Rich Sezov's Blog

My Road to Writing, Part 6: Full-Time Writing

My blindness to the difference between creating at the keyboard and formatting a document came from all the business writing I was doing. In 1997, I��d made a career change from server administration to software development. I��d begun coding, first on Lotus Notes platforms, and then on Java. By the turn of the century I��d switched jobs and was lead developer at a Fortune 500 company. One of my first assignments was writing an RFP, or Request for Proposal.

An RFP is a document that describes a business problem the company wants to solve, and potentially the platforms and/or tools it wants to use to solve it. This document is then sent to outside consulting firms who compete by sending their proposals for solving the problem along with how much it will cost. The company then picks one of them to do the job for the price quoted. Business writing had been my thing for a while, and an RFP was an easy first assignment.

Here��s the thing: companies tend to have templates for everything, and this RFP was no different. I didn��t have to create anything from scratch; the template already had all the sections I needed to complete. In other words, the creating was inexorably mixed with the formatting. Logos, headings, and sections were already in place; I only needed to replace the placeholders with my own text. I fired up Microsoft Word (the company standard, of course), opened the template, described the problem in the proper sections, outlined possible solutions and the tools we wanted to use to create them, and completed the document.

I was surprised and pleased; my supervisor said it was the best RFP he��d ever seen. Of course, as a writer, that isn��t saying much��an RFP is hardly a challenging document. But it was the latest example in a pattern I��d been following for years, a pattern that did not lend itself well to my original dream of creative writing.

This pattern led me to reject the idea of text processing and find my next word processor, on Linux: StarWriter, part of the StarOffice suite. A German company, probably frustrated (like everyone else) at trying to release the stranglehold Microsoft Office had on the industry, decided to give their office suite away and sell support only. The company was purchased by Sun Microsystems (according to Wikipedia, for less than the cost of licensing Microsoft Office for all their desktops) and became an open source office suite, first called OpenOffice, and now called LibreOffice.

StarWriter (now just Writer) had everything I��d been accustomed to: WYSIWYG editing, scalable fonts, layout features, and more. There was nothing I couldn��t do in Writer that I could do in any other word processor I��d used, including Microsoft Word. My wife wrote her dissertation on it, formatted precisely to specifications.

I had my Linux-based word processor.

Over the next decade, I switched jobs a few more times. At each job I was forced to use both Windows and Microsoft Word, but at home I could use Linux with my KDE desktop. I was a Java developer, writing more code than text. I used my word processor as both a place to put words and as a page layout program, like everybody else. My desktop had given way to my first laptop at home, and I didn��t need to tinker much with hardware anymore.

In 2007, everything changed again. I got a job for an Internet startup, an open source company called Liferay. I��d been hired to do their documentation, full-time. Finally, I��d gotten the opportunity to combine my writing skills with my technical knowledge. I was employee number 47. Now I would be working with the software and writing about it every day. It was a daunting task; Liferay is a huge piece of enterprise software, capable of running websites for the largest of companies, and chock full of features.

Naturally, I turned to my writing tool of choice: LibreOffice Writer. I��d decided I��d write books, and since I was the only person doing this, I could use what I wanted. I wrote three editions of the documentation and did the layout with only LibreOffice Writer as my tool.

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At some point, of course, books and PDFs weren��t enough. Liferay needed fully indexed and searchable documentation on the web, not in a book. Not only that, but I now had a team, and we did more than just documentation; we were also responsible for developing the training material. For both the documentation and the training material, we used LibreOffice. The training slides were created in Impress, and the documentation in Writer.

It was (and still is) difficult to create an editorial process of multiple writers collaborating with each other and sending final edits to an editor (me) in LibreOffice. I wanted to see the history of the articles, what was changed, and who changed it. I wanted to compare the old version of an article with the new version. We needed new tools to do that, and our own company showed the way.

Liferay was in the middle of migrating its source code repository from Subversion to Git. Git was revolutionary at the time, and it started to get very popular. Where other source control systems placed roadblocks on developers by locking files, overwriting changes, or forcing crazy merges, Git freed developers to work. It could make many merges automatically; everybody had the complete history of the source, and it was nearly impossible to overwrite the history.

I realized that Git offered everything I wanted in an editorial process: I could see the whole history, all the changes, who made them, and the delta between an old version of a document and a new one. We could work together easily and merge the changes. The only problem?

We would have to switch to plain text.

My Road to Writing, Part 5: Conversion

You have to understand, at this point in my life, I��d been building my own computers from parts for almost a decade. And even though I��d just purchased one from Gateway, that didn��t mean I didn��t keep upgrading parts of it. A new hard drive (and reinstall) here, a new video card there. Modem too slow? Install a faster one. No network card? Let��s add one. Buy a SCSI scanner; install a SCSI card to run it. That��s the way you did things back then. USB as a standard interface didn��t exist.

At this time, one of my computer science professors started attending my church with her family. Her husband, whom I hadn��t met before this, was also a computer science professor at my alma mater. He was (and I��m sure still is) a Unix-aficionado. I had played with Linux and gotten it to do some useful things, but it was still an alien environment to me, with very different workflows and assumptions.

For example, it didn��t seem important to Linux/Unix users to have a graphical desktop environment, and to do everything in a GUI. Instead there were window managers, which had to be set up manually and didn��t automatically find the applications installed on the machine. They felt like souped-up menus, like the Hard Disk Menu I used to set up for customers on DOS. And a lot of core applications had to be run in the terminal��in fact, it seemed like the window managers�� main function was to run multiple terminal windows, sometimes with a few graphical applications.

Linux had a plethora of editors that could manage plain text, but word processors? Few if none, at this time. Spreadsheets? Couldn��t find any. How was anybody supposed to get any work done in this environment? Was Linux just for coding? Was it just for replacing the Novell- and Windows-based file servers I��d used? Was it just for running web servers? Now I had met someone who could answer those questions for me.

At around the same time, Microsoft released Windows XP, with its activation servers. This was their effort to combat piracy of their operating system. XP, so they said, would take a snapshot of the hardware on your system and upload that to the activation servers. If you made a change to your computer, such as swapping out the motherboard, upgrading your hard disk, changing the video card, or adding some other hardware, Microsoft would assume, since your hardware changed, that you were pirating Windows XP by installing the same copy on another computer, and they would deactivate your computer. You could call and beg Microsoft to reinstate your computer, but that decision was up to them.

In my mind, this meant several things:

Microsoft could reach out to my computer at any time, or my computer could reach out to Microsoft at any time and upload data to their servers. Microsoft had the power to render my computer useless from afar. I could not, therefore, upgrade my computer��s components as I��d been accustomed to doing. If my hardware snapshot could be uploaded without my knowledge, so technically could anything else.

I could only come to one conclusion: if I installed Windows XP, my computer would no longer be my own. Some part of it would belong to Microsoft. Additionally, I would never be sure I could trust my own computer.

On my personal computer, I have never used Windows XP or any version of Windows that came after it.

I went from dual booting Linux and playing around with it to actively seeking to use it full time. In my discussions with Professor Provine, I learned about the difference between word processing and text processing. He asked me this question: what would happen, 20 years from now, to the data I was entering into my proprietary word processing programs? Could I be sure I would always be able to get that data out?

I thought about my old papers, written in WordStar, now a decade gone. How long would conversion utilities be available? Would they convert cleanly into a modern format, complete with all formatting? I didn��t know, but I��d have to find out.

But, he said, that was just chasing your tail. You could convert to another proprietary format, only to have that fall out of favor and have to convert again. And again. There was a way to prevent that. His wife��s dissertation, he said, was written in plain text, in something called groff. No matter what happened, that dissertation would always be readable and editable; yet it had been formatted exactly to the specifications required by his wife��s dissertation committee, complete with images and illustrations.

He didn��t recommend groff to me; instead, he recommended I check out LaTeX, which he pronounced, ��laytek.�� Tools like these were why, on Linux and Unix systems, nobody cared so much about word processors. The text editors on Linux were among the most powerful available, and you could produce professional, typeset documents using only plain text.

Though this intrigued me, it felt like going backwards. In WordStar, I could type dot commands right into the text to set margins and columns, and then I could preview what the page would look like. LaTeX was much the same: type commands to set formatting and insert images, and then run a program to generate a PDF you could look at to see if your formatting was right. It wasn��t WYSIWYG at all. And as I look back on this now, I realize I was no longer thinking like a writer, about getting text on the page and sculpting that text to be as clear as possible. I was conceptually mixing the act of creation at the keyboard with the act of formatting a document, and they are not the same. But that��s where the WYSIWYG, GUI world had taken me.

It would be another decade before I realized my mistake. But that��s for the next part.

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Published on September 10, 2024 21:00

My Road to Writing, Part 4: Writing for Work

My original plan was to get an English degree, become a high school English teacher, and write novels on the side. By my junior year (after three years of taking secondary education classes), I was sent into a local high school to observe, and what I observed was that I didn��t want to be a high school English teacher. I dropped the secondary education minor required to become a State-certified teacher and started taking computer classes in my senior year. There wasn��t enough time to get a minor in Computer Science and still graduate when I wanted to, but it had been enough to land me my first job out of college. My first job was for a small computer consulting firm called MC Systems of NJ, Inc.

As you could probably tell if you��ve read the last installment of this series, by this time I was pretty obsessed with computers. I��d taken college-level programming classes, replaced the operating system on my PC several times (MS-DOS to DR-DOS to OS/2), and devoured everything I could read about PCs and the devices you could connect to them. I was newly married and had a keen desire to provide for myself and my wife, who was still in school (and would eventually go all the way to the Ph.D). Writing? Well, it was one of many things possible with computers.

During this time, software manufacturers started moving toward Windows and office suites. Because my company sold whatever our customers wanted, I got to work not only with Microsoft Office, but also Lotus SmartSuite and WordPerfect Office. Having exposure first to WordPerfect for DOS in high school, then WordStar for DOS in college, then DeScribe for OS/2, I naturally compared my experiences.

WordPerfect for Windows at the time felt like a half-baked text editor, with a fraction of the functionality its DOS version had years ago. Microsoft Word looked great in screenshots: its interface was clean and intuitive, and its functionality seemed logical. However, once past the basics, I found it a nightmare to use, especially if you tried any of its layout features. Images and tables would jump all over the place, and documents felt very fragile as a result. And it crashed, taking all of Windows down with it. I had been more successful creating complex layouts in WordStar.

I kept happily using DeScribe, expecting the clearly superior OS/2 to overtake the market, bringing its applications along with it. After all, it was much more stable than this Windows-based stuff our customers wanted. I even pitched and sold OS/2 as a workstation for police dispatchers, so they could replace their 3270 terminal to the State (for looking up drivers�� license numbers) with a system that could multitask their remote terminal sessions with their local call logging software (written by my employer).

I used DeScribe and my OS/2 workstation at work to generate all kinds of newsletters, flyers, and more. My writing skills had turned to business writing rather than to fiction, and I was good at it. On one OS/2-based workstation, I could seamlessly run my employer��s DOS programs, Windows programs, and my word processor all at the same time. I even ran a BBS (bulletin board system) for the company in the background so people could contact us and download software patches (anybody remember Maximus BBS?).

I loved that job, and it gave me lots of experience. Eventually, though, that company got bought out by another, larger company that did the same thing but also had a retail computer store. It was here, thanks to the owner��s son (who now works for Google), that I was introduced to Linux. I won��t go into my early forays with Linux here, as they don��t have much to do with writing, and I want to stay on topic.

Eventually I left this company to go work at a pharmaceutical company��s research and development facility. I was hired as the network administrator, and I graduated from small business networks to the enterprise. During this time, an event changed the rules in the PC market: Windows 95 was released. Now Windows rocked a desktop like OS/2, the Mac, and the Amiga had, and it quickly became clear that OS/2 and my now beloved and well-used DeScribe word processor were not going to overtake Windows.

As the network administrator at my R&D facility, I engineered and ran the rollout of Windows 95 to something like 250 desktops. This included Microsoft Office and the dreaded Microsoft Word, upon which the company had standardized. Word still looked great, but was painful to use. I experienced this on a daily basis at work. On my personal machine at home, I decided I would not torture myself: I bought Lotus SmartSuite. Why? Because Ami Pro, the included word processor, functioned similarly to DeScribe.

At some point, I went from triple-booting OS/2, Windows 95, and Linux to a new machine from Gateway running Windows 98. It had a DVD-ROM drive! I could watch The Matrix on it! I installed Linux on my old machine and used it as a file/Internet server. We still had dial-up, so I had a system where my computer and my wife��s computer were networked with the Linux server, and if either of us requested something on the Internet, the Linux machine would automatically dial our ISP and, using PPP, connect us to the Internet. If the connection to the Internet wasn��t used for a period of time, it would hang up automatically.

I used Ami Pro on this new machine to create letters, church bulletins, and other personal documents. I wrote one short story on it, based in the DragonRaid (now Lightraiders) world, as well as an adventure for that game that I fully outlined, but never fleshed out. I was beginning to get creative with my word processor again.

The new century would bring drastic change. But that��s for the next part.

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Published on September 09, 2024 21:00

My Road to Writing, Part 3: Getting Graphical

I grew up in Wildwood, NJ, a tourist town complete with all the trappings: a beautiful beach with white, powdery sand, restaurants, a boardwalk with rides, water parks, arcades, and games. As such, it was never all that hard for a local like me to find a summer job. By the end of my junior year of college, I��d been working summer jobs for 8 years; most recently as the driver of the Chilly Willy Ice Cream truck. By then, I finally saved up enough ��extra�� money to buy a new computer��this time, one that was top-of-the-line.

I paid about $1500 for a 486 DX-33. It had 4MB of RAM, a whopping 120MB hard drive, a sound card, and an accelerated graphics card paired with a 14-inch color monitor. It came in a gigantic tower case that was about 3 feet (1 meter) high. I could have gotten Microsoft Windows 3.0 with it, but no, that was too pedestrian for my 32-bit microprocessor. I opted to purchase IBM��s 32-bit OS/2 operating system which was, after all, advertised as a better DOS than DOS, and a better Windows than Windows.

I kept using my beloved WordStar, which I��d upgraded to the latest release (version 7). It ran perfectly on OS/2. The experience, however, was strange for me. When I booted my machine, I had an environment more similar to the Macintosh or the Commodore Amiga than the text-only DOS environment I��d been used to with my old machine. WordStar ran in a text-mode DOS window, or I could simulate DOS by going to a full-screen DOS session. Though I��d entered the world of graphical, pre-emptive multi-tasking, I still operated my computer by doing one thing at a time, as though it were still an old, obsolete machine.

I wasn��t aware of this then, but looking back on it now I can see that my identity had shifted. No longer was my computer a utilitarian thing, a tool mainly used for creating words. Now I used my computer for many, many things, and I wanted to use it correctly. I avidly read PC Magazine and learned all about ISA, EISA, and VESA Local Bus slots, IRQ settings, and more. I learned about co-operative and pre-emptive multi-tasking and new, graphical applications that could replace the old text-only, DOS-based ones. At school, now that I��d dropped the secondary education requirements, I had free slots in my schedule that I filled with computer programming classes. My girlfriend (now wife) bought me Turbo Pascal for Christmas��another program I ran in an OS/2 DOS window, but which I needed for my computer classes.

I had no connection to the Linux world (in its infancy; this was 1992 after all) or its Unix heritage, where text was (and still mostly is) king. All I saw were articles championing graphical desktop environments, the superiority of graphical applications, and how multi-tasking would change the world.

My roommate had a Commodore Amiga, a machine that had been both graphical and multi-tasking since 1985, before I��d even gotten my first PC. To him, my PC��even though it ran my fancy, graphical OS/2 operating system��was a primitive thing, still catching up to what the Amiga had been able to do for years. He typed his papers into a graphical word processor (I��m sorry, Amiga fans: I don��t know which one it was) that looked to me similar to a page layout program. When he printed those papers, they used scalable fonts and looked exactly the way they had on his screen. My WordStar had a preview function that showed you what your document would look like��and I��d extended it with some scalable font add-on that I don��t remember now��but you still had to type the document in plain old text mode.

I��m pretty sure the magazines and my roommate��s computer started me down the road of graphics envy. It wasn��t their fault, of course; and part of it was my desire to learn more about computers in general, and to do things right. After all, I was now about to graduate in the spring; I needed a job in the computer industry and to get that, I needed to know what I was doing. If I had an adviser in the Computer Science department I��d have been set straight, but I was still an English major taking extra computer classes.

I can��t understate the incessant over-and-over repetition of how important graphical interfaces were in every computer magazine of the time. DOS and its text-only interface was pass��; a way of working for Neanderthals who could not see the utility and beauty of running two programs at the same time, seeing documents or pictures on the screen exactly the way they��d be printed, or copying files by dragging them where they needed to go and dropping them there. In hindsight, I think this was the PC world��s own brand of envy: the Apple Macintosh, Commodore Amiga, and Atari ST had had all of these things for years. The PC had to evolve.

I began to believe that going full-on Graphical User Interface was the way to go. With the PC, I had to evolve. At the time, there were several GUIs for the PC. The leading GUI was Microsoft Windows, but Windows wasn��t yet an operating system; instead, it ran on top of DOS and gave you a graphical interface. It could only do cooperative multitasking, which meant that leaving CPU cycles for multiple programs to run was the responsibility of the programs themselves, not the operating system. Programs could take over the whole CPU (and they did) and they could overwrite memory already allocated for another program, which would cause a crash. By contrast, OS/2 was far superior in every way as a fully pre-emptive multitasking operating system with memory protection, complete with a GUI. It seemed like the future.

I went all in.

Though I was happy and efficient on WordStar, the first graphical program I bought was a word processor, of course. Though I now had an interest in programming, I remained an English major, and writing was still the primary unit of ��work�� created on my computer. DeScribe led the small group of OS/2-based word processors; I bought a copy.

[image error]DeScribe was actually wonderful. In addition to making me feel like one of the cool guys who did computing right with a graphical interface, it actually provided two resources in one. Prior to this, I had a cheap desktop publishing program to do flyers and newsletters and stuff. I��d import text from WordStar to create those documents. Now DeScribe could do all of that in one program. It really was a sea change or paradigm shift.

In my final year of college, I used OS/2 to play tons of DOS-based video games, program in Turbo Pascal, and create documents in DeScribe. By February of 1993 I��d have my first full-time job as a computer technician, by May I��d graduate, by August I��d be married, and by September I��d own my first house, a 500 sq. ft. bungalow. Writing��particularly writing fiction��had become a back-burner thing in my mind, a dream perhaps for the far future. Right now I had a career to build, a marriage to maintain, new responsibilities as a homeowner, and lots to learn in all these areas. Spare time was spent on my computer, but not writing. I was learning about networking with Novell Netware, this new thing called the Internet, and how to fix computers. I had no time to write.

As perhaps happens to many people, my childhood dream succumbed to bigger, more immediate concerns. But it never died.

Part 1 of this series is here.
Part 2 of this series is here.

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Published on June 07, 2021 21:00

My Road to Writing, Part 2: Early Word Processing

[image error]The first word processor I ever used extensively was WordPerfect, in high school. I��d write articles and my serialized story for the school newspaper, papers when I could (since I didn��t own a computer), and anything else I had a chance to write, since the experience was so much better than the typewriter I had at home.

When I got my first PC at high school graduation, I had a dilemma: I couldn��t afford WordPerfect. At $595, it cost almost as much as my computer. A friend who owned WordPerfect helped me out. I brought my computer over to his house, and we installed WordPerfect on it. As a computer newbie, I may have only been dimly aware that this activity was known as good old-fashioned software piracy. But now I was ready for college and all the papers I��d have to write as an English major.

I also have to say that in the second half of my senior year of high school, I became a Christian. I won��t go into the details of that here, but suffice it to say that during this period of my life, I was suffering through the train wreck Rosaria Butterfield talks about. I was making sometimes painful adjustments to my life��some of them justified and some of them, perhaps, ill-advised. Zeal without knowledge and all that.

By the time I got to college in the fall of 1989, I realized I had stolen WordPerfect. At first, I tried to ignore this. After all, if I didn��t have a word processor, my computer became mostly a paperweight that could also play video games. How could I do any of my work without my word processor? I was an English major; I had to be able to write! And serious writing happened with a keyboard!

I found, however, that I couldn��t forever ignore my conscience, and guilt pushed me to find a solution other than stealing software. Buying WordPerfect was out of the question; I had to find something that was affordable. As a beginner to both computers and word processing, I had yet to discover fully the wonderful world (at the time) of Shareware. If I had grown a conscience a year later, this story might have turned out very differently.

Instead, a friend informed me of a deal (he ��knew a guy;�� I didn��t ask any questions) on another word processor I��d never seen except in magazines: WordStar. Reviews I��d read said there was basic feature parity with WordPerfect. I could get a copy of WordStar for only $75��an amount still painful, but doable. The catch: this copy was on 3.5�� disks; my computer had a 5.25�� disk drive (and a whopping 20MB hard drive). A quick check of the computer lab revealed machines that had both drives; I figured I could copy the data from the 3.5�� disks to blank 5.25�� disks and then get the thing installed. I went for it. I also bought a box of blank disks.

Kids these days, with their ��educational discounts�� or free, open source office suites have no idea what we went through.

[image error]When WordStar arrived, it came in a nondescript, white box almost exactly like the one pictured here that I got from an eBay listing. In fact, everything pictured in that listing except the disks is exactly what I got. Of course, I couldn��t do anything with it until I transferred the data from the 3.5�� disks to the 5.25�� disks that fit into my computer, so I grabbed the box in my excited hands and ran down to the computer lab in Robinson Hall��the same building, incidentally, where Greta Stratton-Foster, the sociology professor in my novel Providence, has her office.

I spent an afternoon transferring data from one type of disk to another. When I was done, I went back to my dorm room, deleted WordPerfect, and installed WordStar��and something else: a virus I��d picked up from the computer lab.

I guess that was part of the price I had to pay for a clear conscience.

WordStar was just as well known and well supported in the computer industry as WordPerfect; in fact, it had been around longer. Any time I went to the computer store and looked at add-ons, they were supported. I happily dove into learning my new wordsmithing tool, and I bought some of these add-ons, such as scalable fonts, clip art packs, and anything else I thought would make the presentation of my writing more professional on my decidedly underpowered computer with its 9-pin dot matrix printer.

Kids these days have no idea what we went through with dot matrix printers.

Interestingly as I look back on it now, college assignments and papers killed my story writing for a while. That first semester, I had a lot of fun in Expository Writing, which was the writing class for English majors (everybody else had to take College Composition, a boring term paper-writing class provided by the Communications department). In my class, however, we practiced writing in different ��voices:�� the comic voice, the satiric voice, the angry voice, etc. This helped me a great deal in my writing, but as I continued from semester to semester, all the assigned reading and writing for other classes put a damper on my story writing.

For example, one professor who I had several classes with wanted a paper every week, based on our reading assignments. This paper had to make several points in only three pages of double-spaced text. How can anybody��especially an English major��write anything that makes a coherent argument in only three pages?

Meanwhile, I began seeing my computer as more than just a writing machine. My original plan for going to college was that I��d become a high school English teacher and write novels on the side until I could support myself with the novels. Then I��d quit being a teacher and write novels full time. But in my junior year, my secondary education assignments culminated in a trip to a local high school to ��observe,�� in preparation for a semester of student teaching. Let��s just say that what I observed caused me to drop the idea of being a teacher, and I began to look more seriously at my computer as a possible source of income.

By now I was too late in my college career (if I wanted to finish in the requisite four years) to attain a minor in Computer Science, but I began taking computer classes anyway. I��ll pick up that story in my next blog entry. For now, I��ll say that my road to becoming a novelist turned out to be a lot longer and more eventful than I��d originally planned or imagined.

Part 1 of this series is here.

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Published on May 19, 2021 21:00

My Road to Writing, Part 1: The Early Days

Some writers prefer writing their novels out longhand, in notebooks. I��ve never understood people who prefer writing on pen and paper. Maybe I��m weird, but the idea of doing any serious writing by pen��and then having to type it later��has never worked for me. I suppose that means I was born at the right time.

I started taking writing seriously at about 12 years of age. At this point, that��s a long time ago, since I was 12 years old in the 80s. Since then, a lot of things have changed with regard to writing: word usage (I still by default write worshipped and kidnapped), the process (mindmapping replaces outlining for me), and most especially the tools (pen/pencil and paper, to typewriter, to text-based computer, to graphical computer).

I was bad at penmanship in grammar school. It was the only subject in which I got Cs and Ds consistently. I struggled through capital letters, chafed through lower case letters, and dragged on cursive. Finally, in the 5th grade, when penmanship was no longer a course, I switched myself to writing in all caps and have stuck with that until now. Why? Because the nature of capital letters means you have to slow down and be more careful, thus producing more legible text. And by the 5th grade, none of my teachers cared about it, as long as they could read my assignments.

We used to have these spelling assignments where you��d get a list of new words to spell and you had to make up sentences containing those words. Rather than produce a bunch of dry, boring sentences (e.g., ��The patient was paralyzed from the waist down��), I��d make up stories and work the spelling words into these. My teachers loved it. I always got an A+ on my spelling sentences��when my teachers could read them. I still have some of these stories in a trunk in my basement.

Somewhere around this time, I got a plastic ��children��s�� typewriter. I think it was only labeled a children��s typewriter because it was cheap plastic: it did have metal hammers and a real ribbon. My mom, who was an office manager for an orthopedic surgeon, was an excellent touch-typist, and she taught me to type. At this point in my life, though, I didn��t have much use for the skill, because I couldn��t use it for my school work, and I hadn��t gotten the idea yet that I might someday become a writer. Handwriting was everything in school work at this time, and I sucked at it.

I was always a creative kid. I attempted a magazine based on Mad Magazine which I called Crazy Magazine. Of course, my drawing skills are probably worse than my penmanship skills, so the magazine really had no prayer of going anywhere��but I do remember photocopying several issues and handing them out at school.

Also about this time, friends whose families had more money than mine began getting Commodore 64, Atari, and Apple II computers. I was incredibly interested in these things, but they were way out of reach for my single mom to purchase. I remember the envy I felt in 8th grade when we had these bulletin board projects to do and my friends were able to produce posters and banners strung together on dot-matrix paper, while I was stuck with crappy construction paper, markers, and bad drawing skills.

[image error]I don��t remember what circumstances brought this about��it was probably getting older and having to start writing papers for school��but in the 7th or 8th grade, my stepfather pulled out for me this old Royal manual typewriter. The thing must��ve weighed 50 pounds. It was gun metal gray and had round keys that when you pressed them, went way, way down, slapping a hammer through an inked ribbon onto a page. Near the end of each line a bell would ring, signifying that you needed to finish the word you were working on or hyphenate it. Once you did this, you��d reach up with your left hand and in a smooth motion that my mother demonstrated for me, use a bright, chrome lever to swipe the platen, or the roller the paper was on, back over to the right to begin a new line. I looked at the machine in awe. Everything about it said to me, ��serious writing.��

Coincidentally, a short time before this typewriter appeared, I��d done some of my first bit of creative writing outside of my spelling sentences, just for fun. I��d written a science fiction story called ��The Illusionists�� that had been inspired by a dream I��d had. The story had some promise, I thought, if other people could read it. Now that I had the typewriter, I thought maybe I could try my hand at another one��and this time, I��d type it. I was a freshman in high school by now and taking a typing class, so if the story stank, at least I��d become a faster typist. And so I produced a story called ��The Deadly System,�� also loosely based on a dream I��d had (I had probably seen Alien recently; it bears some similarities). I stuck this one in a green folder and gave it to a friend of mine��a budding artist as I was a budding writer��to read. The story inspired him enough to illustrate the front and back of the green folder with the monster in the story, which I thought was pretty cool. There are more details here, but they aren��t germane to my point.

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I was off and running. That story blossomed into several more, some of which got published in my high school��s literary journal. Soon I began thinking that I might want to do this writing thing for a living. Now I was doing serious writing, and that writing always happened at a keyboard.

I had a love/hate relationship with my typewriter. I loved typing, and I got quite good at it. I could get my thoughts down a lot faster��not to mention more legibly��if I typed them rather than writing them with a pen. It was too easy, however, to hit the wrong key, which immediately made the sheet of paper you were working on imperfect. But I kept slugging away, even beginning a novel (the rewrite of which, incidentally, may be my next novel).

I got really serious about computers in high school, mostly because of my interest in writing. Writing on a computer removed all the barriers put in place by a typewriter��typing mistakes, messy ribbons, keys getting stuck, loading another sheet of paper in the middle of a thought, and more. On a computer, you never had to re-type anything to revise it; you just made the change right there, on the screen. It was like magic. Kids these days have no idea what we went through with typewriters.

Upon my high school graduation, I got a PC��a discounted Philips with an amber, monochrome screen��to take to college with me, where I would be majoring in English. It had an 8088 processor. The 386 had just come out, so my new machine was already antiquated, but I loved the thing. I did all of my college writing on that PC, in WordStar, where I most appreciated being able to continuously type without having to reach up and swing that platen over at the end of every line. And of course, there was the all-important Backspace key, allowing me to correct mistakes on the fly.

The point I want to make here is that for me, the keyboard has always represented serious writing��whether that writing is creative, scholarly, or technical. Writing with a pen always got in my way and represented extra, tedious work��in other words, re-typing, not to mention deciphering what I wrote��and there are far better ways to use my time. I��m happy to write notes in a journal and jot lists, but if I want to do any serious writing, I always sit down at a keyboard. I��ll probably never understand people who have this affinity for paper and pen. There are now better tools.

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Published on April 26, 2021 21:00

Writing Tools, Part 1: The Early Days