on a drive I control, period.
Bad keyboards. Most writerdecks ship with low-profile membrane or scissor keys. If you've ever sat down to write 2000 words on a chiclet keyboard you know why this matters. The keyboard is the instrument. It should feel like one.
I had cautious optimism that some of these were solvable. I didn't know if all of them were. Latency on e-ink especially. The hardware industry had been telling people for years that e-ink couldn't do real-time text rendering, and I had no reason to believe otherwise. But the only way to find out was to build it.
What I wanted instead
Before I wrote a line of code I made a list. The device I wanted to write on:
- A real mechanical keyboard, full-size keys, hot-swappable so it could be tuned to any switch preference
- A 6-inch or larger e-ink display with custom typography, wide margins, generous line height
- Zero perceptible latency between keystroke and character render
- Native Fountain rendering for screenplays
- Standard editing shortcuts (Ctrl+S, Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+C/V) because I shouldn't have to learn a new mental model to write
- Files stored locally on an SSD I owned, exportable as plain text over USB-C
- No subscription, no cloud, no AI, no account
- A draft browser I could navigate without taking my hands off the keys
That list was the spec. Everything in AUTEUR exists because of one of those bullets, and nothing is in there that doesn't earn its place.
How it actually got built
The first prototype was an off-the-shelf single-board computer driving the e-ink display over UART, with a mechanical keyboard plugged in via USB. Ugly enclosure, but the bones of the idea. The first time I saw a character appear on the e-ink display the moment I pressed a key, I knew the latency problem was solvable. That was the unlock.
What followed was a year of getting from "the idea works" to "the device is reliable." Some of the hardest problems weren't the ones I expected.
The cold boot crashes were the worst stretch. The device would boot fine nine times and then refuse on the tenth, with no obvious pattern. It turned out to be three separate things stacked: an init sequence in the firmware that violated the display library's expected pattern, a software timer that relied on the system clock before network sync (so when the clock jumped after sync, the timer would fire prematurely), and a storage power-down race condition. I fixed each one individually, deployed them one at a time, validated, and the boot reliability went from 90% to indistinguishable from 100%.
The keyboard was its own project. I went through several layouts before settling on a 65% footprint, which preserves arrow keys (essential for draft navigation on e-ink, where you're moving through documents constantly) at the cost of a compressed right shift. The shift is the one ergonomic compromise in the layout and the production board will correct it. Everything else is dialed.
The enclosure went through more revisions than I want to admit. I'm currently shipping the prototype in an ABS print, which is heavier and more substantial than the early 3D-printed versions and feels like the device it should be. The production enclosure will refine that further, but the form factor is locked. 260 by 297 by 91 millimeters, smaller than most laptops, heavy enough to feel like a real instrument.
What it is now
AUTEUR is a 6-inch e-ink writing instrument with a hot-swappable mechanical keyboard, internal memory, native Fountain and Markdown rendering, and zero perceptible latency. It runs a custom application on top of an embedded Linux stack, with firmware driving the display.
It does not have an internet connection. It does not have a subscription. It does not have AI features. It's a writing instrument that does one thing.
When you press a key, a letter appears. That's the whole magic trick, and I spent over a year making sure it works.
What's next
We've partnered with Soldered Electronics on the production hardware, which consolidates the prototype's three boards into a single integrated PCB. Soldered's e-paper screens are recovered from old e-readers, so AUTEUR's display is hardware that would otherwise have ended up in a landfill. The Crowd Supply pre-launch is live.
If you've bounced off other writerdecks because they got the small things wrong, AUTEUR is the one I built for you. It's the device I wished existed when I sat down to write a screenplay ten years ago and gave up. It exists now.
The first batch is small. Pre-launch subscribers get notified the moment the campaign opens. If you want one, the page is here.
I'll see you in the drafts!