George R.R. Martin Writes Everything In WordStar 4.0 On A DOS Machine | Hacker News Reader

George R.R. Martin Writes Everything In WordStar 4.0 On A DOS Machine

techcrunch.com

32 pointspromocha35 comments

Having written quite a bit of text using both word processors and just plain text editors, I can see the value of this.

When your creatively writing or drawing its critical that your tools stay out of the way. Good writing and drawing programs do this, poor ones bog you down in administrivia, formatting, correcting, and the like.

This does mean things like having control, and many word processors these days dont allow the control needed. I also see this trend in many programs these days where the program seems to think that it has a better idea of how you want something done than you. When you get into a fight with one of these programs it can really burn up the idea you had in your head and then your stuck trying to find it again.

So, yeah, artists and writers sometimes use older things because they are better in that way.

And my colleagues wonder why I use emacs. I like IDEs, I use VS for work a fair amount. But when I just want to dig into the act of writing a program or text, I like editors that just stay out of the way.

John McPhee uses Kedit with a bunch of macros[1] which is pretty hardcore.

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/01/14/130114fa_fact_...

Hardcore would be Edlin or ed. At least KEdit gives you a window.

(Apparently Edlin is still available in Windows8, though requires 16 bit support).

Good to hear that as a KDE user.

Cormac McCarthy writes everything on a typewriter that cost him $50 in 1964 [1]. The novel, A Confederacy of Dunces was written by hand [2]. So I guess this means that when it comes to writing, especially writing fiction, the man and his mind are what matters.

[1] http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/04/cormac-mccarthy...

[2] http://www.broadwayworld.com/article/John-Kennedy-Tooles-A-C...

Pen or pencil, it forces you to slow down and consider each word. If you read "On Writing Well" there's a lot of emphasis on not falling into boring patterns. It's like taking the longer, scenic route vs. the turnpike. The reader is right there with you for the journey. Some of us relish life at a slower pace.

That's funny. I held onto my DOS 286 laptop for many, many years so I could write on a single-function device with no access to modern software.

I used Norton Commander editor or vim to write documents and found it easier to be creative with a text editor instead of a word processor. If editing what I wrote on the first draft forces me to rearrange line endings, I find that I tend to edit my words less often while creativity is flowing.

The modern equivalent would be an RPI with nice keyboard, monitor, software of choice and no networking.

"At least, he doesn’t have to worry about viruses or hackers messing with his work."

Cause there aren't any DOS viruses? Heh. Kids today.

It's airgapped.

His writing presumably gets to the outside world somehow (last I checked). Presumably that means floppy disks, which are an attack vector.

That computer is not connected to the internet.

DOS viruses generally didn't spread over the internet. :-)

So I guess what he has to worry about is someone handing him a sketchy floppy disk...

We're dealing with mostly clueless millenial "journalists" here, so cut them some slack.

He writes for TechCrunch. That normally means he also believes there are no Mac viruses (or flaws).

Sometimes when coding I find it useful to make a conscious choice to go back to "inferior" technology.

For example, if I'm undertaking a huge refactor which will require a lot of reworking of tests, I'll usually drop down to Emacs (or keep using an IDE, but turn auto-compilation off) just to avoid the extreme amount of mental noise coming from all those compilation errors just sitting there and increasing over time. Sometimes it's better to just willfully ignore all that irrelevant detail for an hour or two, get into the flow and power through while you have the inspiration. Those test errors (compilation or otherwise) can always be fixed later.

That's practically cheating--Neal Stephenson wrote the entire Baroque Cycle trilogy in longhand[1].

[1] http://www.nealstephenson.com/photos.htm

I was looking for a joke along the lines of "that's why the world he depicts is so cruel, and that's why he kills characters so often", haven't found it, and by this comment am adding it.

On a serious note, whatever tool does not distract you while writing fiction is best. Usually you don't need an IDE for that.

OTOH a saga of that size might benefit from cross-referencing, timeline, etc IDE-like tools. Stephen King is known to employ a special person who checks his works for consistency with previous works in the same universe.

Brandon Sanderson has some videos up on youtube that show how he writes his stories, including writing notes and referring to them:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxFySrqdi8E

I enjoy my kobo. The single purpose (novels only, constant airplane mode) aspect is a big part of it. E-ink and 3 week battery life helps make it feel like a non device. It doesnt trigger my 10 second attention span mode.

It might be nice to have a nice light clamshell e-ink writing machine. All it does is write novels.

Anything that helps. For ggrm, I propose we take away any computer that runs any software other than wordstar. Get winds of wi ter written already! I need to know what happens. :)

He got off the exit right before the highway ran into Clippy-ville. Good for him. Also of a similar ilk is Neal Stephenson, who writes his stuff in Emacs (in LaTeX, I believe). There is something to be said for cranking out raw text without worrying about fighting the beast over spelling, grammar, indentation, auto-this and auto-that. If you're good, those things just get in the way.

The question is how long it will take for a new saas offering "wordstar 4.0 in the cloud".

If it isn't broken, don't fix it.

I am tempted to try this for my own writing; the only thing I'd want to figure out is a sane way to get files off of it without having to resurrect a floppy drive.

You could always emulate it or run it in a virtual machine if you're just looking for the experience of an old style word processor.

Or, you know, just use a new word processor and turn off all the features you don't like.

Part of the experience is actually being disconnected. You, your mind, your writing implement (be it pen and paper, typewriter, old DOS box or a more modern OS with no network connection (see Knuth)).

EDIT: This could be done with a VM or something, but really you need some software that'll lock down your computer and not let you just alt-tab back to your normal, internet connected experience.

This is more what I was getting at, or at least what seems evocative about writing on vintage hardware; being disconnected.

I find Sublime Text distraction free mode very good at that.

Have you tried using pen and paper?

If this was a serious question, the serious answer is that I type a good order of magnitude faster than I write by pen and paper. And the ability to delete is useful.

I was amazed when I saw this Years ago. Now that I think about it, seems like a good choice since it allows him to focus, that machine has no multitasking = no distractions, internet...

A dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7732320.

  > He’s actually quite active on Twitter

Oh, okay. Never mind the fact that the first thing you'd read if you open the linked Twitter profile (@GeorgeRRMartin_) is

  > Not affiliated with GRRM

Let's not mention that Googling his Social Media habits would reveal a blog post mentioning he doesn't use Twitter or Facebook[1]. Heck, you can even read that on his Wikipedia article.

Is it just me, or is the amount of basic fact-checking being done by TechCrunch (and others) basically nil?

[1]: http://grrm.livejournal.com/197075.html

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