To create art, you need peace and quiet. Not only does Scrivener save like a maniac so you needn’t bother, you also get to drop the curtain on life’s prosaic demands with a feature that makes its users swoon: full screen. When you’re working on a Scrivener opus, you’re not surrounded by teetering stacks of Firefox windows showing old Google searches or Citibank reports of suspicious activity. Life’s daily cares slip into the shadows. What emerges instead is one pristine and welcoming scroll: Your clean and focused mind.

Full screen is not a Scrivener invention; Scrivener credits Ulysses, another excellent Word alternative for Mac. But full screen has been refined by Nisus Writer, which Michael Chabon used to write “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union,” as well as the seminal program CopyWrite. For PCs, programs like NewNovelist, StoryView and Liquid Story Binder get raves.

But if, when it comes right down to it, full screen is your holy grail, and the ultimate antidote to the bric-a-brac of Word, then you must enter the WriteRoom, the ultimate spartan writing utopia. Where Scrivener calls itself a “writer’s shed,” which suggests implements like duct tape and hoes, WriteRoom pitches itself as the way to “distraction-free writing” for “people who enjoy the simplicity of a typewriter, but live in the digital world.” With WriteRoom, you don’t compose on anything so confining as paper or its facsimile. Instead, you rocket out into the unknown, into profound solitude, and every word of yours becomes the kind of outer-space skywriting that opens “Star Wars.” What I mean is this: Black screen. Green letters. Or another color combination of your discerning choice. But nothing else.

For those of us who learned Basic on a Zenith Z19 and started word processing on a Kaypro (anyone?), the retro green-and-black now takes the breath away. It’s not just the vintage features available on WriteRoom, it’s also that the whole experience is a throwback to a time before user-friendly interfaces came to protect us from technology’s dark places. In those days, the mystery of the human mind and the mystery of computation seemed both to illuminate and to deepen each other.

Yes, with WriteRoom, your sentences unfurl in prehistoric murk. Yes, your green letters seem like civilization’s feeble stand against entropy. Yes, when you write, you have lighted a candle instead of cursing the darkness. Yes, you can and should also curse the darkness.

The new writing programs encourage a writerly restart. You may even relearn the green-lighted alphabet, adjust your preference for long or short sentences, opt afresh for action over description. Renewal becomes heady: in WriteRoom’s gloom is man’s power to create something from nothing, to wrest form from formlessness. Let’s just say it: It’s biblical. And come on, ye writers, do you want to be a little Word drip writing 603 words in Palatino with regulation margins? Or do you want to be a Creator?

SHAKE TO DELETE: The Etch A Sketch was the typewriter generation’s introduction to a screen that could make words simply vanish. The Web is filled with Etch A Sketch art, preserved as it could never be on the original shakable and protean palette. Find examples at gvetchedintime.com, etchasketchist.blogspot.com and ohioart.com/etch.