A writer’s tools are very personal things. I am reminded of years working on the farm where I grew up. My father had his tools, and I couldn’t use them most of the time. We had, for example, two scythes for clearing weeds near fence and irrigation lines. He always used the same one, and as much as I thought I got the worse of the two, whenever I picked up the other one, it just wasn’t comfortable. My writing tools are similar.
I’m writing this using FocusWriter. I’ve configured a theme that makes it look like an old DOS based word processor, with a mono-spaced font in green over a black screen. I started back down this path after reading a paen to WordStar on Robert J Sawyer’s blog.
I have fond memories of writing with simpler tools – although I never published any of it, my earliest writing was on a typewriter. I had a portable Royal on which I wrote both college papers and a number of unpublished short stories. Those stories are still around in a box somewhere – earnest and pretentious, most of them. In the mid-80s I upgraded to an electric Panasonic, though I always fancied an IBM Selectric. The Panasonic featured an integrated type-lift correction tape and you could correct the immediate few letters. I used that machine for years and wrote many more short stories, all of which remain unpublished. Then, in the early 90s I bought my first PC. I did this with the intention of learning to write programs, which I eventually did, but not before I fell in love with simple ANSI text editors that were like WordStar and many of which allowed you to use WordStar keycodes. I found that I really liked the readability of green text on a black background.
When you ran DOS, you could only have one program in memory at one time. Even so-called multitasking environments like DesqView were in reality task-switchers. That had some limitations, but it had some major strengths, too, particularly for the task of writing. When all you have is a word processor in front of you, you have to write. Either that or admit that you’re not actually writing, and get up and go do something else. There’s no bullshit like checking Twitter or responding to a quick email or looking up the weather. Write, or do not.
I have lately been looking to recapture that simplicity of interface, free of distraction. Microsoft Word is useful for some things, and pretty much a necessity for others, but for simple, focused composition, for flow, I find it cluttered and clunky. After reading Sawyer’s column above, I started considering whether I could make WordStar work for me.
To be clear, I never used WordStar back in the day. At the time I acquired my first PC (a 386-33 with 4MB of RAM!) WordStar was already considered obsolete. With people looking forward from single-tasking DOS to multi-tasking environments like OS/2 and Windows, simple 25×80 two color editors seemed archaic.
And yet I found myself leaving Windows (3.0) frequently. I wrote in a shareware editor named Boxer. I wrote thousands and thousands of lines of code in Turbo C++ and Turbo Assembler. There were no distractions – the entirety of your machine was consumed with that single interface, that single task. If you had email, it had to wait until you’d finished what you were doing and had switched programs.
It’s that focus, that flow, that I would like to recapture. When the only tool I had was a typewriter, well, the only thing you could do is write. I would take my coffee and go into the spare room in the townhouse when I had an hour or two, and I would do nothing but write.
Now, at this point I’ve managed to write two first drafts of substantial works on a multitasking Windows machine. But it has been tough going at times. There are advantages to being able to look up a word or research a topic without closing the word processor and starting some other program, but when I’m in the zone, I don’t want anything between me and the flow of the words.
Ultimately I decided that there are too many limitations with WordStar, and with the more modern Windows clone WordTsar, even if the latter was ready for prime-time, which it isn’t. WordStar is limited to the old DOS 8.3 filename convention, for one thing. There are ways around that, but they require some hoop-jumping. Another problem is that an ancient program has no understanding of modern document formats, and WordStar is so old now that few modern programs can read its files. Again, there are ways around that, but once again that requires extra steps… and avoiding extra steps and bits and pieces are what this quest is all about.
So for now I have decided to try FocusWriter. I am composing this on FocusWriter set to a simple green mono-spaced font on a black screen. FocusWriter gets out of your way, hiding its simple toolbars until you mouse over to the edge of the window. There are still phones, of course, and other programs and notifications… but with FocusWriter, the words on the screen have the most important place.
As I finish this blog entry, something else has come to my attention. Freewriter offers what are essentially electronic typewriters – simple screens that accept a stream of input from a keyboard – mechanical, in the case of the original Freewriter. You can’t edit, only write.
Back to the old days… I’m going to have to think about that. Maybe this is what I’ve been looking for all along.