On Mon, Jan 29, 2024 at 12:57 PM Jim Hall via Freedos-user < freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> It's a different sort of thing, but a colleague shared his editor's > advice to write in a way that makes it difficult to go back and edit > what you've done, while you're writing it. The idea is that you don't > spend time "editing as you go" - constantly spinning your wheels, > editing what you just wrote when you should be focusing on writing new > stuff - and instead do all your editing and revisions after you've > finished a full draft of something (article, chapter, etc). > There's a simpler solution: turn off your monitor :-) I actually read that in a fiction writing book once (Frey's *How to Write a Damn Good Novel* IIRC). The "don't revise while you edit" is good advice but in my experience it's more about consciously not getting bogged down and not using revising as an excuse. But you're going to spend far more time rewriting than rewriting, anyway. Writing is fundamentally rewriting, not writing. TBH, none of the pro writers I know use any kind of "distraction free" setup. Most of them are writing on Scrivener for macOS (which I used) or Word for Windows. If you're going to write a book, you write a book and distractions aren't going to get in your way. I've written three books and did them all on Scrivener for macOS. If I was going to get distracted, I'd find a way even if I was carving cuneiform. But whatever works for you! The history of alternate writing methods is long. Jack Kerouac bought a roll of butcher paper and fed it into a typewriter and wrote the first draft of *On the Road* as one long continuous scroll. Tom Robbins wrote all of his novels one sentence at a time...drafting it it in his mind, debating it, perfecting it, and then committing it on his typewriter, and he never revised. When he'd written his last sentence, he sent the stack of papers to his publisher. I'm not endorsing Kerouac or Robbins' results but writers have tried all kinds of things and there is no one method that fits everyone. On Tue, Jan 30, 2024 at 11:13 AM Ben Collver via Freedos-user < freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote: > If there's a "Walden" for computer programmers, it would be a 4:3 > display running DOS where coding can be done without any modern day > annoying interruptions. > I disagree. The perfect coding environment is radically different than the perfect fiction writing environment. When I'm writing code, I want reference docs, PDFs of books, StackOverflow, ChatGPT, manuals, my own library of examples, etc. Even when I'm writing nonfiction articles (which I do every day), I'm pulling in info from the web, books, etc. As always, YMMV.
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