Comment by smacktoward | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smacktoward | Hacker News Reader

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I guess you know you're getting old when you start seeing people "invent" things that you saw people using every day when you were young.

> I came to think, maybe we should create a digital typewriter giving us the best of the two worlds.

What the author calls a "digital typewriter" is what originally used to be known as a "word processor" -- a standalone, dedicated digital device with a keyboard and a (typically small, typically monochrome) display, running built-in software for editing text: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_processor_(electronic_dev...

You would type on the keyboard and your words would appear on the display, where you could go back and edit typos and such if you needed to. The display usually only showed a few lines of text, but you could scroll up and down through the entire document using the screen as a buffer. Your work would be then persisted to some storage medium, often in later models a floppy disk. It wasn't WYSIWYG, but it was a vast advance over mechanical typewriters, for all the reasons the article mentions.

These devices had their heyday from the '60s through the '80s. They were eventually rendered obsolete by the arrival of the inexpensive general-purpose personal computer. All the functions of the word processor could be provided on the PC via software, and the PC's bigger, more colorful display made it a better environment for doing those things anyway. The programs people used to do word processing on PCs came to be known as "word processors" themselves. Eventually the dedicated devices stopped being made, and I guess over time people just forgot that there was once a word processor that wasn't software.

My mother was a writer, and I have many childhood memories of her sitting at her treasured Brother word processor. So perhaps I have more reason to remember the hardware word processor than most people do.

And they keep reinventing it. I don't see a year going by without a Kickstarter or the like for one of these things. https://getfreewrite.com

Further, we've had oodles of minimalist/cut down/focused/sensory deprivation gimmick word processors for the last twenty years, all essentially recreating the UI of every single DOS word processing program.

And yet, whenever professional writers talk about what they write with, it's almost always MS Word or some crappy screenplay program. Not some minimalist program, not some special piece of hardware, just the standard tool available. (Occasionally, their preferred text editor if they're a geek - just another standard tool.) Decades and centuries ago, they used word processors or typewriters or pen and paper because those were the available, standard tools.

Because a tool is just something to aid the act of writing, not a device for squeezing it out of you when you have nothing to say.

You realize the author references the FreeWrite in the article and talks about the reason for this particular creation was to have an open source version that was cheaper.

One of the issues is that, as soon as you get into any collaboration or editing, you have to move the document into some common format anyway. In which case, I usually find that I might as well have started there in the first place.

I actually like Scrivener on the Mac for bigger projects. But given that, at some point, I'm going to have to switch to another tool, it's usually not worth using for the first draft.

You gotta do what works, yeah. Some people rig up stuff to make their tools work with others, others don't find that worth the effort; ultimately a personal call.

You’re rather dismissive and uncharitable, aren’t you?

Dismissive, yes.

Buying various tools for a craft does not make you a craftsman. You only become a writer by writing, not by buying silly hipster products "for writers". And there have always been such products aimed at people who don't actually write.

Uncharitable, no.

Some people want to "be a writer" for various reasons without actually wanting to write. It's anything from an imposed expectation (common in "creative" subcultures) to an affectation. If playing at being a writer makes them happy, that's harmless. There's no stolen valor in pretending to be a writer.

But, some of the people buying these sorts of products could be writers. Very often, they buy these products out of fear, that being one of the major factors that inhibits writing. They're afraid to write because they're afraid of writing badly, not understanding that even the greatest writers had to write many thousands of words of utter shit in order to develop their skill. (And not internalizing that even great writers revise, rewrite, and get the help of editors.)

So they pursue methods of making their writing environment more optimal, buy various tools, or read endless books, magazines (back in the day), or blog posts on how to write—and when they try each new gimmick, they find they're still afraid. Obviously, then, they haven't tried enough and haven't optimized enough, so they go on to the next gimmick.

It can be very hard to get over that fear. Writing can be a lot of effort. But getting there is much more satisfying than hanging back and trying to find the key to being a writer.

The key is just writing.

Published, unpublished, printed, made a cheap Amazon ebook, hosted on a free site, posted on a forum, emailed to a list, shown to a few friends, safely squirreled away on your hard drive for nobody else to ever see? Novels, short fiction, flash fiction, fan fiction, slash fiction? Blog posts, essays, books? Deathless prose or complete dreck?

Doesn't matter: you wrote. You're a writer.

(And yes, to be entirely fair, I don't actually think anyone has "nothing to say". But you have to actually say it, and these things can't squeeze that out of you.)

I think you're absolutely right that fear is the biggest problem a writer has to overcome, and that many of these products appeal to the fearful writer.

At the same time, I do remember what it was like writing on a typewriter, and in DOS word processors, and before I had an always-on internet connection. And I do think it was easier.

I had recently tried to get back into writing, and had cancelled both my home and mobile internet service, and wrote on an iPad with virtually every app deleted except a text editor. And I found that it really did help: instead of my head being filled with stuff from the internet, I could fill it with stuff about the story I wanted to write, the way I remember being able to when I lived in a more isolated world using a device that wasn't bursting at the seams with digital affordances.

That "imposed expectation" you talked about ended up killing off my efforts after I produced a draft I wasn't happy with, so that problem was still there. I'm getting back into it again, and will probably recreate my setup from before. This time around I bought a cheap Alphasmart Dana, since I'd sold my iPad.

It could be that I'm part of a subset of people that are just more easily distracted by / addicted to a lot of digital stuff that's emerged in the past couple decades. But I do know that some professional writers have considerably more elaborate setups than myself or anyone buying a portable word processor: a tiny house out in the woods, a room that simulates a thunderstorm outside, etc.

I don't think you're wrong about what drives a lot of people to buy this stuff, but I also don't think these products are without value.

I don't think you're wrong about what drives a lot of people to buy this stuff, but I also don't think these products are without value.

I'd agree that there's some potential value for the right people, and I definitely agree in doing whatever makes your process work. If you work best emailing yourself passages you bang on out your phone on the train, curling up by a window, at a computer with no network or games, sitting at a desk with no random objects to fiddle with, running WordStar in a DOS box, writing with pen and paper—that's all good. (I myself use Emacs; low distraction, so long as I don't open a web page or play Tetris or whatever in that window.)

But, I think that's distinct from how these products are generally marketed, which has been more on the exercise machine or gym membership model: aimed at the people who won't use them. Some people will use them, but they aren't the target. Freewrite was always marketed fetishisticly, going back to when it was "Hemingwrite". Low-distraction word processors harped on how "beautiful" the program looked as much as the minimization of distractions. They're more about provoking the aspiration to write rather than selling a tool for the job.

I grew up too poor to have a computer, so we were still using a word processor well into the 90s. Using the Apple ][e at school was a treat, but as far as writing things, I think I still preferred the word processor.

Also, I believe they still make them. And they still cost just as much as they did back then. They're like graphing calculators.

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