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.

The essence of hipsterism:

[lxs]

Use the most backward impractical tool available and declare it superior.

cf. fixie bikes and Holga cameras.

Word processors detriment on books.

[line-bundle]

Do word processors not make it too easy for writers to write bloated books?

I take the position that word processors have had a detriment on clarity of writing. It's too easy to not have to keep everything in you head when writing with a word processor.

I used to enjoy Asimov, but it seems his later books (after 1980) just got fat and I stopped reading.

And look at college textbooks. Who reads all those pages?

Whatever Works For You

[Greyfox]

I've always hated Word and its ilk because the program is constantly fighting how I want to work. I spend more time fighting with the program than I do creating new content. Microsoft and Apple both seem to feel they know how to do what you're trying to accomplish better than you do, and not just in the word processing tools. So if you found a tool that works better for you, more power to you.

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!

Wrong end of the telescope

[starfishsystems]

Remember when you were a kid and you would pretend that the cardboard tube from a roll of paper towels was a telescope? You would look down the tube and see a tiny piece of the world. That's what it's like to compose text using a line editor.

I was once compelled to write a WYSIWYG editor, in the days when all the system provided was a line editor equivalent to ed. I noticed that the work became an order of magnitude faster once I was able to use my editor as a development tool.

No Patent Infringement!

[TheNarrator]

One good thing about using technology that old is there's no chance you could be violating any patents. It certainly makes sense as a symbolic gesture at least.

Re:MS Notepad

[gratuitous_arp]

Why people use vim, in 2 minutes:

The popular vi clones (like vim) allow users to perform advanced editing (not just tapping arrow keys to move around), and it does it with the keyboard alone -- and mostly keys that are easy to press (like :w to save, instead of Alt+F, S). This means you do not waste time moving one hand back and forth from the mouse -- it *removes* this overhead. If you try to use something like Word with the keyboard only, you'll be using some very awkward key combinations. Not so with vim.

That covers the "advanced" GUI editors. Now: ed, MS edit, Notepad, etc., don't even try to implement the vast number of features you get with vim that let you quickly edit through the command line. As Bram Moolenaar likes to say, once the commands are "in your fingers" -- so that it's second nature -- your editing speed improves immensely. Particularly for writing code, but it is true for any other use as well.

If you are not interested in quick, efficient editing, then there is no reason to use vim. Ed or Notepad or Word will yield the same result as vim, it will just take you longer to do it (assuming you know how to use both editors efficiently). Most users get hung up because vim is a modal editor, so they ditch it and go back to gedit. For the rest of us who put the time in to learn how to use it effectively, it pays off in a big way.

See also:

Bram's Seven habits of effective text editing: http://www.moolenaar.net/habits.html [moolenaar.net] (this is in presentation form somewhere on youtube, too)
Vim's about page: http://www.vim.org/about.php [vim.org]

Re:MS Notepad

[Fallingcow]

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.

Re:Use LaTex

[N7DR]

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

Rather to my surprise, the last decade has seen a marked deterioration in the number and quality of professional designers and typographers used by most publishing houses (both large and small). I some time ago came to the conclusion that someone with skills in TeX (and, probably more importantly, an understanding of the minutiæ of typesetting) can do a much better job than most publishing houses these days.

That is not to say that publishers don't provide other useful services (principally editing and marketing).

Re:Next step?

[fishbowl]

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.)

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

[Omestes]

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.

Ooooo, I'm even BETTER, I use a QUILL pen!

[MrLizard]

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.).

Typewriter

[NixieBunny]

They worked very well for 100 years. If your editor complains that it's too hard to get the words into a computer file, then introduce her to OCR.

Re:Next step?

[BungaDunga]

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.

No kidding

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

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

[Astronomerguy]

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.

Mirrors my experience

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who is working on their fourth book, I've come to do all of my initial composition in a plain text editor. After I've finished my first draft (straight ahead, just like the OP says), I take it into OpenOffice and use my publisher's official formatting style sheets. Yes, they fully support the files that oo.org makes. Personally, I don't do 1,000 words a day every day. I do 1,500 to 2,000 per day, four days a week. That lets me miss days without feeling the weight of deadline pressure.

But yeah, I use plain text to get the words on the page.

Re:Next step?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because your schoolmaster was a stupid twat that didn't teach you how to use a pen properly.

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.

Re:Next step?

[MaskedSlacker]

I use emacs with a custom Lisp function (that took me a day to get right) that creates a fullscreen frame with the text centered and 65 columns wide, and turns the colors to black on green. It's like writing on a typewriter.

For the curious:

(defun black-green ()
    (interactive)
    (set-background-color "black")
    (set-foreground-color "green")
    (set-face-foreground 'mode-line "gray15")
    (set-face-background 'mode-line "black")
    (set-face-foreground 'fringe "gray15")
    (set-face-background 'fringe "black"))

(defun write-room ()
    (interactive)
    (let ((wr (make-frame '((minibuffer . 12)
                                  (vertical-scroll-bars . nil)
                                  (left-fringe . 315); no fringe
                                  (right-fringe . 315)
                                  (fringe-mode . none)
                                  (background-mode . dark)
                                  (background-color . "black")
                                  (foreground-color . "green")
                                  (cursor-color . "green")
                                  (border-width . 0)
                                  (border-color . "black"); should be unnecessary
                                  (internal-border-width . 64); whitespace!
                                  (cursor-type . box)
                                  (menu-bar-lines . 0)
                                  (tool-bar-lines . 0)
                                  (mode-line-format . nil)
                                  (fullscreen . fullboth)
                                  (unsplittable . t)))))
        (select-frame wr)
        (text-mode)
        (set-fill-column 64)
        (black-green)
        (select-frame (car (cdr (frame-list))))
        (delete-frame)
        ))

Re:Next step?

[triple.eh]

At first I was aligned with your thinking, however the more I thought about it the more the guy made sense.

By using a basic, bare bones non-WYSIWYG editor and just doing a brain dump of prose in vi(m) or ed you can simply let your mind flow and not let it worry about how the document looks and get side tracked with formatting. Once you're done the draft, load it up in your favourite modern word processor and start formatting.

I've actually done this writing documentation: brain dump first, format later, and have found it to be much quicker. As an added bonus, the formatting exercise actually doubled as a good proof read step too.

Re:Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS

[MarkvW]

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.

Did you ride your fixy to the coffee shop 1st?

[supercrisp]

Others are posting on this, but I thought I'd post as someone who teaches creative, academic, and professional writing--and who has training in the pedagogical theory and assorted gobbledygook (ie theories I don't like). Yes, eliminating distractions as you draft is very helpful. And some people find it helpful to switch the tool or the context when drafting. Probably the best way to draft is to force yourself to write, with whatever tool, in 15-20 minute sprints, with no correction, pausing to think, or whatever. For more on this, you can read Writing with Power by the unfortunately named Peter Elbow. And, yes, a text editor is one way to avoid distractions, but so is a little discipline. Others opt for a legal pad. I myself use a legal pad with blue or black ink. Or I use MS Word or a "light" option for the Mac called Bean. When I'm writing stuff that feels good, I type in black. When it feels like it might not work, I type in blue. So blue is my code for "relax." I never use a text editor, but I can see why you would, if you're the sort of obsessive person who also thinks that a text editor merits a review with instructions for use, or if you're the sort of person who will choose a text editor so poor for you purpose that you have to talk about byte counts. But let's face it, writing those reviews, fiddling around with bite counts, looking for the perfect text editor that will blank our your screen and has a single-keystroke function to load content from lifehacker or the latest theories on sleep technology, well, that's all just a technique for PROCRASTINATION. My favorite advice on that is from an anecdote about Faulkner. He was once asked by a woman how he got inspired to write. He replied that he only wrote when he was inspired, and he was inspired every morning at eight.

Re:Word processors are becoming page layout tools!

[BrokenHalo]

Fair enough. Personally, I would like something between the two extremes - in other words, something exactly like WordPerfect 5.1. That was a stupendous program, and I have never since found its equal. Later versions of WP were just a horrible amalgam of the most simplistic early efforts combined with an atrocious re-interpretation of MSWord's UI.