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Word Processors: One Writer's Retreat
Personally, when the PC revolution got underway, I bought an Apple IIe soon after its introduction. VisiCalc caught my eye. As did Flight Simulator, and going online with a 300-baud modem to local computer bulletin boards. But when it came to writing -- in those days, three drafts of a first novel -- I would not abandon my trusty Hermes portable typewriter. The Apple would not tempt me to some writing Eden. The complexity of computers, I sensed, could only sap the creative process.
This reluctance to mix computers with writing ended abruptly in 1988: I began writing professionally. At different writing jobs, I made use of whatever hardware/software combo the employer had. I fashioned text with PCs, Macs, Sun workstations, and still deemed any personal writing project at night better suited to the beloved Hermes.
I soon realized storing words on electronic media meant the professional wordsmith also did "desktop publishing." I had to worry about font selection, repagination, stylesheets. I wondered when I'd have time to find the right word, the original phrase. Once, while "writing" a software manual, I commented that I'd spent far more time formatting than actually writing. That comment went unanswered. I had a sure sense I needed to make an adjustment to new priorities.
Still, I couldn't shake the idea something was being lost when writers got embroiled in desktop publishing. After five years, I gave up the software manuals, the marketing newsletters, to refocus on personal writing. And for the first time, I thought about moving my writing to that Apple IIe. I hesitated. The monitor was filled with text glowing green on a black background. Would those green emissions overwhelm my inner eye of imagination, unlike a piece of paper sitting in a typewriter? I decided to take the plunge and see.
Maybe I looked sideways when I visualized a story scene. I soon found the Apple IIe gave efficiency analogous to replacing handwriting with typewriting. I only retyped what I needed in successive drafts. Counting words was a snap. And, thankfully, Apple IIe word processing was primitive: more a typewriter with memory, not a desktop publishing system. On balance, a good tool. Before long, I was publishing short stories to the World Wide Web.
But by 1999, living with an Apple IIe was Neanderthal. So despite 15+ years of service, I upgraded to an IBM ThinkPad laptop. I was attracted by portability, the renowned IBM keyboard touch, and a promised multimedia experience of the World Wide Web. As for writing, I would use the full-bodied word processor that came with the ThinkPad. This I accepted as a tradeoff for new PC technology. I gave it a go and lived with a plethora of pull-down menus within pull-down menus. I endured help balloons that appeared without bidding. To keep writing, I resisted becoming expert with all my word processor could do.
This strategy of limits on learning worked but briefly. In months, I was driven to maddening distraction with features I thought I'd accidentally turned on and wouldn't, in a blue moon, set right. Gems like capitalization on autopilot. But what really called for a decision was discovery of quotation marks in the wrong font spread randomly throughout a book-length file (and a pair of left quotation marks at that!).
Moreover, the ThinkPad's operating system, Windows 98, caused me to yearn for the stability of an Apple IIe (if not a Sun workstation). I thought about Linux--the alternative to Windows (unless one buys a new computer and goes Macintosh). But in a serendipitous experiment, I installed the very alternative BeOS on the ThinkPad. As operating systems go, it was a vision of loveliness. Scot Hacker, author of THE BEOS BIBLE, aptly described BeOS as combining "the grace of a Mac and the power of Unix."
The productivity suite I bought for BeOS had a "less is more" flavor and the word processor, in particular, worked well. I wrote a novel without struggle. But too often I tackled the day's writing deciding such issues as a font for the day's draft. The point being, I still had too many choices, compared to my beloved Apple IIe. When I finished the 76,000-word manuscript, I found a disconcerting bug in my otherwise dependable word processor. It repeated words, on occasion, in the text. Admittedly, a dozen "doubles" among tens of thousands of words isn't a big deal, but I wondered if my writing might benefit from even less computer functionality. Did those font choices have a price?
With a new novel to write, the time seemed ripe to switch software. I'd like to say I scoured about for word processors, but I didn't. In my novel, one character would write computer programs. The story question was, What software would he use? It had to be vi. Vi, a Unix editor for plain text files created in 1976 by Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. I'd remembered working with a software engineer, who saw no advantage to word processors and dismissed the "prettiness" of desktop publishing. He did everything in vi. Could I write a novel in vi? I decided, Why not?
Vi fast became -- and remains, 100,000 words later -- my writing implement of choice. Most of all, what I like about vi is something that is, well, aesthetic. I like vi's keyboard-only operation. Vi doesn't assault with helpful balloons or racks of toolbar icons. No, vi has a 70s ambience (no mouse, no GUI) that's refreshingly clean. In that sense, vi is a treasured software servant. It works well without showy presence and respectfully stays out of the way.
Sure, vi is only a digitized window on the ThinkPad screen. But, at times, I can almost imagine another sheet of paper filling up with words, not unlike one I rolled into my Hermes typewriter. That's when vi, the minimalist's text editor, lets the words roll freely, as with Hemingway's carpenter pencil, from my fingertips.
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in a presentation in Australia to the Press Club, Scott McNeally stated: "When the anthropologists look back on the 1980s and 1990s and do the archaeological digs, and get their callipers and brooms and microscopes out, they will blame the massive reduction in productivity during the 1980s and 1990s entirely on Microsoft Office."
While this view maybe considered extreme, the author of the article certainly casts some doubt on the usefulness of complex word processing software. But then, I would not call vi particularly intuitive, but it does cut down on pointless formatting decisions that seem to endlessly arise.
Sure that plays well on slashdot, but most writers looking for a typewriter-with-memory would be better served by Notepad or the Mac equivalent. (Does OSX still have TextEdit?)
:)
How many writers know what a regular expression IS, let alone how to search with one?
It is truly amazing how important the simple act of writing really is. Nearly every form of education, entertainment, business and reference is totally dependent on letters, words and sentences.
In the face of $100 million motion picture budgets and teams of hundreds building video games, the words of another author remain quite profound:
"With words alone, I have an unlimited special effects budget."
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
with index finger clicker is my weapon of choice, although I use Kwrite (What? Not Emacs/VI? Let the flammage ensue but direct your shrapnel away from the top of my head.) for producing a final draft.
While words cannot express the beauty of discovering the frequency of Sol-type stars within 100 light-years of Earth, or Tibetan surnames and their construction without visiting a library, computers (and especially the internet) are a godawful distraction to creativity.
Like now.
Creative people seem to be among the most resistant to new technologies and/or meduims brought about by technology. The word processor is just one example...but how long did it take photography to be accepted as a fine art? (I'm sure that there are photographers out there right now that will argue that it still hasn't).
A large fraction of those same photographers who are shaking their heads right now -- they refuse to accept digital photography as an artistic medium. Furthermore, much of the other digital "art" mediums have yet to be accepted...what about 3D rendering? This is surely an art form, but is not widely accepted. The demo scene is another that is not embraced by the artsy world.
The point is that the artistic types will tend to cling to their ways...who knows why. But it doesn't seem like, as a group, creative folks tend to enbrace new technology (or in this case a pretty damn old one, like a word processor) I wonder if it's alright to use an electric light Vs. a candle to write?
-Turkey
A friend was once writing a fairly lengthy document with pen and paper while sitting on my couch during one of his stays in town. He had brought his laptop with him, so I asked why he wasn't using it. He explained that it was too easy to spend a lot of time editing and second-guessing instead of writing. So he did his initial drafts and main revisions on paper first, then put it into a wp for final tweaking and output.
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
The last time I stepped into my mom's office (she's a lawyer btw) and still found people there using Wordperfect 5.1/DOS. Whatever works for your purpose, as my mom tells me "It does legal briefs better than anything else that I know how to use, so why change?" Why should authors use the latest version of MS Word or Vi, or Emacs or anything?
Once people have found a comfortable niche in technology, why change until you have better needs?
...in bed
These damned features are *hard* for normal people to turn off. You may think that it's easy as a seasoned computer user. Just yesterday a friend of mine called me on my cell, just to ask how she could turn off automatic spell checking in Word. She is not dumb at all, but for her this was a task that she could not do alone.
I had to support a bunch of secretaries when they started off with Word. They all had problems with the feature overload. These secretaries had to write pathological reports and their former system was text-only in a Novel network. Word for them was hell (and the support for me was hell too *grin*).
Never say that people are stupid because they don't know how to use computers. Otherwhise we are stupid for not being able to write reports at insane speeds.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Of course a good working knowledge of vi is useful as it's pretty much the lowest common denominator on any Unix-like system.
Very well put.
I first learned vi in 1991, and while it was a steep uphill battle, I crested the hump pretty quickly and have been totally pleased since then. I have always enjoyed having a familiar editor available on just about any system I've touched (Solaris, Ultrix, Unicos, Linux, OSX, Windows).
Sure it's nice to have Emacs configured to do a gazillion things for you, but I liken that to owning a radio, tv, telephone, answering machine, dishwasher, dog walker, maid, bicycle, grocery cart, and dry cleaner all built into one gigantic thing.
No thanks, I just want to edit files...
Put differently, it all goes back to the aphorism "Perfection is the enemy of (good/progress/etc.)" which is true not just because in trying to make things perfect you often either ruin them or never finish them - it's true because everyone's idea of perfection is different, but most of us can agree on "pretty good".
fencepost
just a little off
Okay, I'm at least a semi-pro writer (one published book, contributing editor for DV Magazine). And I think folks are completely missing how to use Word correctly, and its strengths. I'll be talking about Word for Mac v.X here. Even though Office XP is quite capable, I can't stand the way that they put icons in the left of the menus. Plus there's no better to write than with a laptop in the lap, leaning back in the Aeron, feet on the desk keeping the beat with NoFx.
Back around '89 when I first got Word 4.0 on my Mac SE, I did procrastinate by too much formatting. But I got over it! The key is just to define your standard template. Get that template down, and you're writing object-oriented with styles. Understanding how to use styles and tabs is critical to efficient Word use. Instead of doing it spaghetti-code style with formatting applied directly to units of text, build the right design for each style, and religiously only use styles. If you need to change the style later, it's changed in all instances. Much, much easier.
I NEVER mess with formatting when writing articles anymore, since my standard template has my styles all set up the way I want them.
The real strength of Word is that it lets you deal with your content in a variety of modes. I actually write all my first drafts in Outline mode now, so I can see and tweak the overall structure. This means I don't need to write linearly, like a typewriter is required. I can write what I'm inspired to write that moment, skip back to get terms used later defined in the appropriate place, and that kind of thing. And since the outline headings are styles, formatting concerns just disappear into the background. And because, the structure is always visible, it's much easier to remember what you intended to do, and to pick up on structural errors in my original plan for the piece.
When I'm editing, especially someone else's work, I use Normal mode. Thus I'm not distracted by where page breaks are and that kind of thing. Just the text.
Page Layout mode I use rarely. Word isn't designed for any kind of detailed layout. Still, it's nice to see where the page breaks fall before going out to PDF or anything. But I'll just import into InDesign if I need fine control.
So, big picture:
Use Styles to make structure, not formatting, central.
Use the right viewing mode for the stage of your project.
My video compression blog
e.g., spell-check options and auto-correct spell-check options are in different menu trees. The former has a control that says, "Correct spelling as I type," but that *isn't* the auto-correct (but it seems like it might be...). One is in general preferences dialog, the other in "tools." Not, NOT intuitive.
Flash forward a few years. Now I am a writer about computer programming. And mostly because of that transition, I absolutely cannot stand to write anything other than plain text. Well, almost plain text, I have my own little variant called "smart ASCII", which uses just a few of the conventions that email and Usenet often use: *bold*, -itals-, and so on.
In fact, I have written hundreds of articles, tutorials, and the like about programming (for well-known publishers like IBM, Intel, O'Reilly, etc.), all in plain text. My book Text Processing in Python is written the same way.
Well... once in a while I am compelled to use something awful like MS-Word--or something that exports to it, like AppleWorks or OpenOffice--but I hate doing that. It is tools that convert my smart ASCII into formats like HTML, XML, LaTeX, PDF, and so on. But those tools come at the end of the process. After I put the words down, then is the time to worry about niggly details like fonts, layouts, and so on... all in a way that is far more consistent than a wordprocessor is likely to produce. My book, for example, has been praised as particularly attractive typographically... I did all the preparation myself, by eschewing all the GUI nonsense that gets in the way during writing. David Mertz
Buy Text Processing in Python