Slashdot Mirror
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.
real men use
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Its all about personal taste, and I happen to like little red squiggly lines under most of my words.
Use the most backward impractical tool available and declare it superior.
cf. fixie bikes and Holga cameras.
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.
"When I log into my Xenix system with my 110 baud teletype, both vi and Emacs are just too damn slow. They print useless messages like, ‘C-h for help’ and ‘“foo” File is read only’. So I use the editor that doesn't waste my VALUABLE time.
Ed, man! !man ed"
http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed.msg.html :-)
"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.
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.
The last time I used Word, 'plop' was very descriptive of its behavior as well.
Have gnu, will travel.
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?
Next year he should upgrade to Microsoft Edlin. That'll teach him.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
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.
I don't know what OS the author of the original post is using, but if he's using a Mac, he should look into WriteRoom.
http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom
It's like writing on the word processor from the Apple II days, it clear all the modern OS widgets out of the way so you're not constantly distracted, and you can edit in any combination of background/text colors you want.
I prefer bold blue text on a black background. None of the formatting is saved in the document, it's only done in presentation by the app and you get modern features like word count and what not.
I can't recommend it high enough.
But hey, I'm an oldster around here, what do I know?
Reeses
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.
> tl;dr
Is that the emacs command used to indicate you're a twat?
The real litigious bastards...
How I'd love to see this guy's clutterfree text editor, especially if it's running in a window surrounded by blinking reminders to upgrade Skype, update Java, download the new version of Nokia PC Suite, check whether there are new updates for all Apple applications installed; then the antivirus requires immediate attention because the subscription is due, there's 20 unread Twitter status updates, and everytime a new friend comes online MSN Messenger throws a big party on its side of the screen... Oh yeah, that would be worth writing a big story about productivity.
Cats are too unpredictable to be good editors. The last time I let a cat use my keyboard to edit something I wrote, I ended up with page after page of "vnmerhi gbchqeruiph vvj buiphbjnnk wfqÙQSC g[no tyn"
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.).
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."
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.
Get yourself a CP/M machine and write your novels on that 64kB at a time. Like a Kaypro II or maybe an Osborne 1 would probably be your best bet. Although a C128 or AppleII with Z80 card would would be usable as well.
A Xerox 820 II with 8" disk drives would also be fun, but they are a little pricey on ebay in working condition, especially if it had the 8086 expansion board for CP/M-86 or MS-DOS.
Then to send it up to your PC you can use the serial port, which was often used for printers on CP/M, so you might be able to just hit "print" to transmit to your PC.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Don't be silly. "tl;dr" is an Internet acronym for, "I'm stupid and lazy."
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.