Cory Doctorow: Writing in the Age of Distraction | Hacker News Reader

Cory Doctorow: Writing in the Age of Distraction

locusmag.com

Pretty common but useful advice. His advocacy of text editors is different though. I'm noticing a trend of SciFi writers like Neal Stephenson and now Cory Doctorow who use programmer's text editors such as emacs and vim rather than conventional word processors or novel specific tools like CopyWrite. I don't buy that spell check is that annoying. You can turn it off, and novelist specific tools claim not to be distracting, though I haven't tried any. Is emacs really that much better for creative work or do they want to appear smart/cool by using the same tools as the "hackers" they write about?

That sounds like a trend of two. I think it is more likely that both Stephenson and Doctorow were programmers earlier in their careers (implied in their Wikipedia articles -- Doctorow founded a software company and Stephenson switched to a physics major so that he could "spend more time on the university mainframe"). And once you know a text editor really well (any text editor, even Word), it is simply most efficient to keep using it; there are apparently still professional writers who won't use an editor that lacks WordStar keybindings.

However, it would not surprise me at all to learn that there is significant overlap between "people who learn to program" and "people who want to write sci-fi novels". I just don't think we'll hear about Toni Morrison picking up emacs anytime soon.

The idea that vim and emacs are not distracting because they don't have features was a little odd. I think he means that they don't make you feel like you have to style the content, maybe.

In a period of quiet desperation, I was using the Dark Room text editor in full screen, but I get by on Notepad++ and gedit these days. The main advantage I find is that they launch quickly and they rarely go slower than you can.

I use vim personally, but I do pretty much all my writing in there. It's very, very good at shuffling text around. And there are very few visual distractions.

Funny—I linked to a bunch of articles making similar points in my post on students, laptops, and distraction at http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2008/12/28/laptops-students-di... . I suspect the people who accomplish the most are often the ones who can concentrate the longest.

Unremarkable lifehack-type article, but still a good reminder to cut out distractions and do some actual work.

Most lifehack articles are written by people of modest accomplishments, and, personally, I find it difficult to take them seriously. Doctorow has accomplished quite a lot - certainly, far more than most of the productivity "gurus" - and I think it's much more interesting to hear what he thinks is important.

It's true Doctorow is accomplished, but it is also true that most accomplished people cannot be objective about the factors behind their success. It is one thing to have all the skills and motivations to succeed; another to be able to report on those skills and motivations with enough honesty to teach others.

That's a good point. I do think that when advice is very detailed and specific, it's more likely to be accurate. When people are fooling themselves, or trying to fool their audience, with this kind of thing, they usually speak in generalities. It's too much mental hard work to make up something very specific, like "You should use vim or something like it", followed by detailed reasons why that's a good idea; that, to me, has the ring of something Doctorow has thought about a good deal. I'm _not_, of course, speaking of 'specifics' like the "20 minute" number he talks about; it's a detail, sure, but one that is very easy to make up.

20 damned minutes? That's what it takes him to bang out "a couple of pages"? It's easy to be productive if you're frickin' Superman.

Every fiction writer has a different working style, but I've seen lots of them suggest that it's good to bang out prose at a fairly steady pace. Jim Macdonald:

http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showpost.php?p=82327&...

When you're writing, don't slow down.

Yes, you will do research ... you'll need to know exactly what kind of car your guy is driving, but during the outline/first draft stage isn't when I do it.

I'll research a bunch before, and after during rewrite and revision. The rule in the middle is "don't slow down."

In fiction you're trying to describe a time stream of events and conversations, and it's easier to feel the pace of your prose if you're typing it at a steady clip. Musicians get the same advice: Get in the habit of playing through your mistakes while staying with the beat, or you will develop a style that sounds choppy and hesitant and that calls attention to every mistake.

I'll tell you what's distracting: the flashing ad banner on the left.

I find that I have the exact opposite experience from Doctorow. The hardest thing for me is to get started. Once I'm going I can bang out a lot of text. I always get my best writing done after I'm warmed up and emotionally involved in the scene.

I got bored reading this article but I generally like Cory Doctorow's sci-fi writing. His book Little Brother was great and every now and again I seek out a futuristic hacker* short story he wrote called "0nz0red".

*the other meaning of the word

0wnz0red

http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2002/08/28/0wnz0red/...

Interesting that Suzy Orman has just decided to distribute her latest book free online in standard PDF form. See my post at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=427164 for more info. I'd like to know what Cory thinks!

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