On word processing
June 9, 2003 | 12:00am
I got asked again a few days ago in an online forum about what word processor I used.
Questions like this go back a long way, to a tradition of equating the tools of the trade with the workman’s success (or lack thereof). In writing, T. S. Eliot’s typewriter and Ernest Hemingway’s Mongol No. 2 pencils have become virtual religious icons (despite the fact that Hemingway also used typewriters, as the account below graphically attests to). Eliot had a theory why a typewriter was better for writing the kind of poetry he did – it supposedly gave the work a more mechanical and therefore less personal edge (the opposite effect of writing with a fountain pen). But much of the fascination with writer’s tools, I suspect, is sheer voodoo and idol worship, of the kind that makes you rush out and buy the same boxer shorts (well, maybe a few sizes smaller) that Michael Jordan swears he wears, or whatever toothpaste Tiger Woods uses, in the vain hope of imbibing a smidgen of the endorser’s genius.
The essayist and editor Joseph Epstein, writing as "Aristides" in The American Scholar, observed that "If Capote was a horizontal author, Ernest Hemingway was a vertical one. He wrote standing up, usually in his bedroom in his house in Cuba, using the top of a bookcase, on which room was cleared, to quote the Paris Review, ‘for a typewriter, a wooden reading board, five or six pencils, and a chunk of copper ore to weight down papers when the wind blows in from the east windows.’ It gets better. Hemingway ‘stands in a pair of his oversized loafers on the worn skin of a Lesser Kudu – the typewriter and the reading board chest-high opposite him.’ He told his interviewer, George Plimpton, that he began in pencil, then shifted to his typewriter when his writing was going extremely well or when he wrote dialogue. Each day he kept count of the words he produced: ‘from 450, 575, 462, 1250, back to 512, the higher figures on days Hemingway puts in extra work so be won’t feel guilty spending the following day fishing on the Gulf Stream.’"
None of my schoolboy idols (Edgar Rice Burroughs, W. Somerset Maugham, the younger John Updike, Robert Graves, Dylan Thomas) used computers to "process" their opuses, chiefly because they didn’t have any then. Like most people my age, I caught the tail end of that pre-digital society and wrote with whatever was literally on hand, from pencils to Bics to Wearevers to Smith-Coronas.
My manuscripts tell a story (well, of course they do, but that’s not what I mean). The earliest ones, circa the mid-1970s, are all typed out very neatly, with an almost-printerly attention to layout and design. This was me trying to get at least the "look" of a finished story, if not the substance. I went out and scoured the stationery shops for the blue carbon paper I preferred. I observed margins with meticulous care, revising a phrase if it overshot the mark. The only problem was, the stories and the plays were lousy as hell.
Then I hit my stride in the early ‘80s, and wrote stories like "Heartland" and "Oldtimer" – in longhand, on yellow legal pad paper. This was me possessed by the notion that a "real" writer had to be able to write anywhere anytime, and I made a statement, if not a scene, at friends’ wedding receptions by jotting blithely away on long yellow sheets while they tossed bouquets and arm-wrestled with wineglasses. I paid someone else to type these drafts up for me (my kid sister Elaine used to do it for free, but you can invoke seniority only so much), then promptly peppered the typescript with blooms of assorted emendations. It meant, of course, another trip to the typist and another fee to be paid, but I began to feel that this was what writers did – they marched haggard and bleary-eyed into their secretaries’ offices in the morning to drop off sheaves of coffee-stained, cigarette-charred papers (the next Iliad, the new Paradiso). These were the kinds of manuscripts you held close to your chest; inevitably, you misplaced a sheet here and there, forever to be remembered as the greatest few paragraphs you ever wrote but sadly lost.
As the decade wore on, I began to relax and to work directly on the typewriter, literally cutting and pasting (or taping and stapling) swatches of text until a story came together. The long story (or short novel) "Voyager" began this way, a physical collage of many scenes written on different typewriters (it was begun in 1983, as an impulse piece to protest the Aquino assassination, and would not be finished until 1994, by which time it had become a love story). I pecked happily away at my Olympia portable until, as fate would have it, I learned word processing.
For about 15 years now, I’ve done practically all my writing on a computer, using a program called, for some oddly apt reason, a word processor. (I didn’t like "word processor" the first time I heard it, thinking that it described something like an Osterizer churning overripe adverbs and adjectives into a frothy mix. But I’ve relented since, seeing how the technology really allows you to do things with words that you can never do on a typewriter.) Right now I favor MS Word v.X and, as a converter for Internet files and formats into plain text, TextEdit Plus, both of them for the Mac.
I’ve told this story before in various forms and venues, and so to cut it as short as I can let me just say that I took up word processing (and with it, the whole computing bundle) in 1987 as a graduate student in the US, after a year of obstinate resistance. Like some fool dragging a block of ice into Alaska, I had hand-carried my Olympia with me to the States, refusing to touch a computer until my classmates assured me that it would mean no loss of national or personal pride to take up this new Gringo affectation. Twenty minutes was all it took to learn MacWrite and to get me hooked on Macs for life. MacWrite was a great program (and still is) because it allowed you to type and format your work just the way you wanted to see it in print (what would come to be known as "What you see is what you get," or WYSIWYG). Indeed, anything that can convert a Luddite into a geek in 20 minutes has got to be great (or "insanely great," as the Apple experience has been less than modestly promoted).
Since then I’ve used a variety of computers – yes, even PCs – and word processors. When I had to move to another university for my PhD and work on PCs, I learned DOS and mastered WordPerfect 4.2, whose great virtue (once you got past the finger combinations) was its simplicity of appearance (which you could have said, actually, of anything DOS) – you typed away in glowing green or orange letters on a big black screen. As soon as I got back to Macs, I shifted to Word 5.1a, my word processor of choice from about 1994 to 2001, an eternity in computer time, supplanted only recently by Word 2001 and then by Word v.X for the Mac.
My friend Krip complains about how MS Word 2001 is slow as molasses on the PowerBook I’ve been babying for him for the past six years. I tell him, ever so gently, that it might be time for him to consider upgrading either his memory (the laptop’s, I mean) or the computer itself. Since I don’t think he’s going to do either anytime soon, I’ve made a mental note to downgrade his processor to Word 5.1a the next chance I get.
There’s a lot to be said for these old programs, even and especially in new machines. They’re very small – WordPerfect 4.2 for DOS was something like 230K, or about a sixth of a 1.44MB floppy’s capacity. MacWrite wasn’t much bigger. They had to be tiny, because floppies at that time were physically larger (remember the old 5.25-inch disks?) but digitally smaller, with capacities of only 360K and 720K. (MS Word v.X, on the other hand, is a mammoth 12.7MB.) Whatever your program was, it had to fit in one diskette, with space to spare for data, because everything happened there, especially if your computer had nothing more than a 10MB hard drive, if it had one at all. In pre-hard drive days, you walked around with two diskettes: one to boot the machine, and another to run your programs and save your work on.
If it seemed like it took forever to boot WP4.2 on an XT or MacWrite on a MacPlus, you should see them run on a Pentium or a G4. They’re as zippy as hares in heat. So, what happened in the transition from these bantam performers to the multi-megabyte, memory-hog behemoths we have to deal with today? "Software bloat" is what it’s called in the business, the progressive inflation of popular software programs on the assumption that the customer actually has more needs than he or she realizes – fancy formatting, a bucket of fonts and styles, hyperlinks to the Internet, spell checks, grammar checks, a built-in dictionary, conversion to Web pages, and what have you – none of which, naturally, comes free. And just as soon as you buy a more powerful and more expensive machine to run these big new programs, they make the programs even bigger and more complicated, requiring – guess what? – another hardware upgrade to make full use of their features.
I have to admit that I make use of the dictionary and the spell check quite a bit (I fancy myself a spelling bee, but even the best of us can’t beat fatigue and eyestrain at 3 am). I also appreciate Word’s and TextEdit Plus’s ability to read and save files in various formats, especially RTF, and to enlarge the screen fonts to something 50-year-old eyes can read. I do not appreciate Word’s propensity to tell me how to write a letter. So I turn this witless "wizard" and almost everything else off, so I can work with what I used to have when all I did was to feed a sheet of bond paper into the typewriter carriage: a blank page, and a blinking cursor in my head. I daresay the best word processor is still somewhere up there in your unplugged noggin.
Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com.
Questions like this go back a long way, to a tradition of equating the tools of the trade with the workman’s success (or lack thereof). In writing, T. S. Eliot’s typewriter and Ernest Hemingway’s Mongol No. 2 pencils have become virtual religious icons (despite the fact that Hemingway also used typewriters, as the account below graphically attests to). Eliot had a theory why a typewriter was better for writing the kind of poetry he did – it supposedly gave the work a more mechanical and therefore less personal edge (the opposite effect of writing with a fountain pen). But much of the fascination with writer’s tools, I suspect, is sheer voodoo and idol worship, of the kind that makes you rush out and buy the same boxer shorts (well, maybe a few sizes smaller) that Michael Jordan swears he wears, or whatever toothpaste Tiger Woods uses, in the vain hope of imbibing a smidgen of the endorser’s genius.
The essayist and editor Joseph Epstein, writing as "Aristides" in The American Scholar, observed that "If Capote was a horizontal author, Ernest Hemingway was a vertical one. He wrote standing up, usually in his bedroom in his house in Cuba, using the top of a bookcase, on which room was cleared, to quote the Paris Review, ‘for a typewriter, a wooden reading board, five or six pencils, and a chunk of copper ore to weight down papers when the wind blows in from the east windows.’ It gets better. Hemingway ‘stands in a pair of his oversized loafers on the worn skin of a Lesser Kudu – the typewriter and the reading board chest-high opposite him.’ He told his interviewer, George Plimpton, that he began in pencil, then shifted to his typewriter when his writing was going extremely well or when he wrote dialogue. Each day he kept count of the words he produced: ‘from 450, 575, 462, 1250, back to 512, the higher figures on days Hemingway puts in extra work so be won’t feel guilty spending the following day fishing on the Gulf Stream.’"
None of my schoolboy idols (Edgar Rice Burroughs, W. Somerset Maugham, the younger John Updike, Robert Graves, Dylan Thomas) used computers to "process" their opuses, chiefly because they didn’t have any then. Like most people my age, I caught the tail end of that pre-digital society and wrote with whatever was literally on hand, from pencils to Bics to Wearevers to Smith-Coronas.
My manuscripts tell a story (well, of course they do, but that’s not what I mean). The earliest ones, circa the mid-1970s, are all typed out very neatly, with an almost-printerly attention to layout and design. This was me trying to get at least the "look" of a finished story, if not the substance. I went out and scoured the stationery shops for the blue carbon paper I preferred. I observed margins with meticulous care, revising a phrase if it overshot the mark. The only problem was, the stories and the plays were lousy as hell.
Then I hit my stride in the early ‘80s, and wrote stories like "Heartland" and "Oldtimer" – in longhand, on yellow legal pad paper. This was me possessed by the notion that a "real" writer had to be able to write anywhere anytime, and I made a statement, if not a scene, at friends’ wedding receptions by jotting blithely away on long yellow sheets while they tossed bouquets and arm-wrestled with wineglasses. I paid someone else to type these drafts up for me (my kid sister Elaine used to do it for free, but you can invoke seniority only so much), then promptly peppered the typescript with blooms of assorted emendations. It meant, of course, another trip to the typist and another fee to be paid, but I began to feel that this was what writers did – they marched haggard and bleary-eyed into their secretaries’ offices in the morning to drop off sheaves of coffee-stained, cigarette-charred papers (the next Iliad, the new Paradiso). These were the kinds of manuscripts you held close to your chest; inevitably, you misplaced a sheet here and there, forever to be remembered as the greatest few paragraphs you ever wrote but sadly lost.
As the decade wore on, I began to relax and to work directly on the typewriter, literally cutting and pasting (or taping and stapling) swatches of text until a story came together. The long story (or short novel) "Voyager" began this way, a physical collage of many scenes written on different typewriters (it was begun in 1983, as an impulse piece to protest the Aquino assassination, and would not be finished until 1994, by which time it had become a love story). I pecked happily away at my Olympia portable until, as fate would have it, I learned word processing.
For about 15 years now, I’ve done practically all my writing on a computer, using a program called, for some oddly apt reason, a word processor. (I didn’t like "word processor" the first time I heard it, thinking that it described something like an Osterizer churning overripe adverbs and adjectives into a frothy mix. But I’ve relented since, seeing how the technology really allows you to do things with words that you can never do on a typewriter.) Right now I favor MS Word v.X and, as a converter for Internet files and formats into plain text, TextEdit Plus, both of them for the Mac.
I’ve told this story before in various forms and venues, and so to cut it as short as I can let me just say that I took up word processing (and with it, the whole computing bundle) in 1987 as a graduate student in the US, after a year of obstinate resistance. Like some fool dragging a block of ice into Alaska, I had hand-carried my Olympia with me to the States, refusing to touch a computer until my classmates assured me that it would mean no loss of national or personal pride to take up this new Gringo affectation. Twenty minutes was all it took to learn MacWrite and to get me hooked on Macs for life. MacWrite was a great program (and still is) because it allowed you to type and format your work just the way you wanted to see it in print (what would come to be known as "What you see is what you get," or WYSIWYG). Indeed, anything that can convert a Luddite into a geek in 20 minutes has got to be great (or "insanely great," as the Apple experience has been less than modestly promoted).
Since then I’ve used a variety of computers – yes, even PCs – and word processors. When I had to move to another university for my PhD and work on PCs, I learned DOS and mastered WordPerfect 4.2, whose great virtue (once you got past the finger combinations) was its simplicity of appearance (which you could have said, actually, of anything DOS) – you typed away in glowing green or orange letters on a big black screen. As soon as I got back to Macs, I shifted to Word 5.1a, my word processor of choice from about 1994 to 2001, an eternity in computer time, supplanted only recently by Word 2001 and then by Word v.X for the Mac.
My friend Krip complains about how MS Word 2001 is slow as molasses on the PowerBook I’ve been babying for him for the past six years. I tell him, ever so gently, that it might be time for him to consider upgrading either his memory (the laptop’s, I mean) or the computer itself. Since I don’t think he’s going to do either anytime soon, I’ve made a mental note to downgrade his processor to Word 5.1a the next chance I get.
There’s a lot to be said for these old programs, even and especially in new machines. They’re very small – WordPerfect 4.2 for DOS was something like 230K, or about a sixth of a 1.44MB floppy’s capacity. MacWrite wasn’t much bigger. They had to be tiny, because floppies at that time were physically larger (remember the old 5.25-inch disks?) but digitally smaller, with capacities of only 360K and 720K. (MS Word v.X, on the other hand, is a mammoth 12.7MB.) Whatever your program was, it had to fit in one diskette, with space to spare for data, because everything happened there, especially if your computer had nothing more than a 10MB hard drive, if it had one at all. In pre-hard drive days, you walked around with two diskettes: one to boot the machine, and another to run your programs and save your work on.
If it seemed like it took forever to boot WP4.2 on an XT or MacWrite on a MacPlus, you should see them run on a Pentium or a G4. They’re as zippy as hares in heat. So, what happened in the transition from these bantam performers to the multi-megabyte, memory-hog behemoths we have to deal with today? "Software bloat" is what it’s called in the business, the progressive inflation of popular software programs on the assumption that the customer actually has more needs than he or she realizes – fancy formatting, a bucket of fonts and styles, hyperlinks to the Internet, spell checks, grammar checks, a built-in dictionary, conversion to Web pages, and what have you – none of which, naturally, comes free. And just as soon as you buy a more powerful and more expensive machine to run these big new programs, they make the programs even bigger and more complicated, requiring – guess what? – another hardware upgrade to make full use of their features.
I have to admit that I make use of the dictionary and the spell check quite a bit (I fancy myself a spelling bee, but even the best of us can’t beat fatigue and eyestrain at 3 am). I also appreciate Word’s and TextEdit Plus’s ability to read and save files in various formats, especially RTF, and to enlarge the screen fonts to something 50-year-old eyes can read. I do not appreciate Word’s propensity to tell me how to write a letter. So I turn this witless "wizard" and almost everything else off, so I can work with what I used to have when all I did was to feed a sheet of bond paper into the typewriter carriage: a blank page, and a blinking cursor in my head. I daresay the best word processor is still somewhere up there in your unplugged noggin.
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