Beat your computers into typewriters

July 1, 2006 in Uncategorized
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Bruce Sterling, in a recent and inspired rant about spimes, blogjects and the Internet of Things, went on for a bit about how inaccurate the word “computer” is. He posited an alternative universe where we called them “ordinators”, like the French do, ordinateurs.

I was just reading this off the Guardian:

Most writing happens under the duress of constant distractions: phones, emails, colleagues, and a vast and unending internet full of tantalising ways of wasting time, to name just a few. When we write, we have to devise strategies to thwart these and to ensure concentration [...] By and large, these strategies fail to address the very source of most distractions that fill a modern working day: computers. Even disconnected from the internet, a computer is a Pandora’s box of time-killing baubles: music libraries, bundled games, archives from other projects, photographs, movies, popup reminders from your other software programs nagging you to do this or that, and more settings, preferences and opportunities for tweaking than you can shake a stick at. You can spend a whole day at the keyboard on vaguely productive tasks and still emerge with nothing to show for it.

I like “time-killing baubles”. It’s true, of course. Sometimes I envy Wendell Berry, who actually does use a typewriter. (Or carves everything by hand onto clay tablets, whatever. Doesn’t use a computer, is what I mean.) In the article quoted and linked above, Vinh goes on to talk about using software to beat the problem. If a typewriter is the “ultimate single-tasking productivity application”, and yet typewriters are too flat-out tedious to actually use, he says, perhaps we should have software that emulates typewriters. Something that takes over your interface, hides away all the time-killing baubles. Ideally, according to Vinh, it wouldn’t allow you to backspace or ^H^H^H^H your way into the morass of “editing”; the whole point of this entire exercise is forward momentum. Having spent plenty of time in one morass or the other, I can see his point. Kind of. The article ends with a plug for a MacOS X app called WriteRoom, which does pretty much what he says except for the backspace-not-allowed thing.

So hang on -without that most typewriter-like quality, isn’t this just a fullscreen text editor? How’s that different from running vi on a console? Or, like I do nowadays, vi on a full-screen terminal with a nice transparent background? Fullscreen on xfterm4 (press F11) is quite nice. (And you know, even Microsoft Word comes with a fullscreen mode, which frankly would work just as well as this WriteRoom thing -if it ain’t vi, it ain’t vi. Unless it’s Emacs, and the less said about that the better.)

On a related if slightly tangential note: there is a vi that may be better than vi, and that’s Cream. Which works fine in graphical mode, has a few nice colour schemes and is perfectly functional cross-platform. Doesn’t have a fullscreen mode, though. I can’t say I’ve suffered because of that lack.

Which brings me in a roundabout way to my professionally reasoned out response to the “oh no, our computers are so distracting that I need a whole new application to give me a fullscreen text editor”. Obviously it’s not just the computers which are distracting: that’s pretty much what life is like for a lot of us now. What’s apparently not so obvious, though it should be, is that if you need a new software tool to save you from the world so that you can write in peace, then you’re probably not cut out for this work anyway. Distraction, tedium, boredom, ennui, apathy -whatever variation or flavour is your preferred poison, these are not things that can be fixed in software. To make your own way out of the slough of despond (or the slightly muddy scrubland of perpetual distraction, whatever) is one of the things that makes people smart and insightful. People who can’t focus on what they want to do in the middle of chaos, they probably can’t write anything worth reading, either. In fact, that might be how you get to the point where you can write something worth reading.

Also, it annoys me that the arty-farty MacOS types are all gaga-googoo over a fancy new text editor just because it has (booya!) fullscreen mode. I think that’s actually the real reason behind my slight overreaction to this whole thing. I’m simultaneously envious and contemptuous, neither of which are nice to look at. Or perhaps, to be kinder to myself, I’m just slightly brain-stretched from simultaneously feeling like an insider and an outsider.

I wrote a few hundred words today. They were all right. Words in some order. I used Cream. It’s a novel. Or it will be, at some point -maybe. If I’m lucky, persistent and sufficiently cunning. My take is that persistence matters most out of the three, though some would definitely give first place to sheer good fortune. Text editors though, even in fullscreen mode? Nah.