Writers who use computers sometimes talk about their nostalgia for, and fantasies about, typewriters’ plentiful white space — or the white space of any blank sheet of paper. As in a purely empty page: as in the opposite of Microsoft Word’s space-eating toolbars, dancing paperclips, and squiggly red lines underneath your artsy grammar and underneath words your software simply doesn’t recognize. True, you can turn off many of these word processor impositions (surprising as it may be to geeks, lots of writers aren’t aware of those settings). But some impositions — whether in MS Word or other word processors — stay put, cluttering up your screen and distracting you. Ah, but you say you’re invincible against clutter’s powers of distraction? I suggest you actually try a text-editor’s blank screen for a while before you assume clutter doesn’t mess with your story headspace.
What’s a text-editor, you say?
Text-editors are software programs designed specifically for composing text — not for producing images and tables and bullet points and dancing paperclips alongside words. If you don’t want to abandon the way computers allow you to move text around quicker than longhand, or the way computers allow you to get your thoughts down faster than a cramping hand, use a text-editor (I use TextPad). Word processors are at root text-editors combined (often poorly!) with elements of graphic design programs. But text-editors combine the advantages of a computer without the disadvantages of word processors; you can think of text-editors as high-tech typewriters.
In a Locus Magazine article titled “Writing the Age of Distraction,” Cory Doctorow advocates text-editors against word processors:
Word, Google Office and OpenOffice all come with a bewildering array of typesetting and automation settings that you can play with forever. Forget it. All that stuff is distraction, and the last thing you want is your tool second-guessing you, “correcting” your spelling, criticizing your sentence structure, and so on. The programmers who wrote your word processor type all day long, every day, and they have the power to buy or acquire any tool they can imagine for entering text into a computer. They don’t write their software with Word. They use a text-editor, like vi, Emacs, TextPad, BBEdit, Gedit, or any of a host of editors. These are some of the most venerable, reliable, powerful tools in the history of software (since they’re at the core of all other software) and they have almost no distracting features — but they do have powerful search-and-replace functions. Best of all, the humble .txt file can be read by practically every application on your computer, can be pasted directly into an email, and can’t transmit a virus.
Below, compare a screenshot of a typical MS Word configuration with a screenshot of TextPad, both using text from the beginning of my (free!) short story “Glenn of Green Gables.”
Microsoft Word:
As you can see, TextPad shows merely one thin menu bar at the top; the rest is empty space for you to dive into. MS Word surrounds your screen, and thus your headspace, with distractions.
My text-editor gives me an additional benefit: when I set TextPad to full-screen, I feel as if associations between my computer and non-creative work and recreation drop away. Let me explain. Robert Olen Butler advises taking advantage of a phenomenon psychologists call “functional fixedness.” From his how-to fiction-writing book From Where You Dream:
That is, if you have a certain place and certain objects that you associate only with a certain task, eventually the associational values build up in such a way that when you go to that place and engage those objects, you are instantly completely focused on that task.
Partly I regard my computer and desk as a place where I check email, stare at Twitter, what have you; partly, it isn’t a place to get ‘in the zone’ for creative writing. For a while I thought that maybe I could use two computers and two locatons — one for creative work and the other for non-creative work and recreation — but that wasn’t practical. However, everytime I work creatively in a text-editor, I feel as if I’m in a different world, far away from a tempting taskbar or, god forbid, a dancing paperclip.
EPILOGUE: Minor tech notes for new users of TextPad and other text-editors:
- Text-editors save documents as .txt files in either UNIX-based or PC-based format (your choice); many programs on whatever platform read either format sufficiently well (so the formats are largely interchangable); but, if you run into a problem with something somewhere (such as with tagcloud.pl), try saving your .txt file in the other format. Microsoft stuff uses the PC-based format; Macintosh and UNIX-based programs (including operating systems such as Linux) prefer the UNIX-based .txt format.
- In TextPad, pressing Alt+V followed by an “F” keystroke will give you a full-screen view, but you might have to adjust your Windows taskbar first (by right-clicking it and changing options on the Properties menu) in order for it to disappear beneath Textpad’s blessed blank screen.
- In TextPad, an F11 keystroke will give you a sidebar where you can select between multiple files. I find this useful when I write sections of a creative work out of order.
- In TextPad, pressing Alt+C followed by a “W” keystroke will force the program to word-wrap your text automatically, which is what you want.
- You can and should change many of TextPad’s default settings, such as for font size, to your liking.
