Robert J. Sawyer

If you're going to bring up Kerouac with his rolls of paper, you're better off talking about WordStar than Word. Word divides the document into discrete pages, while WordStar documents were long uninterrupted ribbons of text, just like Kerouac's rolls. Perhaps Kerouac "got it," but so do George R.R. Martin and Robert Sawyer, writers who continue to use WordStar decades after its demise (Sawyer even talks about the benefits of this undivided waterfall of text on his website [0]. Text editors also similarly long ribbons of text, and are just as conducive to putting words down as any bloated word processor that is optimized to produce two page corporate memos or colorful party posters to be posted in the lunch room.

I've used Word professionally since the mid-1990s. I do know how to use it properly, and it still sucks.

"Writing" isn't meant to be done in a word processor, which was developed as a business tool, not a creative tool. Writing should be done in whatever tool one wants to write in.

Word is, be design, both a desktop publishing app and a secretarial tool. For book-length writing, it works poorly with long files, the file format is subject to corruption. The docx format is also proprietary and subject to Microsoft's whim; any conversion scheme is a hack (though Pandoc and many others do work adequately). Unless you learn the ins and outs of Word's style scheme (and sometimes even if you do) and follow it slavishly, formatting is often inconsistent and there's no…

WordStar is popular with science fiction writers for more fundamental reasons. (Not because it doesn't have spell check or isn't connected to the internet.)

Wordstar treats the text like a long-hand manuscript. You can add notes to yourself like "fix this!" and deal with the edits later. Or, you can block copy large sections of text and have the computer keep a reference to it without having to "copy and paste" it immediately. I've seen George RR Martin write that he likes how easy it is to move large sections of text around in WordStar.

Here's how the SF writer Robert J. Sawyer describes it:

"... as a creative writer, I am convinced that the long-hand page is the better metaphor.

Consider: On a long-hand page, you can jump back and forth in your document with ease. You can put in bookmarks, either actual paper ones, or just fingers slipped into the middle of the manuscript stack. You can annotate the manuscript for yourself with comments like "Fix this!" or "Don't forget to check these facts" without there being any possibility of you missing them when you next work on the document. And you can mark a block, either by circling it with your pen, or by physically cutting it out, without necessarily having to do anything with it right away. The entire document is your workspace...

WordStar's ^Q (Quick cursor movement) and ^K (block) commands give me more of what I used to have when I wrote in longhand than any other product does. WordStar's powerful suite of cursor…

"My favorite word-processing program is the versatile, customizable, and powerful WordStar for DOS, last updated in December 1992. Running it under Microsoft Windows can be difficult, particularly with 64-bit versions of Windows, and especially with recent versions (Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10).

But an MS-DOS emulator released in 2014 called vDos makes it easy to run WordStar for DOS (and many other MS-DOS programs) under Windows, whether 32-bit or 64-bit, with real onscreen italics and boldface and excellent printer and clipboard support. WordStar's graphical Advanced Page Preview and Inset work under vDos, too, although only at standard VGA resolution (640x480 pixels). vDos is free for home and personal use.

Note: for an older version of this page, covering vDos versions prior to 2016, see here.)

https://sfwriter.com/vdos-old.htm

vDos was created by Jos Schaars by modifying DOSBox. DOSBox, beloved by those who like MS-DOS games, has never been good for business applications. Jos changed that by stripping out the gaming flourishes (joystick support and so on), beefing up file locking, and vastly enhancing the screen display (plus allowing you to use any monospaced TrueType font you wished). His system supports XMS, EMS, and it automatically converts PostScript or PCL (LaserJet) output into Adobe Acrobat PDF files that can be printed on any printer."

The page with the download¹ has a long essay about the benefits of WordStar. An example:

> WordPerfect requires that I decide whether I want to cut or copy a block, then immediately mark the beginning of the block, then immediately mark the end of the block, then immediately position the cursor at where I want the block to go, then immediately move the block, and then find my way back to the place where I was originally working. From the moment I decide I might, perhaps, want to do something with a block of text to the moment I actually finish that operation, WordPerfect is in control, dictating what I must do.

> WordStar, with its long-hand-page metaphor, says, hey, do whatever you want whenever you want to. This is a good spot to mark the beginning of a block? Fine. What would you like to do next? Deal with the block? Continue writing? Use the thesaurus?

> After another half hour of writing, I can say, ah hah!, this is where I want to end that block. And two hours later I can say, and this is where that block should go.

¹: https://sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm

Actually, that's one of Heinlein's characters commenting on writing. Occasionally Heinlein would have to remind people that his characters spoke for themselves, not for him.

I can't remember a case where he spoke or wrote about writing in a similar fashion to what C.S. Lewis wrote in his letter, but his 5 rules of writing[1] have been influential for many writers. Once, in an Annapolis address, he explained that the rules were simple (1. You must write. 2. You must finish what you write. ...) but only 1 in 10 would follow each step. This was how you could get from half of the adult US population wanting to be a writer to less than a thousand actually being members of the writing guild he belonged to.

[1] http://www.sfwriter.com/ow05.htm

Okay... Let's try a different approach here. "DISPFONT.EXE" and "DISPFONT.OVR" are key files you'll find in WordStar's archive [0].

I don't have a CP/M emulator on hand to fire up the original to show you an example, as WordStar pre-existed DOS.

But this is a quote from v3, the first DOS version, from the manual:

---

Screen Fonts for Preview

At the Add or Remove a Feature screen, you can install three different types of screen fonts for Preview. The screen font options are Code page 437, Code page 850, and PostScript fonts. If you want to install PostScript fonts, install both PostScript and code page 850 fonts. (Be sure to set the code page to 850 in DOS. See your DOS manual for instructions.)

[0] https://sfwriter.com/ws7.htm