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.

Comments

Next step?

[eddy]

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.

Re:Next step?

[BrokenHalo]

Seems to me this issue has been explored as thoroughly as it needs to be - by none less than Neal Stephenson in In the Beginning Was The Command Line". The man can write, and having done do on a subject close to the heart of many geeks is doubly cool.

Re:Next step?

[icebike]

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.

It failed to convince me too.

Almost every word processor has a non-layout presentation option used for banging out text without sacrificing running spell checking, syntax, auto capitalization, or the use of outlining capability, etc.

Self imposing a limitation making it harder to make changes mean more post production work. Consistency suffers. Continuity is the first causality. Errors creep in and persist.

Some things should be changed at the minute you decide to make the change, or the text suffers. No amount of editing after the fact will find all of these. (Especially in technical writing, where your editor will know far less about the subject than you).

No one who writes anything of length works in page layout view or worries about fonts, page breaks while entering the basic document. New writers may make this mistake their first time, but soon learn.

But in technical writing, when a term or a name changes you pretty much have to find and fix that immediately, because your editor won't have a clue. In non technical writing, when it becomes important for continuity to insert some facts or flesh out a character earlier in the story to support a later story twist, you have a choice of inserting it inline, with the intent of moving it later, or finding the appropriate place, and inserting it right then when the idea is fresh. The former leads to more re-writes.

A well developed story, or a well thought out technical outline saves far more time than simply forgoing structural edits by using self limiting tools with the hope of remembering to relocate, rewrite, or revise text later. The annotation features of word processors would actually help in these tasks if one wanted to put them off till later.

That the writer in TFA feels the need to impose self exile from modern tools suggest more about his work habits and discipline than about word processor technology.

There are still a few authors that write with a typewriter. Or even in long hand. Some are even successful. Not many. Fewer every day.

Ok...But let's not blame the mouse.

[The Living Fractal]

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...

Re:Ok...But let's not blame the mouse.

[loufoque]

There's a reason why George R. R. Martin notoriously uses Wordstar on MS-DOS to this day, you know. :)

Maybe that's why his next book is five years late?

Re:Ok...But let's not blame the mouse.

[macshit]

ed is a fine editor (the fact that it's "old and out of normal use" don't change that), if barebones.

It's notable because it:

1. Makes it somewhat cumbersome to do lots of little micro-edits or twiddling. If you're going to change something, it's often easier to replace the text, typing the replacement in again.
2. Doesn't keep the document all up in your face -- the past is the past, you want to see it, it's there, but there's no active display of the document cooing "edit me... edit me... just a little"

The process of writing using a medium where it's really easy to tweak the text is very different than when one can't. I've noticed many cases where I've simply tweaked a text to death -- there end up being fewer "small mistakes", but the cohesiveness and large scale structure suffer. Moreover, the urge to tweak can be a real time sink.

If I had a will of iron, maybe I could just force myself not to tweak ... but I don't have a will of iron; despite my best intentions, I often succumb to temptation (to my later chagrin). And most people don't. So I can easily understand how a professional writer, for whom these points are even more important, may want to use some light artificial restrictions on his working environment in order to focus on what's really important to him.

So I don't think it's really fair to assume "there's something else going on here behind the scenes". Maybe this guy just wants to get on with his craft and cut out the crap that he's found to interfere with it. It's probably the same reasons many authors write on paper, despite the inconveniences (sure some of them may do it because they have a fountain-pen fetish, but I don't think it's reasonable to assume that must be the reason).

[As an aside -- I've noticed that many people (not saying you do, just the general vibe of the thread, and similar threads) often seem almost personally offended by others explicitly choosing to not use some popular modern technology... and while such choices may sometimes have silly reasons ("I don't watch TV, haha I'm so intellectual!"), I think the responses are often just as banal or even scary...]

Less is romantic, it isn't more

[Shihar]

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.

What's your point?

[Petersko]

"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.

Re:Use LaTex

[westlake]

If you need to avoid all the manual formatting and want great quality, then you should prefer LaTeX or a suitable *TeX.

Or you could sent your manuscript out to a publisher who has professionals working full time in typography, layout, design and illustration.

Writeroom, et al.

[pushing-robot]

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.

This isn't about productivity

[Gooberheadly]

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.

Re:This isn't about productivity

[FoolishOwl]

I believe that's the primary point.

I do, however, think that word processors are badly designed from the point of facilitating writing. Most advice on writing encourages the writer to break the process up into separate phases: brainstorming and free-writing, outlining, writing a draft, revising, revising, and revising. Word processors tend to encourage doing all steps at once, and worse, encourage the writer to choose layout and typesetting options before the writer begins writing, when writers generally shouldn't bother about those details at all. Brainstorming and free-writing are widely recommended practices, that most word processors implicitly discourage, with automatic spelling and grammar checking.

Nearly everyone I've known who takes writing seriously, student or professional, struggles with minimizing distractions from the writing process. There's something particularly difficult about writing, the process of putting one's thoughts in words which, in itself, cannot be a clear algorithmic process, and most people will be tempted to procrastinate, in the form of doing something that seems related, but isn't really useful. Word processors, with all their layout tweaks available when clicking on bright, attractive buttons, are full of temptations to procrastinate and distract oneself from the writing itself. Even launching a word processor is significantly slower than launching a text editor, and most include a (distracting) splash screen.

I've never seen a child, assigned to write an essay, who will not fiddle with fonts, layout options, etc., before typing a single word.

Concentrating on writing in a word processor is like meditating in an amusement park -- with sufficient discipline, it can be done, but it's really not a conducive environment.

For writing, I think a better approach is, at least, breaking the software tools into two: the actual writing, and the layout. The latter part could often be optional. Most simple text editors, like Notebook or gedit, are more than adequate for writing, revising, saving, and loading, and include basic spell-checking.

the real problem

[Jeek Elemental]

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.

True Believer, I Think Not

[Nom du Keyboard]

A true believer wouldn't be using a computer at all -- or using the Internet -- or posting to Slashdot.