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Pretty common but useful advice. His advocacy of text editors is different though. I'm noticing a trend of SciFi writers like Neal Stephenson and now Cory Doct

Pretty common but useful advice. His advocacy of text editors is different though. I'm noticing a trend of SciFi writers like Neal Stephenson and now Cory Doctorow who use programmer's text editors such as emacs and vim rather than conventional word processors or novel specific tools like CopyWrite. I don't buy that spell check is that annoying. You can turn it off, and novelist specific tools claim not to be distracting, though I haven't tried any. Is emacs really that much better for creative work or do they want to appear smart/cool by using the same tools as the "hackers" they write about?

justindz 18y ago
The idea that vim and emacs are not distracting because they don't have features was a little odd. I think he means that they don't make you feel like you have to style the content, maybe. In a period of quiet desperation, I was using the Dark Room text editor in full screen, but I get by on Notepad++ and gedit these days. The main advantage I find is that they launch quickly and they rarely go slower than you can.
LogicHoleFlaw 18y ago
I use vim personally, but I do pretty much all my writing in there. It's very, very good at shuffling text around. And there are very few visual distractions.
jcl 18y ago
That sounds like a trend of two. I think it is more likely that both Stephenson and Doctorow were programmers earlier in their careers (implied in their Wikipedia articles -- Doctorow founded a software company and Stephenson switched to a physics major so that he could "spend more time on the university mainframe"). And once you know a text editor really well (any text editor, even Word), it is simply most efficient to keep using it; there are apparently still professional writers who won't use an editor that lacks WordStar keybindings. However, it would not surprise me at all to learn that there is significant overlap between "people who learn to program" and "people who want to write sci-fi novels". I just don't think we'll hear about Toni Morrison picking up emacs anytime soon.

justindz 18y ago

The idea that vim and emacs are not distracting because they don't have features was a little odd. I think he means that they don't make you feel like you have to style the content, maybe. In a period of quiet desperation, I was using the Dark Room text editor in full screen, but I get by on Notepad++ and gedit these days. The main advantage I find is that they launch quickly and they rarely go slower than you can.

LogicHoleFlaw 18y ago

I use vim personally, but I do pretty much all my writing in there. It's very, very good at shuffling text around. And there are very few visual distractions.

jcl 18y ago

That sounds like a trend of two. I think it is more likely that both Stephenson and Doctorow were programmers earlier in their careers (implied in their Wikipedia articles -- Doctorow founded a software company and Stephenson switched to a physics major so that he could "spend more time on the university mainframe"). And once you know a text editor really well (any text editor, even Word), it is simply most efficient to keep using it; there are apparently still professional writers who won't use an editor that lacks WordStar keybindings. However, it would not surprise me at all to learn that there is significant overlap between "people who learn to program" and "people who want to write sci-fi novels". I just don't think we'll hear about Toni Morrison picking up emacs anytime soon.