Game of Thrones author George RR Martin: 'Why I still use DOS'
bbc.com
bbc.com
I hate using software that second guesses me; more often than not it makes for a very frustrating experience. It's like having a backseat driver.
"Don't worry about mistakes, I'll fix them for you!" [1] says the WordStar 3.3 manual on page 66 in a full page cartoon. Or "Hi, Choose from the menu, and I'll bring whatever you would like to order!" in another one on page 38.
Feel free to turn off whatever auto-correction options you like.
From an IT perspective I always find this type of thing interesting. Everyone is trying to add automation to make things easier for low skill users. That same automation is exactly what low skill users will fight with relentlessly. Primarily because people are each so different. The worst thing you can do to a writer is change what they wrote, but I know hundreds of people who wouldn't be able to function without spell check.
(P.S. I don't think spell checking came around until BSW version 3.)
Spell checking was usually a separate program on a separate disk run as a last step. I used to use apple writer and apple works and used websters spell check.
Bank Street Writer got around the lack of lowercase somehow.
I wonder why that is. I guess I'm guilty of this myself, but often IT people have a way of pushing software, hardware and other tools on people even though they don't need it.
When writing prose is your primary concern, squiggly lines and auto-correct and whatnot are simply irritating distractions. Hence the whole stripped-down, no-distractions word processor niche, especially on the Mac. If you already have a stripped-down, no-distractions word processor you've been using since the Reagan administration, you really don't need a new one. Hell, it's why I haven't used word processors for plain prose in years and just used whatever text editor I preferred at the time (with the occasional spell-check pass).
His editor and publisher can still use the modern tech to do whatever it is you kids use these days to blog your books.
General wisdom in author circles is that you write THEN edit. Having spell check and other tools only hampers the creative process.
Darkroom/WriteRoom (and the dozen+ similar programs created over the past decade or two) http://jjafuller.com/dark-room/ offer zero nonsense, zero setting, zero hassle, text entry programs geared towards authoring a book. They get rid of pretty much everything on screen except for text and background. No UI, no features, nothing. Just the way it should be.
I've used them for NaNoWriMo for years and years.
Quality of writing, to me, is a more important trait of an author than volume of output. It would be nice if he got moving though.
Survivorship bias, sure, but if his writing machine has lasted this long, it's well on the "will last even longer" side of the bell curve.
my grandfather used a dos machine to manage the family's finances for years, and in the 90s i insisted, after learning BASIC on that machine, that he get with the times. though i was a linux enthusiast, i just bought him a cheapo emachines at best buy or wal-mart, which my entire family called to pitch in on later. because hey, nothing says happy birthday like diluting your nephew's first and only substantial gift to his stand-in father figure.
anyway, that was a mistake. the new spreadsheet was terrible and actually would not just create new rows like the old one, so after he died i had to go over to my grandmother's house and make a number of new rows that roughly corresponded - whether i liked it or not - to how long i thought she would live. i created rows all fucking day and she unfortunately did not, as far as i know, run out again.
that said, i think george r. r. martin should give a linux box with vga console a shot. without my dos experience, i'd probably never have learned to love the console.
Writing is an art, the writer an artist. To each, their canvas and brush.
There is a joke here about DOS and 5 years per book.
If you lose the outline of a character's life, just kill them off.
I know there's browser plug-ins to turn off specific sites or the web as a whole... it would be interesting if microsoft included the functionality in office. Would have made for much more productive nights writing papers in college!
You're depending on inconvenience to prevent you from web-browsing, and unchecking a checkbox does not count as "inconvenient enough".
On the other hand, isn't George RR Martin a bit slow on writing the series ? I don't read the books but many friends complain about that =)
He wrote the start, with a ending in mind (that he still wants to reach), and he was supposed to write three books.
The problem is that when he ended the first book, the story had not advanced enough already.
Then when he ended the second book, the story had not advanced enough AND he created lots of unplanned characters and stuff.
When he tried writing the third book, he decided to "hack", or rather have a five year timeskip.
Except he noticed that all the new unplanned characters and stuff introduced meant he would have to figure what everyone did during the timeskip... And he could not, because they were unplanned in first place, and he could not figure how to write toward the ending without plot holes.
So he decided to not do a timeskip.
The result was that the book he was outlining as the third book now started to look like a ridiculous humongous tome, so he decided to divice the third book in two books that happen in parallel.
Those two books are relased, and now he promised everyone that in the next two books he will tie up plot points and characters, not open more... Let's see if he can resist the urge of the feature and scope creep :P (well, as a coder I can say that resisting the urge to finish features and fix bugs before making another yet cool shiny feature is something kinda hard :P)
The only thing that would stop me from using a similar set up for writing is that there isn't a DOS version of Spotify :(.
If that's doable, I bet DOS and WordStar (or WordPerfect, etc.) would be awfully quick in a VM.
It works for him. Nothing to fix there. A lot of people around me could learn something from this article.
It seems that all he cares about is writing text, period. A typewriter is not good enough because editing is a pain, but Wordstar 4.0 seems to fit his needs perfectly. How is there anything wrong with that?
A lot of software is novelty-driven, because you need to sell your users on the next version. Sadly, this is often at odds with the goals software should aim to fulfill as a tool. Did we ever need a v2 for the hammer, or drafting pencil?
Clearly, innovation is good - the modern (1514) hammer is better than the big stone our Homo Abilis ancestors used. But at some point, you reach an upper bound.
But there are other things you can put on the other end of a hammer besides a claw, none of which made the original hammer a bad idea if all your problems really are nails that you don't need to claw back out.
Some of it is driven by available technology. It would have been very hard to have a great spell-check functionality on early home computers, like my 48k Apple II+, simply because of the hardware.
Did we ever need a v2 for the hammer, or drafting pencil?
Hammers did indeed evolve quite a bit from their stone age original form, though the general shape and principle have remained the same.
There is a modern claw hammer halfway up the left side in this illustration from 1514:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Melencolia_I_(Durero).jpg
Drafting pencils have been around from the late 1500s:
http://leadholder.com/main-history.html#leadholder_origins
It's arguable that truly modern ones didn't appear until the 20th century, however.
Uh, yeah, both the pencil and the hammer not only have gone through multiple iterations over history, but have a branching family tree with real improvements for specific roles over time.
Sure, there's a lot of fluff in software (and all kinds of other products), but technology actually does bring improved tools.
Well worth a read (1996): http://reason.com/archives/1996/06/01/typing-errors