Word Processors — One Writer's Further Retreat 391
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.
Next step? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Ok...But let's not blame the mouse. (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Word processors are becoming page layout tools! (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
ed knows all (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Use LaTex (Score:1, Insightful)
Less is romantic, it isn't more (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
I never got the point of word processors... (Score:1, Insightful)
They seem to be intentionally designed to be the wrong tool for anything you may be trying to do.
Re:Next step? (Score:3, Insightful)
Writeroom, et al. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Ok...But let's not blame the mouse. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Ok...But let's not blame the mouse. (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe that's why his next book is five years late?
This isn't about productivity (Score:4, Insightful)
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:What's your point? (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Having to do so every time he creates a new document.
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.
Word is not a decent tool for getting text into the computer. It starts slowly, vi starts without visible delay. Word also gets slowed down, when typing text, since it does formatting in realtime. Then it saves the document in binary encoding, which is a really bad idea, if you want to not loose your data, with a couple of bit errors. It also tends to correct spelling as you type, this slows down your typing. It has a nasty habit of changing i to I, despite having looked around and changed the language to swedish.
This slows down the typing, so word is about the worst tool to type in text to a computer.
C-x M-c M-butterfly (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps. However, real people know how any *nix "editor" one-upmanship ends:
C-x M-c M-butterfly [xkcd.com].
'Nuff said.
the real problem (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Next step? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
True Believer, I Think Not (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Next step? (Score:1, Insightful)
There is nothing simple about vim or emacs. Nothing.
Re:Next step? (Score:3, Insightful)
Everything everyone does is not always motivated by profit...
Re:Next step? (Score:3, Insightful)
There is evidence that hominids developed language prior to the oldest known cave paintings. When you consider that modern primates have demonstrated a limited ability to learn language, but haven't show any aptitude for representational art, it seems likely that language developed before art in hominids.
You CLEARLY don't get it (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Ok...But let's not blame the mouse. (Score:4, Insightful)
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:
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...]
Re:This isn't about productivity (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:ed is too fancy (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Next step? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not just smearing; you're also pushing the pen "into" the paper with nearly every horizontal stroke, so it digs in. Especially with cursive, where every letter is connected by a horizontal ligature.
And if holding the pen above the line is incorrect, apparently the vast majority of teachers are doing it wrong.
Non linear writing. (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Next step? (Score:1, Insightful)
No, all of the American writing handbooks used for the last fifty years have assumed a right handed student using a fountain pen. They don't work with left handed students using a pencil. But instead of changing the instruction material, they blame the student or the teacher.
There's nothing that shows how ossified the American education system is better than writing instruction. It's laughably bad from the very first step, and everyone who has studied has known it's provably, objectively wrong for the last 50 years. But we don't do anything about it, because that's how we've always done it.
Re:This isn't about productivity (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Actually, it's like meditating in an amusement park while a park employee constantly pokes you and tries to tell you about the rides, and even occasionally tries to pick you up and put you on a ride.
My biggest ongoing peeve with Word, et al, is not the availability of advanced features, but the persistence with which it insists on applying those advanced features all by itself, whether I've asked it to or not. It's a huge distraction to be constantly interrupted by having to undo some change I never asked the software to make. I don't mind that they're there, but if I wanted that text to be a list or a maybe a heading I'd have used the freakin' I Want This To Be A List or Maybe a Heading button/menu/shortcut.
I know I can go through and turn all that stuff off, but 1) I can only do that if it's my computer, and 2) it usually takes a while before I find all the things I need to disable. However, at that point I now have what amounts to a $100 text editor. I've had .emacs files that were simpler than my "Make Word Tolerable" routine --- and emacs/vim/etc tends to listen to me when I tell it to do something. With Word, it seems to be more of a suggestion.