If you're going to bring up Kerouac with his rolls of paper, you're better off talking about WordStar than Word. Word divides the document into discrete pages,

If you're going to bring up Kerouac with his rolls of paper, you're better off talking about WordStar than Word. Word divides the document into discrete pages, while WordStar documents were long uninterrupted ribbons of text, just like Kerouac's rolls. Perhaps Kerouac "got it," but so do George R.R. Martin and Robert Sawyer, writers who continue to use WordStar decades after its demise (Sawyer even talks about the benefits of this undivided waterfall of text on his website [0]. Text editors also similarly long ribbons of text, and are just as conducive to putting words down as any bloated word processor that is optimized to produce two page corporate memos or colorful party posters to be posted in the lunch room. I've used Word professionally since the mid-1990s. I do know how to use it properly, and it still sucks. "Writing" isn't meant to be done in a word processor, which was developed as a business tool, not a creative tool. Writing should be done in whatever tool one wants to write in. Word is, be design, both a desktop publishing app and a secretarial tool. For book-length writing, it works poorly with long files, the file format is subject to corruption. The docx format is also proprietary and subject to Microsoft's whim; any conversion scheme is a hack (though Pandoc and many others do work adequately). Unless you learn the ins and outs of Word's style scheme (and sometimes even if you do) and follow it slavishly, formatting is often inconsistent and there's no certainty that the styles you apply to make your document to make it look a certain way ensure it looks that way on someone else's machine. There's no doubt, though, that a Word-compatible word processor needs to be in every writers' toolkit, since it is the standard in the publishing world. [0] https://www.sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm https://www.sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm, scroll down or search for THE LONG-HAND PAGE METAPHOR.