I'm always in search of the ideal word processor, or even a great text editor. So I was amused by an article in the the New York Times Magazine that was cursing Microsoft Word. It, along with other posts and articles it referred to, was a rallying cry to abandon Word. Amusement became peals of laughter, however, when I realized that all of these articles were written by MacHeads. How they avoided choking on the irony is a mystery to me.
Why do I say this? Because the Mac drove the industry to its current GUI state. Menu here, fancy font there...on and on. Lovely for an operating system, I suppose, but loathsome for a text editor, for when you just want to do some writing. Which is why these articles were hilarious, because they were all written by MacHeads, complaining about the very state of things their beloved Mac created. Not that they thought of it in those terms. Instead, it was all Microsoft's fault.
Beyond the irony, I can sympathize with their plight. Early on in my forays into word processing I discovered that it's far too easy to change things when you use a computer, and so you do. Constantly. Endlessly. A tweak here, a touch there. Oh, maybe this word would look better before that word. Then there are the font choices. Ooh, Verdana looks marvelous, makes Arial look plain, and why do we have to suffer with Courier 12?!? (Once upon a time, I assisted in an on-line writing forum and more than a few participants complained about the font restrictions for manuscript submissions. You tried to explain that the entire industry was geared around Courier mono-spaced but they whined that it "looks ugly!" Strange, but I thought you wanted a reader to marvel over the substance of your words, not the style. But I digress...)
The end result of having access to all this fiddling is that you're doing anything but writing. Eventually, if you apply yourself, you can learn to avoid these tics. Maybe. They always lurk there, however, and they tease your inner editor into coming out to play at the worst time, when you're trying to crank out that all important first draft.
Thus, the search for the perfect creative writing word processor/text editor. To the delight of MacHeads, and to my utter damnation, the best ones appear to be MacOnly software.
Until a couple of years ago, I was content with WordPerfect. Setting a manuscript up was pretty straight forward and I'd been using it since pre-DOS days. When I was in law school, though, I reluctantly started using Word. My entire study group used it, including the guy with the Mac, and it just made it easier to exchange notes and the like. As a result, my writing took on the character of a split personality, with my creative writing being done in WP while scholastic and business work was done in Word. It was a situation that couldn't last, and it didn't. What ended it was MS Word 2007.
Most reviews of Word '07 focus on the elimination of the menus and the introduction of the "ribbon" interface. The learning curve is strange rather than steep, but once your mind clicks to the new lay of the land, it all seems clear, clean, and easy. Microsoft did a marvelous job, throwing out the old and trying to see how well something new new worked. I think it works great.
But what converted me completely was the ability to hide the ribbon. Double-click on a ribbon title and the entire thing goes away. Click next to the ruler and it goes away. In short order, Word appears sparse, bare, neat, clean, unobtrusive. It's almost like looking at the DOS version of WP. The status bar along the bottom of the window shows a real-time word count, plus other ancillary information. It's marvelous.
I spent a little time defining some writing styles, all mono-spaced Courier of course. I set the style, the ribbon goes away, and I'm left with a bare screen. If I maximize the window I can get rid of other desktop distractions and just get to work. Yet often that's not enough, and so I break out Q10.
Q10 is a text editor that makes your computer act like a typewriter. It even clicks as you type (though you can turn that off if you like). When working in Q10 you have a black screen with orange text. It takes over the entire screen, hiding the rest of your computer world away. Along the bottom is a sparse status bar that counts words, pages, and characters. It also shows the file name and the time of day. Other than that, it's just you and your words. You can't do anything fancy. You can't even underline, bold, or italicize.
I cannot stress how much of an effect this has on your writing. You focus on what you're writing and not how you're writing it. It's superb. And since Q10 saves ordinary ASCII text files, they're usable anywhere in the computer world. Once I've a first draft done, it's easy to move it into Word for formatting and letting the inner editor out to play.
Oh, and it's free.
There are, for those who are interested, equivalent programs for the Mac world. Still, though, I just find it ironic that MacHeads are looking for this stuff, distracted by all the hoopla their favored computer created. Too, too funny.
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