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.