>I have one of those nine-pound Dell laptops you can get for $389 because nobody ended up buying that model, for obvious reasons. I took the wireless card out immediately, and I plugged up the Ethernet hole with superglue. I did work on a DOS machine until about five years ago. It ran WordPerfect 5.0, which is still the best software ever written for a writer, I think.
>It’s doubtful that anyone with an Internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
I'm not trying to defend Jonathan Friendzone but George R. R. Martin said the same thing - he writes on WordStar if I recall correctly. The Internet is a major distraction.
If you want to get a similar effect without buying a super shitty laptop and having to physically alter the machine to make sure it won't connect to the internet, I would install a linux distro like Debian where the wifi drivers probably won't work, then I would probably learn one of the text editors you can use in the terminal like vi or nano and spend all your time there
Isaac Smith
Yeah, grrm is really good at avoiding distractions.
Robert Cox
If you're going to use just terminal applications you might as get an old laptop because then you can have it as a dedicated writing machine as-is.
Then it wont matter if you do mess around with the network hardware.
Robert Adams
If you're disconnected from the internet, there's no reason to deny yourself a modern word processor as opposed to using a terminal-based text editor.
Jonathan Lopez
There's a lot of good to be said for text editors like vi, and I really thought a lot of the capabilities were super snazzy when I went through this set of tutorial files: cs.trinity.edu/~bmassing/Misc/vilearn/
But, having just said that, I don't think it's for everyone. If you're a writer who is always swapping things around then I'd say you'll benefit a lot from it. If you're like me and write in drafts, rather than versions, then you'll not really be getting all you could from it, so just use LibreOffice.
Ayden Perez
One of us, one of us!
Michael Davis
>It ran WordPerfect 5.0, which is still the best software ever written for a writer, I think. speaking as a professional writer, i can say that is utter bollocks
Grayson Sanchez
For the time it was really good, I imagine. But yeah, even the free word processors we have no are better than that if almost every measurable way.
Lincoln Morris
for real. Is there any reason to not just use word? I'm not an editor I'm just writing
Luis Scott
That LibreOffice does everything that we'd need a word processor to do, and doesn't tie you in to MS' propriety format, and is free?
David Green
Every single professional writer has some magic formula that is the only way to write well (for real this time, I swear!) and it's always some shit that works them and only them.
Mason Robinson
I don't think "stay away from the global distraction machine known as the internet" is a "magic formula."
Jaxon James
The silly extremes he takes to are.
Benjamin Campbell
I bought a refurbished thinkpad for this purpose.
Blake Bailey
I use Final Draft but I write screenplays.
Andrew Thompson
He used to be, until the internet became popular. (and before he became a lazy piece of shit and didn't need the money anymore)
Carter Reyes
>Q: WE HEAR YOU’RE NOT THAT KEEN ON TECHNOLOGY... >A: I don’t have an internet connection, or a mobile phone, or a TV signal. I can play [digital] music on the television, or on the computer I suppose, but I don’t. I am pretty much cut off from the 21st century. It’s like culturally I’m trying to establish a kind of sensory deprivation tank for myself, whereby I am receiving no modern signals whatsoever, because I’ve heard that after a while in a sensory deprivation tank you start to hallucinate and have all sorts of strange experiences, so I’m waiting for that to happen.
>Q: HOW DO YOU MANAGE WITHOUT THE INTERNET? >A: It seems to work. I am pretty much cut off from the majority of the 21st century, but not much escapes me. You hear about everything, because you’re talking to people, you’re absorbing a lot of this information as if by osmosis, just through the pores of your skin. I have said that by embracing the internet in the way that it has done, which was kind of inevitable, society has embarked on a massive experiment without having any idea of the various ways in which those technologies will impact upon us socially, politically and psychologically. So I so think if there’s this huge experiment going on, it’s best that I remain outside the petri dish, as a kind of control, so that we’ll be able to see how badly the rest of you have mutated, by comparing you with me as a kind of baseline. >>>interview with Alan Moore
Didn’t DFW say something about how, as long as you have an Internet connection, you can live anywhere and be a writer?
The Internet is great for double checking facts but I often get distracted from my own writing by this godforsaken board and Yea Forums
Kevin Taylor
>For the time it was really good, I imagine oh yeah, it was. most people barely scratched the surface of what it was capable of. but like all DOS programs, it suffered from variable quality printer support, hardware support etc. i was glad to see the back of it
it depends what you're writing. in my job i use a combination of stuff. Word plus Adobe FrameMaker is probably three-quarters of my writing work.
the libreoffice writer word processor is ok if you're just writing for yourself. i use it sometimes when i'm working in linux. but it lags behind word in some ways that are important for pro work e.g. word is way ahead when it comes to working with syles, macros etc also, 90%+ of customers expect work to be delivered in word format (sorry apple fanboys) incidentally, docx is an open format.
Alexander Cox
This is just a retarded boomer whose line of thought doesn't go deeper than INTERNET BAD, NEW SOFTWARE BAD and can't figure out any new technology to write his soap opera """literature""". This is based and genuinely anti-modernity to stimulate creativity.
Gabriel Parker
That's cause DFW plagiarized massive portions of IJ's "informative" segments from early online encyclopedias and that's why he killed himself for fear of being found out as a fraud and never got another novel published in his lifetime.
Caleb Phillips
> Not doing your writing with a feather quill, ink and parchment paper inside a remote cabin with the fireplace crackling in the background.
Lincoln Perez
If I do this will I get magical powers like Moore?
