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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.
Use the most backward impractical tool available and declare it superior.
cf. fixie bikes and Holga cameras.
Personally I prefer markup languages like HTML or LaTeX, which I create with vi or Emacs for the documents I write. You can generally get away with HTML for just about everything these days. You can generate (beautiful) PDFs with LaTeX, but a lot of times people don't want a read-only document. I expect that if you're writing a book the publisher will eventually format it the way they want it anyway, and plain text is ultimately the lowest common denominator!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Especially if, as he says, he's not going to be traveling around the text very much, VI is exactly the wrong tool. It's designed to let you move around a ton without leaving your normal typing position, and to re-arrange bits of text quickly. This ability comes at the price of a painful learning curve and a non-intuitive interface for doing simple shit like moving over a few characters to replace a letter or two in the last word.
If you're just typing text but want few distractions, something like Nano/Pico or one of those newer editors that run in the graphical OS but turn the whole screen black and show only what you've typed would make way more sense--especially the latter, which are designed precisely for this situation. VI's modes and other useful-for-code features are, for the purposes of writing, just another form of counter-productive bloat; it's not remotely worth learning VI if you're not going to be moving blocks of code around and bouncing about your document almost as often as you actually modify the text.
Neil Gaiman writes his novels longhand, with a fountain pen (usually a Lamy Safari) and paper. I believe there is a lot to be said for this approach.
I believe that as text editors go, so long as one is writing in English or at least a language in a latin character set, it's tough to beat the efficiency of VIM. That's certainly what I use, when I have a choice.
But the overall efficiency of a fountain pen is also pretty hard to beat. (For those of you who don't know, a fountain pen requires practically no pressure in order to write, and is held at a very natural angle, and is a quite different experience from writing with a ballpoint. I have serious fatigue problems if I try to write for a long time with a ballpoint pen, these problems go away with a fountain pen.)
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Writers are also know for their idiosyncratic ways. Stephen King basically made his Underwood type-writer a religious artifact, and later his Mac. Neil Stephenson does everything long hand using a pen and ink. I just read a bio on an author who swore off electric lights while writing (I think it was Joe Haldeman). A lot of times this choice has more to do with superstition than rationality. You manage to write your first successful novel with a fountain pen on velum; why risk killing your muse by using anything else?
Using older and simpler means of writing doesn't really matter in itself, since many authors DO use Word, or whatnot and manage to churn out text.
When I briefly tried my hand at writing I got fixed into using a certain method of outlining, using certain tools. I had to do it this way, while fully knowing it was less efficient than probably any other way known to man. The actual application for writing didn't matter much to me, since I can ignore pretty much any feature (do I really need advanced formating for a draft?). The actual preparation phase was a pain though, since I kept trying different software to keep track of things. I probably spent more time playing with software than actually preparation. If I found a method that worked, I would probably stick with it forever, even if the technology became so archaic that I had to go kill and skin animals and forage my own parts.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Fetishizing (sp?) the "simplicity" of your tools is every bit as much an act of narcissism as bragging about the ten million bells and whistles on your new HAL-compliant AI Write-Buddy TM that automatically scans TVTropes.org after each sentence to make sure your cliche factor is under 3.5 millilyttons per chapter. (Exact limit can be set via the user, of course, via a series of 16 nested dialog boxes).
Dude. Write. Or don't write. Just don't write about the tool you use for writing; it's about as dull as possible.
I've used manual typewriters, TRS-80s, WordStar 1.0, Appleworks, Microsoft Word, a zillion other things, and I have seen almost no difference in my writing speed, which is a pretty steady 500 to 1000 words per hour, depending on what I'm writing. (Fiction, usually, >1000... it's easy, the limit is my finger speed. Game writing, towards the lower end, because I have to check rules, do some math, look up references to see the proper formatting of a skill or a feat or a monster, etc.).
As long as you're right handed, anyway. I looked into fountain pens and they're very difficult to use with your left hand- the ink smears unless you write in bizarre orientations.
It is a badge of pride for hipsters to have things that are "retro" and "ironically hard to use." It is all about appearances, functionality has nothing to do with it. They claim it does, but they are lying. A great example is with the bikes. If you look around at what they ride, and I get to do this since I work on a campus and bike to work, you discover that very few actually have a fixed gear bike that one might own for functional reasons. That is to say an old, cheap bike that is truly fixed gear. That has a functional reason to own in that it costs very little to get, and very little to maintain. Almost all of them ride new bikes, which are quite expensive. You search for them, like say a Surly Steamroller which is popular, and you find it is over $700. You can get a nice commuter for less than that (a Jamis Commuter 3 is about $650) which of course features far more hardware and thus ought to cost more (the Commuter 3 has an 8 speed hub, generator light, brakes, rack for a bag, and so on). Also you'll notice that a good number aren't actually fixed gear, they have brakes. They are just single speed bikes.
The choice is purely one of being "cool". Same reason they often feature bull horn handle bars. That is also hipster cool these days. They are of no use to street riding, and in fact are less practical than a number of other handlebar designs. It is just an appearances thing.
You are right, that this sounds just the same. "Oh I've gotten back to the roots of writing, I use a really simple tool, and that means I am more in touch with being a writer and that I write better." No it just means you make more errors that your editor has to fix you hipster douche. New word processors don't change what you write, they just make things easier. The creative process is still the same. Of course if you are a hipster that lacks any creativity... :D.
On my Win7 PC, I use MS Word and set it to full screen. The menus completely disappear and all I have is a blank page ready for me to start typing in, no mouse required. If I don't want any formatting, I set plain text as my default file type. As for loading time, It's ready to go about 6 seconds after I click the app's icon. Having a word count tool and a global replace option sitting in the background is handy in case I need them. To each their own.
You're supposed to hold your hand /below/ the line you're just writing.
Right-handed people should have the same ink-smearing problem when writing in arabic or hebrew. Yet that isn't the case.
I'm a lawyer. My best, by far, experience was with WP 5.1 for DOS. It was fast and I could make it do anything I wanted it to do via the macros. I really liked it, though, when I understood the merge codes. I was able to make any kind of form that I wanted using macros and merge codes.
Word is genetically malformed ecoli. It's "form fields" are kludgy crap. It's "fields" are a sloppy afterbirth. Their merge process is grossly incomplete. Using a template with macros to create another template is a recipe for a brain seizure. It is garbage created by committee. It's about as unified as Afghanistan.
Sure, you can do anything you want with Word--but it won't be simple, it won't be well received by other users, and you'll have to study how you did something before you ever replicate it.
I use the damn program because my employer is welded to it. For some reason they are in love with paying the extreme price that MS demands.
And I understand the object model, but I still hate it. Programming in Word should be easy by now, but it's not. It's basically the same as it was when VBA was brought into Word.
The only satisfaction is that open source WILL kill word. And I will be glad. And I will still look back fondly on WP 5.1.