thanks for this
Obviously, I disagree. But, I have to ask why you feel that way. Please explain.
A tablet computer with custom writing-recognition software that looks and feels just like a pencil and a legal pad.
Throw in a cheap CD burner while you’re at it. No point writing the great American novel if your machine crashes and you don’t have a backup.
I would not recommend a Mac running System 9 or earlier, if an inexpensive, used Mac is your choice, not only because System 9 is outmoded and mummified. Compared to Apple’s OS X (10), System 9’s screen text, though excellent for its time, is second-rate at best, now.
I boot into System 9 once a week or so (to use an old version of QuarkXpress), and I’m always relieved when I can escape System 9 and return to X. The difference is even more noticeable after being on the net with System 9. For anyone whose main purpose for a computer would be to write and read for hours at a time, do your eyes a favour and avoid System 9.
Moved to IMHO.
-xash
General Questions Moderator
I would really like a monitor that was oriented in the same direction paper is oriented, i.e., portrait instead of landscape. I would like to be able to see the whole page at a glance instead of half of it, or all of it in a size I can’t read. (Of course I can just print it.)
I do three drafts of everything and it’s been proven conclusively that if I have to actually RETYPE my revisions at least once, it results in more improvement than simply rewriting a previous version. (Failure to back up, in case that wasn’t obvious.)
My Samsung 213T can be rotated to either orientation. I use mine in portrait mode most of the time. As you say, it’s great to be able to display an entire page of a a document. Great for web browsing too, especially message boards.
I would recommend a laptop, an external keyboard, and a nice flat screen monitor (bigger is better). Get yourself a little stand so you can put the laptop under the monitor. When you are using it on your desk, you don’t have the inconvenience of the crappy little laptop keyboard and monitor, but you also have the ability to go mobile if you want.
A CD burner is a good idea for backups. You also might want one of those little USB thumb drives to keep backups on as well. Those are nice since if for some reason your computer dies, you can just plug it into a different computer and retrieve your files, and they are nice and tiny and easy to carry around.
If the laptop has a wireless network card built in, you’ll be able to access the internet while you travel. I’m not just saying this so you can access the straight dope. The internet (as you are well aware, I’m sure) is an excellent tool for doing research for writing.
Hell, man, if money is no object, hire a stenographer and dictate the damn thing. 
My dream machine would be the one I have right now, if not a better one. AMD 64 3000, GeForce 6600GT, 1 gig ram. Perfect for goofing off playing World of Warcraft instead of writing
Q.E.D.:
a) Instead of getting your work done, you spend an inordinate amount of time arguing with the ^#@# word processor. Word thinks it knows better than you what you want to do with your document and keeps imposing stuff. “Hey, who told you to turn those into a bulleted list?”
b) Copy from one place and past into another and watch your formatting go to hell. Artifact of the way Word applies “styles”. Bad software design.
c) Nonstandard text handling. Text that renders as one set of characters, when copied and pasted into other applications, can look like shit. Common examples: quotation marks that turn into commas, fractions such as 1/2 that turn into misleading digits and symbols
d) Something like two hundred twenty seven thousand recognized commands, arranged in a poorly designed and frustrating morass of badly designed menus, toolbars, obscure keystrokes, optional items available only in customized menus and/or toolbars, in dialogs 3, 4, or 5 clicks away, etc etc etc. This is the poster child for Bloatware. Word will do anything. It will probably bend text into ovals and make it cherry-flavored and sing “It’s a Small World” in the key of C. It’s in serious need of being streamlined and the controls for doing things that folks who use it to write instead of mistaking it for their entire ^@# operating system made simple and more accessible.
e) I don’t like the way it does endnotes and footnotes. I don’t remember the details but I remember throwing things at the wall last time I tried to help someone generate endnotes in a document that also needed footnotes.
f) Word corrupts its own files. Particularly with some kind of auto-save feature (fast save?) in use, which I believe it is by default, requiring you to know about it and root out the preference and turn the bloody feature OFF, but also without it, it sometimes corrupts its own files. I have never seen another word processor so prone to doing so.
g) Talking know-it-all paper clips, annoyingly intrusive spellcheck-as-you-type, auto-CORRECT that changes what you type without asking, and a sprawlingly huge set of other incredibly obnoxious I-know-better-than-you-do features. All of them can be turned OFF. All it takes is half a day of screaming, using the braindead “Help” feature, trying every bloody menu in creation, calling tech support, and posting “how the fuck to I ____ in Word?” questions to SDMB General Questions. But hey, since they are all options and you can just turn them off if you don’t want them, no problemo, huh? Yeah right.
A good portion of the rest is “backchannel resentment”. Resentment that Word exists as a standard when it’s a stinking proprietary format and a moving target at that, so non-Word users have to have something on hand to deal with other folks who send them Word files as attachments, and have to update whatever they use whenever MS changes the Word doc format. Resentment when dealing with folks’ Word documents that are projects that should never have been done in a word processor: spreadsheets in Word tables, graphics work pasted into Word with Word captions, that kind of thing. Resentment at the confusion and loss of behavior-standards that existed just fine until Word came along and, with the attitude that “I own the marketshare so I get to determine what the standards are”, dumped new conventions that spread and infected other software. A key example being the spread of stupid fucking toolbars with lousy or nonexistent keyboard-driven / menu-driven alternatives in applications that are properly keyboard-centric. Toolbars belong in Photoshop and other graphics environments. I hate having them all over my screen & getting in the way without a compellingly good reason, and a word processor, more than anything else, should be something where you don’t have to take your fingers off the keyboard for hours at a time. I blame Word for the pandemic of toolbars in applications where they don’t belong. Things, that is, that don’t really have much to do with the experience of using Word per se. I admit that.
Exapno Mapcase, go back and start over. The OP is an “aspiring novelist” and you are a professional writer. You’ve already got discipline. An apiring novelist porbably has very, very little discipline. If you carefully examine the reasons I suggested a typewriter, you’ll see that they’re all for reasons of discipline. When one is as seasoned as you are (or myself for that matter), the idea of using a typewriter instead of a computer is totally ridiculous.
I stand by my recommendation of a typewriter. If you want to learn to drive, I also recommend that you learn with the standard transmission before the automatic. If you want to learn to work out at the gym, I recommend starting with the freeweights before moving to the machines. As a disciplined, professional writer, you can’t lose sight of where you came from.
Actually, I wrote my first one out in longhand. College-ruled spiral bound notebooks.
I second using a gmail account for file storage (not permanent, obviously!) because it’s quite handy, but… why on earth would you need two accounts for this, other than having two addresses that the documents are stored at?
joe.blow@gmail.com can send an email to joe.blow@gmail.com (aka to the same email address) and then it’s in just one inbox. Why complicate things by using two email accounts?
Heh, whoops. I hope Joe Blow doesn’t really have that email address, or at least that no one tries emailing things to him.
Even though I work on a computer 90% of the time, nothing beats a typewriter for fast first drafts. On a computer, I’m always compelled to change things and make every paragraph perfect, a job that should be saved for later editing. Because you can’t change things on a typewriter, it paradoxically makes you write faster. I get a lot of good automatic stream-of-consciousness writing done this way. I also have an AlphaSmart 3000 word processor (Google for info) which is nice and light and good for carrying around (unlike a typewriter or my heavy laptop), but since you can change things on the AS I find that I’m almost as slow on it as I am on a computer.
The problem with a typewriter is that you have to transcribe the pages into a computer for editing and printing, and that takes a long time and is very tedious. I could never write an entire novel on a typewriter for that reason. But I think a typewriter is still a good tool for a novelist to have around. Also, it’s just so romantic to write a science fiction novel on a typewriter in the 21st century. It’s an anachronism within an anachronism.
I haven’t used it personally, but I know there are text recognition software programs available. Scan the typrwritten pages into the computer, the software turns it into digital ‘text’. Not sure of the efficiency or reliability, but it’s an option to investigate if you’d prefer to use the typewriter.
I stand by my statement. I think that anyone at any level who chooses to use a typewriter when a computer is available has a few keys missing.
However, I stated specifically that writing is personal and that some indivdiuals may disagree. Use your typewriter as much as you want. I will continue to argue that it’s a bad recommendation for anyone else.
Bravo, Ahunter3!
- Troy McClure SF, secretary and involuntary user of MS Office.