The Egatz Epitaph

William S. Burroughs once pointed out, “Man is a tool-using animal.” He was quick to add that without tools, humans don’t last long. I like tools, especially old tools. I have, for instance, a pair of one-hundred year old wirecutters. They belonged to my grandfather, and I mostly use them when changing guitar strings, and that’s a lot of use. I’ve got some other awesome analog tools I wouldn’t trade for anything, but regarding the digital tools I use, not too much is sacred.

If you’re a writer, using new tools can help jar you into new writing habits. If you’re open and receptive to a new workflow, it can result in helping you create a different kind of writing, almost the same way trying a sestina will push your writing in new directions. You might not finish your first sestina, but you can always mine it for good lines and images you can incorporate in other poems.

No matter your trade, sometimes you just need to shake things up. Changing your old gear can be a simple move, but superstitions are hard to break. It’s a pretty easy thing to do if you’re in the right frame of mind. Seemingly mundane things like replacing a favorite pen, a new size Moleskine or a new keyboard can do wonders.

Another approach for writers is a new word processing application. I’ve never been a fan of the kludgy interface that has long been the bane of Microsoft Word. In fact, I avoid Microsoft software as a general rule. If a client or publisher needs a document of mine in Word, I export it from Pages. They’re satisfied and I don’t have to give Microsoft any dollars. Double victory.

I love to set type. I’d done most of my word processing in QuarkXPress up until Adobe slaughtered it with InDesign 1.0 in 1999. Dave Eggers is the only other writer I’ve spoken to who agreed with me about how great it was to write in QuarkXPress. I felt that way until I found a better tool. I wonder if Dave has moved on to InDesign. It’s liberating, Dave. Try it.

InDesign is awesome in how beautiful you can make a page look, even if it’s just a short story manuscript. There’s something incredibly satisfying to me as a writer to create a manuscript page in InDesign with OpenType fonts like Minion Pro, of which I’ve been a huge fan since it was created by Robert Slimbach for Adobe in 1990. If you’ve got Minion installed on your computer, that’s what you’re seeing this blog typeset in.

If beautiful type isn’t what you’re looking for, there’s an answer. All the beauty of an InDesign document comes with a price. InDesign isn’t cheap. If you can afford to buy the application, the document sizes are fairly large in terms of space they take up on your hard drive. For those writers seeking a small footprint and corresponding price, there’s always alternatives.

If you want to pretend you’re living in 1982 and want the retro look of green type on a black background, you can now suffer the way your father suffered for The Man. Enter WriteRoom. Jesse Grosjean in Bangor, Maine runs Hog Bay Software. He specializes in software that doesn’t get in the way of your work. Stripped down and functional is essentially Jesse’s ethos. He runs a blog, and is interested in other things besides software development.

I’m a registered user of WriteRoom. When I need to move my head in a different direction, it’s there for me. It’s default font is Monaco, which helps bring back some of that dreaded DOS-era craziness. It hides everything else on your Mac by default with a black background. It appropriately violates Apple’s user interface guidelines by hiding the menu bar. The cursor is a blinking green block. Put on some Rick Springfield via iTunes and you’re in business.

WriteRoom doesn’t end there. You can use different fonts and type sizes, unlike how your father suffered with monospaced typeface the wizards of Redmond built into MS-DOS. You can open and save to rich text format with no problem. Even changing the scale of the document is possible: as a whole, the document can be made larger or smaller. This last feature alone would’ve been enough to prevent people from going postal thirty years ago.

Check out WriteRoom if you need to do what writers are made to do. There are few better solutions to block out the distractions and get the words down. Remember, man is a tool-using animal. Sometimes it’s good to get your hands on new tools.