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Word Processors — One Writer's Further Retreat
ch-dickinson writes "In 2003, I posted an essay ('Word Processors: One Writer's Retreat') here about my writing experience — professional and personal — that led to a novel draft in vi(m), and I outlined reasons I chose a simple non-WYSIWYG text editor rather than a more full-featured word processor. A few novels later, in 2010 now, I decided to try a text editor that predates even vi: ed. I'd run across ed about 20 years ago, working at a software company and vaguely recalled navigation of a text file meant mentally mapping such commands as +3 and -2: ed didn't click with me then. But writing a novel draft is mule work, one sentence after another, straight ahead — no navigating the text file. The writer must get the story down and my goal is 1,000 words a day, every day, until I'm done. I have an hour to 90 minutes for this. So when I returned after two decades, I was impressed with how efficiently ed generates plain text files."
Read on for the author's brief account of why he looked a few decades back in the software universe to find the right tool for the job.
Documentation for ed is available on the Internet, but I found it a great help to take Richard Gauthier's USING THE UNIX SYSTEM (1981) with me when I reported for jury duty in Portland, Oregon. His 30-page discussion of "the editor" is thorough and gave me some sense of the power of this pioneer text editor (cut & pastes, for example).
As I said, what drives my mule-like early morning routine is word count. The text editor ed has no internal word count tool (through dropping back to the command line gives, of course, wc). What I had to do was quite simple: I converted byte-counts (which ed does with each write to the file) into word equivalents. So if my style of writing runs 5.6 characters per word, then a word goal of 1,000 words is simply 5,600 bytes. Every day, I set my target byte count and once there, I quit.
In less than three months, I finished a 72,000-word novel draft and give ed credit for not slowing me down. Based on my experience writing novels with plain text editors (vim, geany, and now ed), I understand how few computing resources are needed to take manuscript composition off a typewriter and put it on a personal computer. The advantages of the latter are several, including less retyping, easier revision, and portability among different systems. Whether going from typewriter to personal computer makes for better writing I'll leave to others for comment.
What doesn't make for better writing is confusing text on demand (that daily word count that grows to a manuscript) with desktop publishing. Desktop publishing makes so many word processors into distracting choice-laden software tools. Obviously, there is a place for a manuscript as PDF file compliant with appropriate Acrobat Distiller settings, but that ends, not begins, the process. I like to think I'm not putting the cart before the horse.
So why would I recommend ed for a wordsmith? I'd say it comes down to just enough computing resources to do the job. WYSIWYG word processors have a cost and intuitively I think there's cerebral bus contention between flow of words onto the screen and keeping a handle on where the mouse arrow is (among other things).
But then perhaps I've a "less is more" bias (I have a car with nonpower steering — better road feel; I ride a fixed single-speed bike — ditto). That feeling is the sum of things there (and things left out). When I ride my fixie bike, it seems to know why I ride. Similarly, when I invoke ed, the text editor, it seems to know why I write. An illusion, sure, but also a harmony that goes with being responsible for all of it and staying focussed (without any distracting help balloons!).
One of Charlie Dickinson's novels is available for download at cetus-editons.com.
Documentation for ed is available on the Internet, but I found it a great help to take Richard Gauthier's USING THE UNIX SYSTEM (1981) with me when I reported for jury duty in Portland, Oregon. His 30-page discussion of "the editor" is thorough and gave me some sense of the power of this pioneer text editor (cut & pastes, for example).
As I said, what drives my mule-like early morning routine is word count. The text editor ed has no internal word count tool (through dropping back to the command line gives, of course, wc). What I had to do was quite simple: I converted byte-counts (which ed does with each write to the file) into word equivalents. So if my style of writing runs 5.6 characters per word, then a word goal of 1,000 words is simply 5,600 bytes. Every day, I set my target byte count and once there, I quit.
In less than three months, I finished a 72,000-word novel draft and give ed credit for not slowing me down. Based on my experience writing novels with plain text editors (vim, geany, and now ed), I understand how few computing resources are needed to take manuscript composition off a typewriter and put it on a personal computer. The advantages of the latter are several, including less retyping, easier revision, and portability among different systems. Whether going from typewriter to personal computer makes for better writing I'll leave to others for comment.
What doesn't make for better writing is confusing text on demand (that daily word count that grows to a manuscript) with desktop publishing. Desktop publishing makes so many word processors into distracting choice-laden software tools. Obviously, there is a place for a manuscript as PDF file compliant with appropriate Acrobat Distiller settings, but that ends, not begins, the process. I like to think I'm not putting the cart before the horse.
So why would I recommend ed for a wordsmith? I'd say it comes down to just enough computing resources to do the job. WYSIWYG word processors have a cost and intuitively I think there's cerebral bus contention between flow of words onto the screen and keeping a handle on where the mouse arrow is (among other things).
But then perhaps I've a "less is more" bias (I have a car with nonpower steering — better road feel; I ride a fixed single-speed bike — ditto). That feeling is the sum of things there (and things left out). When I ride my fixie bike, it seems to know why I ride. Similarly, when I invoke ed, the text editor, it seems to know why I write. An illusion, sure, but also a harmony that goes with being responsible for all of it and staying focussed (without any distracting help balloons!).
One of Charlie Dickinson's novels is available for download at cetus-editons.com.
I guess the next step is writing a novel using a hexeditor?
I get using a simple editor to not get down in layout/font issues, but I don't get using ed over vim (or emacs or any other simple text editor). This story failed to sell me on the concept. Is the idea that because it's hard to navigate in ed, you're not tempted to rewrite during the first pass? Seems a bit weak, you should probably have the mental power to just not do that.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Even though I'm struggling to understand why you went this route (I'm leaning towards you're a hopeless romantic, or worse), let's put that aside for a moment and focus simply on your statement about the mouse cursor. I know of no text editing/authoring/publishing software in existence that requires use of the mouse. Not a single one. You could have easily not even connected a mouse to the computer and proceeded to write with any program out there. The fact that you chose one so old and out of normal use speaks more to it being old and out of normal use, and to your romanticizing or somehow aggrandizing that facet, than the fact that it doesn't have a mouse cursor in your way.
Look, I get it, you want to write without distractions. That's fine. All I'm saying is there is something else going on here behind the scenes...
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
When all you're trying to do is get words down on paper, all you really need is a simple, repeat, simple, text editor. Anything beyond that can get in the way, and detract from the creative process.
That's my 25 cents worth, reminding everyone as always that 25 cents won't buy what it once would.
Or, in my case, why I shouldn't write. Whenever I try to type anything into ed, it simply responds:
posing the question it knows I cannot answer.
If you need to avoid all the manual formatting and want great quality, then you should prefer LaTeX or a suitable *TeX.
Prof(Miss) A Mani CU, ASL, AMS, ISRS, CLC, CMS, IEEE HomePage: http://www.logicamani.in Blog: http://logicamani.blogs
Personally, I think you just sound like a romantic, not someone who has stumbled upon a magic productivity method. What gets your rocks off is thinking that you are doing something old sk00l. It is pretty dead easy to make MS Word 2040 or whatever version they are on a blank white screen where words appear when you type. Your other old sk00l romanticism is just that, romanticism. A fixie really isn't better than a bike with gears unless you like having your legs sheared off when you go too fast. Gears are actually awesome when you need to go up a steep hill or want to haul ass down a steep hill. Power steering, computer control traction, and all of that goodness is likewise is awesome when something dives in front of your car and you need to make a sharp dodge. Touchy feel decelerations that you can feel the road better and that somehow improves your not hitting shit skills don't stand up the statistical reality that power steering, traction control, and fun stuff like that reduces accidents.
There is nothing wrong with being a romantic who idealizes simplicity, and there certainly is something to be said for keeping thing simple, but your methods are almost certainly useless to someone who doesn't see the romanticism in using old obscure text editors. For those people, if the editor is really distracting, they should just take a few seconds to pair down the interface to MS Word or Open Office (or whatever), rather than run an archaic text editor. If you are a romantic and need to be in a mood to write, find what gets your rocks off and go for it. Neal Stephenson wrote the 4000 or so page series with a freaking fountain pen. Inefficient? Sure, but if acting a little archaic gets your creative juices flowing, go for it.
"Words processors have continued to have more and more tools, making them harder and harder to use."
For the purposes of this guy's word grinding, any word processor in existence would be spectacularly easy to use. Launch, type, save. Maybe print. The fact that he couldn't resist doing the formatting when writing is his problem, not the tool's. He overcomplicated his work flow. "But too often I tackled the day's writing deciding such issues as a font for the day's draft." I mean, come on, dude. Pick one that looks like the typewriter output you yearn for and go write.
"Look at Microsloth Word: it keeps getting more and more like a page layout program, and less and less like a tool to get text in the computer."
Actually it's a perfectly decent tool for getting text in the computer, unless you're VERY easily distracted, and then when you're done typing, it becomes a page layout program. And seriously, "Microsloth"? Is it 2002 again? I thought that tiresome insult-through-spelling thing had died down.
They seem to be intentionally designed to be the wrong tool for anything you may be trying to do.
I've seen plenty of modern apps that offer "distraction free writing". Even most full-featured word processors have a full screen mode that hides the UI. Plus, you get nice extras like proportional fonts, bold, italic, and underline, simple copy and paste, and so on.
Also, modern CPUs are so powerful that even a graphical word processor should leave the processor idling most of the time. Unless your GUI word processor is incredibly bloated and inefficient (*cough* Word *cough*) there isn't really a practical performance or battery life benefit to switching to a command line editor.
But hey, you're writing a novel, so whatever fuels your creative process is fine by me. After all, some authors use antique typewriters, or pen and paper. I've even been known to use a stylus and clay tablet, but only when I'm writing Sumerian viruses.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
This article is more about how the process of hammering out chips of stone in a tablet focuses the mind on the words than it is on technology. Asimov, King, Heinlein, and DeCamp all wrote about establishing a writers discipline and what it takes to get the job done. This article isn't about efficiency or technology per se. Discipline is about output over a period of time and what it takes to 'make' yourself produce. What this author is talking about is how he disciplines himself to create output. Notice that he mentions his daily time limit. Apparently, a lot of writers have to force themselves into certain constraints to get the job done.
Whatever works for him. Some people still write out their novels in long hand on lined paper.
Perhaps. However, real people know how any *nix "editor" one-upmanship ends:
C-x M-c M-butterfly.
'Nuff said.
is any environment that lets you run eclipse or open office etc. also has firefox 1 click away and hence slashdot or facehook or whatever your particular weakness is.
Boot to a pure shell and theres atleast some temporal insulation from the howling winds of distraction.
A true believer wouldn't be using a computer at all -- or using the Internet -- or posting to Slashdot.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Syntax? Spelling? This is a WRITER, not a secretary. He wants to put what he has in his mind in some medium that can then be further processed later. By an editor/proof reader. He doens't need to highlight things.
What he explored was how much do we REALLY need? IF he can write, then does he need to re-edit what he wrote? I do, but then I can't write. My thoughts are all over the place and I need to go back in a sentence to reword it. Or do I? Is the reason I can't write because I keep re-editing what I wrote until it has lost all passion?
The fastest cars on the earth are also some of the simplest, or were for a long time. If you got ABS on a motor cycle, you CAN NOT brake as hard as if you didn't have it. The tolerance that ABS brings means a skilled driver can brake harder without. If you are NOT skilled, then ABS is better.
So is he skilled or not?
And finally, on error-checking. While useful, in some editors it has become so advanced it tries to correct you even when what your wrote is correct but it just doesn't understand it. Imagine some of the best writers if they were constrained by what their spell checker would allow them to do.
But what this really is about, proffesional writer claims he works better without all the bells and whistle. Unknown nobody claims this is not true. I take the writers word for it that he writers faster without over yours. Hope this doesn't offend you. Damn spell check, should have been DOES.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I recall reading that someone tried this with a finite number of monkeys, they got a few pages covered mainly in the letter 'S' before the alpha male attacked the keyboard with a rock the others finished it off by pissing and shitting on it. The conclusion was that monkeys have intentions, they cannot be used as random input devices.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I don't write like that. When I've taken on a large writing project -- an outdoor program safety manual -- I found myself jumping around like crazy. I'd work on one section for a while, and something I'd write would remind me of something else in an entirely different section. So I'd open another file, and at least scribble down the idea.
Ed is fine if you are an author that writes a list of chapter headings, then 10-12 points for each chapter, then you start at the front and write to the end.
From my perspective, a text processor (no formatting controls) needs to have, at minimum:
* outlining
* folding
* multiple file capability.
*****
As a sidelight, while unix/linux has lots of good text processors, (I like geany and vim) I'm *still* looking for a good formatting system.
* Don't tell me about TeX. If you want to do your own template in TeX you've got quite a learning curve.
* I gave up on Abiword and Open Office both because of irregular crashes that lost all work. Neither has documentation that is worth a damn. Neither has good support for styles.
So I still use Adobe FrameMaker 5.56 Beta when I have to make more than a few pages pretty.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.