Writers, Blocks and Word Processors
May 3, 2008I just read a post over on Unstopable Robot Ninja about writer's block. (Scott says there's no such thing. And I'm inclined to agree with him — writer's block is just another term for procrastination, in my experience, but that's not the topic of this post.) Almost any time I see writer's block mentioned on the web, someone brings up WriteRoom, a nifty little Mac application, at least in theory. In practice, it hasn't been a good fit for me, but that may have as much to do with what I write as it does how I work.
WriteRoom has some nice modern features, including auto-save and compatibility with other text editing and word processing programs. But its claim to fame is a full-screen editing mode that basically turns your $2000 brand new MacBook Pro into a circa-1990 IBM (which probably also cost $2000 at the time) running WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. WriteRoom takes over your whole screen, giving you a lone skinny column of text. They call it "distraction-free" full-screen editing. By default, the background is black, the text is green, and the cursor is a big, fat DOS-style block. But you can customize the color and cursor and a few other things.
The benefit of WriteRoom is that all the distractions on your computer are covered up and therefore neutralized (as are the distractions of full-featured word processors, such as fonts, styles, pictures, charts, tables, line spacing, bullets, and other bits that are important to the final formated document but can get in the way when you are just trying to get ideas down on paper). Of course, it can't do anything about your HDTV, phone, cell phone, iPhone, Blackberry, and weather-predicting USB orb. But, it's a good start.
I don't want to sound down on WriteRoom — it's a fine idea. (Khoi Vinh, design director at nytimes.com, posted a great write-up back in 2006 for an application he imagined called Blockwriter, and posted a follow-up a month later that is the first mention WriteRoom I can recall seeing.) I just don't work in a way that meshes well with WriteRoom. Even during my most productive writing periods, I like to go back and forth between windows. I don't do well with nothing to look at but what I've already written. Having made my living with the title editor or proofreader for the last five years, I get caught up in changing the last sentence and never get to the next one. Call it editor's block, if you like, though I'm sure there's a real name for it. I also usually need to refer to other documents on screen while I'm writing.
But, if you have trouble getting words on the screen because you are constantly distracted by other applications, or if you just want your writing interface to act more like a piece of paper in an IBM Selectric than a full-featured office suite, then WriteRoom (or the Windows clone, called Dark Room) might be just what you need. One of the best things about WriteRoom in my opinion is that its makers know what it is and what it isn't, and they make the goals and limitations of the software very clear on their site, pointing you to specific other editors that fill other niches.
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© 2003-2008 Tony G. Scida. 