Comment by staplung
5 years ago
I wonder how much of this is a deliberately cultivated form of eccentricity. To be clear, I am casting no aspersions here - use what you wanna use!
But the perfidy of spell check and auto-correct seem like fairly easy problems to avoid if you wanted to use a computer that didn't require you to mail floppies to your publisher. Emacs...vi...nano...even WordPad (it's been a long time since I've used that; maybe it does red underlining these days).
Keyboard shortcuts and lack of distracting internet can also be worked around (emacs has a WordStar compatibility mode because of course it does; it even models WordStar's marker system).
Sure, this takes a small amount of setup but it's not as if maintaining museum-grade hardware/software is hassle-free either. But using DOS and WordStar _is_ a conversation starter and subtly signals that you're important enough of a writer that your publisher will bend over backwards to accommodate you. Shit, whoever Martin's publisher is, I'm sure they'd be happy to deal with cuneiform tablets if that's what the man wanted.
I think the lack of distractions on a dos computer may be another inadvertent advantage of using an old computer. Even more so than we non-authors may think.
Cal Newport’s blog has many interesting stories about writers retreat’s. This seems like a sanctuary, whether intentional or not.
Update: I’m writing a text book right now. I can tell you that publishers do not bend over backwards to accommodate non-standard tool choices (Dropbox Paper in our case). The more you include Microsoft word in your workflow, the easier it will be.
> Update: I’m writing a text book right now. I can tell you that publishers do not bend over backwards to accommodate non-standard tool choices
I think GP is specifically talking about super famous/lucrative writers, not writers in general. (This isn't meant as a slight at all, to be clear; I'm nowhere near George R. R. Martin-levels of acclaim in my field either!)
It’s also what he’s used to and the frustration of learning new tooling provides no advantage for him.
Charles Schultz did something similar with the type of pen he used.
> I wonder how much of this is a deliberately cultivated form of eccentricity. To be clear, I am casting no aspersions here - use what you wanna use!
Probably very little. My guess is he learned WordStar well, likes it, and is too comfortable with it want to "upgrade."
> Keyboard shortcuts and lack of distracting internet can also be worked around (emacs has a WordStar compatibility mode because of course it does; it even models WordStar's marker system).
Spending a bunch of time and effort to find a new tool that works just like your familiar tool seems like more of a techy thing. A lot of people just take the if it ain't broke, don't fix it approach.
> Sure, this takes a small amount of setup but it's not as if maintaining museum-grade hardware/software is hassle-free either. But using DOS and WordStar _is_ a conversation starter and subtly signals that you're important enough of a writer that your publisher will bend over backwards to accommodate you.
This is apparently a picture of him at his computer, and it doesn't look that ancient: https://imgur.com/a/9PITE
And given that he's a writer, he's publishers would probably be just has happy with an ASCII text file as a Word doc.
That sounds about right - expecting predictably unnoticeable latency from typing and predictable interface without updates being forced on you, is a kind of "deliberately cultivated form of eccentricity" :)
Merely using vim does not shield you from occassional bowel movements of the modern OS which introduce sudden infuriating spikes of latency.