It wasn’t long ago I mentioned that I had picked up Scrivener, and I’m enjoying it. It’s very much becoming a valuable tool for me as I plod away. I make my writing mistakes much more quickly now, and I can correct them much more quickly mainly because of the research capacity of the software.
I’m not easily impressed. It’s pretty cool, though not as cool as Stephen King balancing a typewriter on his knees in a trailer laundry area cool. It’s also not as cool as the picture to the left, though the trouble with that typewriter, as romantic as it is when it comes to writing, is the incessant clickety-clacking and dinging. It’s been so long since I’ve written on a typewriter that I’m unsure why anyone ever thought it was a good idea.
Clickety clickety clack clickety clickety clack ding.
That being said, I remember the first word processors on computers and it was pretty awesome, particularly because you didn’t have to use correction fluid (‘Whiteout’, as I called it) and didn’t have to worry about lining up pages just so. Generations after GenX will never truly appreciate what a quantum leap it was to be able to write an entire document and save it before printing it, allowing you all manner of editing ability after writing. Of course, when we went to write something, we had to have the idea, we had to be organized, and we had to have some physical endurance. You got strong fingers on a typewriter.
That’s why when I saw Robert J. Sawyer’s article on Wordstar, I chuckled a bit. Wordstar was a part of that shift and while Microsoft and everyone else seems to be packing more and more features into their menus, Wordstar did get it right decades ago. 4 decades ago.
40 years!
For most writers, that’s all that they really needed, as Sawyer, a Hugo and Nebula winner, well documents. Do you like George R. R. Martin’s books? You know, that Game of Thrones guy? Yup, he still uses Wordstar.
What Wordstar lacked – what it only lacked – was the document organization that I needed because my mind is sometimes not as organized as I would like it to be. I envy people who are consistently organized that way.
Yet here’s a fun thing to consider: If Wordstar got it right 40 years ago, why have people been buying software that didn’t fit what they needed? Office Suites, where you could work with spreadsheets and such. The ‘one office suite to in the darkness bind them’ marketing campaign, where it was like Oprah was handing out features. You get a feature! You get a feature! All of you get features!
The future of writing software, though, is a curious thing to consider given all these large language models out there. Everyone’s trying a new gimmick, it seems, and out of the terabytes of garbage generated, we might get something good – but it probably won’t last as long as Wordstar.