Chris Maiorana has an interesting post on using Emacs for creative writing. The TL;DR was that a friend criticized his writing as being too “choppy” and speculated that it was because Emacs made it too easy to rearrange blocks of text. He took that criticism to heart and tried using Libreoffice Writer for his writing instead. The results were the same. It turns out that the problem was his and not his writing instrument. He solved the problem without reference to his editor and returned to Emacs.
It was an interesting story but it got me thinking about professional writers and the mechanics of their writing. Professional writers are notoriously fussy about their writing environment and have strongly held views on what’s right and works for them.
Some—Neal Stephensen and Tess Gerritsen, for example—write their stories in long hand and only later transcribe them with some sort of editor. Stephensen says he types so fast that he doesn’t have time to think carefully about what he’s writing. Gerritsen says she types faster than anyone she knows and that if she wrote on a word processor she would spend her time editing instead of writing.
Others, such as Vernor Vinge, Jerry Pournelle, and Charlie Stross use their editors exclusively. Pournelle, in particular, wrote several BYTE articles on the various editors he used for writing.
I don’t write novels but I do have strong opinions about the proper tools for writing. With all due respect to Stephensen and Gerritsen, two of my favorite writers, I could never write anything in longhand. First of all, my writing is terrible so I have to print, and that is so slow I’d get about 50 words a day done that way. I don’t do too much editing as I’m writing. Sometimes I’ll rewrite a sentence as I’m dong the initial draft but mostly editing happens on separate editing passes. Regardless, every bit of it happens in Emacs.
I’ve been fascinated by the writing process for as long as I can remember. Feel free to share your process.