When I started college in 2006, my parents bought me a Lenovo ThinkPad T410 that was running Windows 7. It was one of those thick, heavy laptops of another era, which even my friend at the time likened to a cockroach in its durability and aesthetic. College was also the point in my life when I began taking my writing seriously. My first stories for my introductory and intermediate workshops were written on this machine, as were my first attempts at novels, using a keyboard whose particular clicks and clacks became wedded to the experience.
Through the years I’ve never written a story, novel, or essay on another machine. My debut novel, False Prophet, was written on my Lenovo, as will be my next book. This consistency and attachment isn’t without a cost: I’ve had to become a serviceable technician in order to keep it running, and I’ve gotten used to pulling it out at airports and bearing the befuddlement of TSA workers, as they swab and scan to make sure it isn’t a poorly concealed bomb. But as everything around me changes—our world, our technology—when I wake up every morning and sit at my desk, my writing practice remains the same. That consistency, that assurance has not only kept me productive, but it makes me feel like every morning when I return to my writing space I’m actually returning home.
—Afsheen Farhadi, author of False Prophet (Melville House, 2026)