
The Simple Software That Could--But Probably Won't--Change the Face of Writing - jsomers
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/12/the-simple-software-that-could-but-probably-wont-change-the-face-of-writing/68364/
======
samdk
This is linked in the article, but you can watch the author write this article
here: <http://ietherpad.com/ep/pad/view/somers-atlantic/latest>

It's _really_ interesting to watch someone else's writing process and see how
that compares to mine. (Especially when that someone does a lot more writing
than I do.) I find that when I'm writing a mid-length essay like this I tend
to get very disorganized very quickly. I think it'd be valuable to try to
record myself and see what, exactly, I'm doing, and then try to use that to
improve.

~~~
csmeder
Wow! This makes me feel so much better about my writing. I always thought good
writers just busted out an article. I didn't think they put in so much
scaffolding. Being a good writer now seems almost attainable.

~~~
Encosia
"The worst thing you write is better than the best thing you didn't write."

~~~
jamesbritt
Oh, yes. One of the things I learned as a writer is to write crap. Write
drivel. Sitting there trying to get it Just Right, staring at the page or
screen as you attempt to dig up that bon mot just kills it.

Write whatever, get it down. Out of order, out of the blue? Stick it in the Do
Something With This section. Just get it out of your head and saved someplace.

Then you can go back, read it over, rewrite stuff, fix it up and, ideally, cut
the shit out of it to make it tight on a serious murder-your-darlings rampage.

~~~
qntm
Hence NaNoWriMo, of course.

------
electromagnetic
For essays, a revision database is useful. They're constructed of elements,
single arguments for a collaborative effort to prove an argument or illustrate
a point.

When I write fiction, I _don't_ want to remember where I came from. If I
remember my source of an idea too well, I risk full out plagiarizing an idea
instead of making it my own and building on it.

I can't write a story about a boy going to a magical school and focus too
heavy on the obvious source without making a fanfic of Harry Potter, and you
can't focus on the less obvious source without making a fanfic of Earthsea.

An essayist needs to remember their source to stay on point. A fictionist
needs to forget the source and get lost in the literary woods. You build a
universe and have an adventure.

Stephen King for example finds an idea and simply asks "what happens now?"
Asimov had the problem that he played the formulaic method and some of his
stories were extremely weak because of the lack of freedom. He dedicated his
whole work to the source, and only really succeeded because his ideas were at
least original. However, Asimov is my personal least favourite of the great SF
writers. I'll drop dead for any Arthur C. Clark or any Heinlein, but I'll get
bored with the vast majority of Asimovs work because it's so A,B,C formula
that it kills the fun.

~~~
nostrademons
I'm sorta the opposite way - when I write fiction, I really _want_ something
that remembers everything I wrote before, because then I can forget about what
I just wrote.

I used to have a real problem with deleting code, because I worked hard on it,
damnit, and a non-trivial number of times the stuff I thought was the wrong
approach turns out to be the right one. That fear went away once I started
using version control, because I know that if I ever need the code, it's a
rollback away.

The same goes for fiction. I find it hard to discard ideas and whole pages of
prose, because damnit, I worked hard on that, and the story might shift again
in the future to require it. If I'm using a word processor with revision
history, I can just trust the computer to keep the old stuff, and if I ever
need it again, I can pull it up.

~~~
electromagnetic
Back when I wrote reviews I developed an all-or-nothing approach. The few
times my editor said "this one needs major changes" I would simply delete and
rewrite the whole thing from scratch - one time did a total rewrite of a 1,500
word review inside an hour, and I know for me I couldn't have done it without
'destroying' (there's always a copy somewhere) my old work.

I suppose if having a revision history gives you the bravery to take a hatchet
to your work, then it's certainly beneficial to your writing.

If anything I would need a version control because I edit like a Roman
general; I decimate. I'll take out huge swathes because it doesn't fit, but
once or twice I find myself going back and putting essentially the same
sentence in - written better, but nothing editing couldn't have done. However,
I live with my methods, but I've wanted to try a revision history when writing
a short story as I need to ridiculously edit them compared to a longer piece.

------
JonnieCache
I'll tell you what would really change the world: forcing our legislatures to
use version control when writing our laws.

No more sneaking in cryptic revisions in the middle of the night without
anyone noticing! No more anonymous additions from lobbyists!

[http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/11/change-gov-revision-
control...](http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/11/change-gov-revision-control.html)

Unfortunately if teaching our designers and managers to use git is hard, the
prospects of teaching our elected representatives to use it are very slim.

~~~
Benjo
I don't think teaching them, or their staffs, to use version control will be
the major obstacle. Convincing representatives that they need to be more
accountable when it doesn't really help them get reelected will be much
harder.

------
peterarmstrong
(This is self-promotional, but hopefully relevant. Please downvote if you
disagree.)

At Leanpub we fundamentally disagree with the point of this article [that
writers don't want their old versions], and agree with what Etherpad was going
for with the time slider: we use Git for all the book revisions (both with our
in-browser editor or via a direct interface to GitHub), but we do this in an
unobtrusive way. (We'll probably expose a similar time slider eventually, but
for git revisions.) While this may or may not be needed for writing of essay
length, we feel it is essential for books. Also, imagine the contribution to
scholarship if, say, Ulysses had been written with version control...

~~~
jessriedel
Yea, I really don't see what the risk is here if the author has the
expectation that only he/she will be able to access the version history
(unless, of course, the work is so good that academics want to study it).

------
DanielBMarkham
[warning: grumpy guy ahead.]

I'm sorry, but other than praising etherpad and pg, and sort of snidely
lamenting the fact that nobody uses etherpad, was there a point to this
article?

"change the face of writing" is a pretty big commitment to make in a title. I
just spent 5 minutes reading something that told me absolutely nothing new,
which had no conclusions aside from something like "writing and publishing are
two different things" -- a statement that is glaringly obvious yet the author
never seems to get around to actually saying.

I'm seeing a lot of Atlantic articles popping up on HN. Let's hope they stay
of a high quality, and don't just rehash old ground and pander.

I was a big fan of wave, but one of the many criticisms it had was that nobody
really wants everything they type published. You want to _finish_ something,
then you publish.

I mean really, think about this: watching the physical act of somebody editing
themselves is going to make such a huge difference in writing? Oh really? We
won't need editors, or conversations about strategies to use in our pieces, or
the creative tension and problem-solving that goes on in a good publication?
Just playing with a slider and watching characters appear and text be edited
will change the face of publishing?

I gave pg a free pass when he wrote the first article. After all, it was a YC
company and it was a cool feature. He had a right to overstate things. But
simply repeating a canard doesn't make the underlying structure of the
universe change, no matter how cool the feature is.</rant>

~~~
spacemanaki
You're right, but, like a lot of old-but-new things on HN, I hadn't heard of
Etherpad, or read pg's praise of it, before this article. There are probably a
lot more people like me reading the Atlantic, than people like you, to whom
it's all old news.

------
steveklabnik
<http://etherpad.com/ep/pad/slider/13sentences>

Sad. Now that etherpad is no more this incredibly relevant link is gone
forever.

(it was a replay of pg writing an essay
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=495336>)

------
gregdetre
Jon Udell's narrated animation of the collaborative process behind Wikipedia
Heavy Metal Umlaut article is hilarious and captivating in a similar way:

<http://jonudell.net/udell/gems/umlaut/umlaut.html>

He makes the case that a million tiny edits by different people over time
really can construct something magnificent and structured.

~~~
akkartik
Oh Jon Udell, how did you fall off my feedreader?

My favorite, perhaps:
<http://jonudell.net/udell/gems/googleMaps2/gmap2_flash.html>

/me goes off to catch up on jonudell.net

------
gregdetre
And I only half-agree that version control isn't important in writing.
Certainly in (collaborative) non-fiction (e.g. science papers), most of the
same merging, cutting, reinstating and backtracking that helps with
programming would be of huge value to authors.

I can think of dozens of smart non-programmers who I think would relish a
friendly Git for writers - it would, of course, have to be called Writ...

~~~
mechanical_fish
It's a big UX design problem to come up with something demonstrably better
than a series of saved milestone copies plus Word's "Track Changes" feature.

The milestone copies are the equivalent of commits. If your doc is in Dropbox
you probably get them for free, but there's definitely room to improve the
interface to those old copies.

Track Changes is the prose version of "diff", plus it lets you put in
editorial annotations which are kind of akin to commit messages.

I expect that the designer who attacks the problem will quickly realize that
prose is just much less clearly structured than code. Code is built of very
simple syntax, grouped into lines, which are grouped into blocks, which are
often named as functions and then called from other bits of code via tightly
defined interfaces. This is done to make the code easier to change, and it
simultaneously makes the changes easier to track, easier to categorize and
label and annotate. (That's not a coincidence; "making the diffs neater" and
"making the code easier to change" are aspects of the same task.)

Prose does not look or work like code. It is not DRY, not at any level of
abstraction from the grammar (change "he" to "she" and you may have to edit a
lot of other words, not necessarily confined to one sentence or one paragraph)
to the semantics (because English doesn't have a gender-neutral pronoun, a
substitution of "he" for "she" threatens to alter the actual meaning of a
sentence, and of adjacent sentences) to the theme (in 2010, a novel about a
man who becomes President of the USA is necessarily different from a novel
about a woman who becomes President of the USA). And so it is a lot of work --
work beyond the powers of a simple algorithm -- to detect which edits are
logically grouped with which other edits. Composing sensibly organized
"commits" and writing the "commit messages" for each revision of _The Waste
Land_ would probably be harder than writing the poem itself. Just ask one of
the historians, whose job it is to do so.

If you are a historian with all the time in the world, an Etherpad session of
T.S. Eliot composing _The Waste Land_ would be awesome. But would it have been
so awesome to Eliot? Or would it have been only marginally more useful than
his typed and scribbled hard-copy revisions? Or maybe even _less_ useful?
Forgetting is a very useful skill. We've got fancy mental mechanisms for
managing the process, and those mechanisms evolved for a reason.

~~~
rlpb
> If you are a historian with all the time in the world, an Etherpad session
> of T.S. Eliot composing The Waste Land would be awesome. But would it have
> been so awesome to Eliot?

This is the key. _We_ want to see that revision history and only in retrospect
for a tiny proportion of writers in the world. I'm not convinced that the
writers themselves have any motivation to do so, especially with the UX
complexities that as you point out would be necessary.

If the people in the position to do it have no motivation to do it, it won't
happen.

And then there's the other side of the coin. A writer may prefer not to show
people drafts. Imagine a politician doing it. At the moment we vet things
before we publish them. We do this for various reasons including for
confidential information and to avoid upsetting people. How much more of a
burden will it be to vet all revision history for this too?

------
zamfi
This is great; it's a pretty good feeling to know that people still use
Etherpad.

jsomers: Do you frequently draft text using Etherpad? Assuming no one else
will see your "breadcrumbs", do you find it useful just for yourself?

~~~
jsomers
I do have a local instance of etherpad but the friction to get it running
seems to be just enough to prevent me from firing it up. So mostly I use
either textmate or something called writeroom. I like using textmate with
markdown because you can highlight something, hit ⌘I, and it's italicized.

For a while I thought _where_ I wrote mattered, but after producing good and
bad just about everywhere I decided to just go with whatever jumps to mind
first.

I'm amused when I look back at my "breadcrumbs," but I don't know if they're
useful. They're just a record of a struggle you already went through. So it's
not like you're going to learn a whole lot of new stuff.

Where they're useful is when you think to yourself, "maybe the way I phrased
it _was_ better." I did that a number of times, and probably wouldn't have
been able to if I hadn't used etherpad.

It's really tough to say. I bet a lot of the benefits would accrue over the
long run.

------
da5e
Word of the day: Maieutics

Wikipedia says "is a pedagogical method based on the idea that due to the
reason innate within each of us the truth is latent in the mind of every human
being, "

------
ffffruit
A link to the T.S. Eliot poem for the curious minded like myself:
<http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html>

------
Raphael
I used Etherpad on <http://piratepad.net> all quarter for group write-ups. Any
other workflow would have been cumbersome.

Google was foolish in killing Etherpad and would be smart to create a lite
mode for Google Docs that emulates it closely.

~~~
Groxx
Yeah, their list of versions is nowhere _near_ as useful as the slider. Nor as
fast.

I haven't used it for a bit, but isn't the multi-person editing a lot like
etherpad? Chat and everything? Irritating that it's locked down, and doesn't
have the slider, but it's a lot better than non-etherpad-clones have managed.

------
hubb
i would never have expected to read an article that mentions both ezra pound
and paul graham. awesome

------
adelevie
Reminds me of what I've heard about "Mt. Fuji" questions for technical job
interviews: the interviewer doesn't really care that you get the question
right, s/he just wants to see how you think.

Yet somehow, I think that the mere knowledge that each keystroke is being
tracked will somehow skew the natural writing process. Some shameless self-
promoters may turn writing into something like a performance.

(here's the timeslider: <http://ietherpad.com/ep/pad/view/D8SOJGh37k/latest>)

~~~
treeface
Maybe...or it will simply create a new branch of technical writing such that
the performance is just as important as the final work.

------
brown9-2
It is really refreshing to read an article which isn't primarily about
software development get some of the details about development so right.

------
timcederman
When writing my PhD, I used CVS to track changes, and in addition revisioned
personal milestones to a new file. All told there must have been ~100
versions, each with a revision history tracked in CVS.

~~~
beza1e1
Here the number of commits from one of my current papers (accepted, not yet
published, names obfuscated).

    
    
      $ git shortlog -s
       193  First Author
       289  Second Author
        36  Third Author
    

If you write something together version control is just necessary.

------
peregrine
Google docs has a revison history.

~~~
rjvir
Google Docs doesn't save every keystroke, it is not as fast and elegant as
Etherpad's.

~~~
peregrine
Agreed. But its more then any other supported product I've seen.

------
sberkun
I presented time-lapsed video of myself writing an essay and presented it at
an event, with audio commentary.

I didn't know about Etherpad at the time, but there are some things captured
here it wouldn't get, as they happen outside the browser.

It also might be more educational, as I explain in voice-over what's going on:

[http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2010/video-how-to-
write-1000...](http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2010/video-how-to-
write-1000-words/)

------
sachitgupta
Scott Berkun (formerly of Microsoft and author of three bestsellers) did a
talk at Ignite about this where he recorded himself writing an essay:
[http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2010/video-how-to-
write-1000...](http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2010/video-how-to-
write-1000-words/)

Really interesting to see how much work even a 1000 essay takes!

------
klipt
In the words of Terry Pratchett:

"I save about twenty drafts -- that's ten meg of disc space -- and the last
one contains all the final alterations. Once it has been printed out and
received by the publishers, there's a cry here of 'Tough shit, literary
researchers of the future, try getting a proper job!' and the rest are wiped."

------
spc476
What I found fascinating were the links to the reference material being used
while writing the article that were later removed. I think people tend to
forget that this is a hypertext medium and thus, you can always link to your
source materials in context, in case anyone is curious enough to follow up on
it.

~~~
jsomers
Good catch. What mostly happened was that an old prof of mine, upon reading a
draft, pointed me to a much better source than the ones I was using. So I
ditched that material (and those citations) and just used the Rainey article,
the one footnoted at the end of the final draft.

------
mhartl
One solution is to eschew word processing and use a typesetting language
instead. For example, I wrote the _Ruby on Rails Tutorial_ book
(<http://railstutorial.org/book>) in LaTeX and versioned it with Git. This
proved useful on many occasions.

------
Groxx
Mirror of the picture link in the last version (took a while to respond when I
tried to view it): <http://imagefrog.net/show.php/133491_tsewlms2.jpeg>

------
gnosis
vim has "persistent undo" (undo/redo changes for every file you edit, saved
across quitting and restarting vim):

[http://choorucode.wordpress.com/2010/11/27/vim-persistent-
un...](http://choorucode.wordpress.com/2010/11/27/vim-persistent-undo/)

vim also has "undo branches", which allow you to undo/redo not only to any
point in a linear set of revisions, but to any node in a tree of revisions:

[http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Using_undo_branches#What_are_undo_...](http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Using_undo_branches#What_are_undo_branches.3F)

Now if it only had a cutesy little slider bar at the top..

------
mcrittenden
Just a note for anyone mourning the loss of etherpad and unhappy with the
selection of clones, I've been really happy with <http://sync.in>.

------
alanh
Just wanted to point out that Simplenote saves old versions of notes, as well
— not infinitely or as fine-grained as Etherpad did, but hey.

------
mcantor
Doesn't Dropbox version stuff?

------
ditojim
etherpad - now a part of google apps.

------
crizCraig
Not even version control saves every keystroke. Something I've always wanted
was complete undo history, in every program I use.

~~~
benatkin
I think that was part of the Google Wave vision. Also part of Jef Raskin's
vision detailed in The Humane Interface, which so far I've only read summaries
of.

I didn't make the direct connection between Google Wave and The Humane
Interface until now. I wonder how much of the former was inspired by the
latter. The first search brings up this blog post, where the author mentions
that he's taking notes in Google Wave but doesn't compare Google Wave to The
Humane Interface.

[http://roberthanson.blogspot.com/2010/01/humane-
interface.ht...](http://roberthanson.blogspot.com/2010/01/humane-
interface.html)

I'm amused.

~~~
crizCraig
Yes, Google wave incorporated that as part of it's platform which would be
cool for building Google Wave apps since it's already baked in. For other
programs though, it seems like it would just be a matter of persisting the
undo data. This data could also be source controlled allowing you to peer into
the process of developers before you and gain a better understanding of the
code. Keeping all your history in Photoshop would also be awesome. I wonder
why apps don't do that more often. It seems like such an obvious and kick-ass
feature.

~~~
benatkin
It's a complexity problem, though: not just for developers but for users.
That's why it isn't about "other programs".

The way out of apps dealing with complexity individually is for the platform
to do more. This is what The Human Interface argues, going so far as to say
there shouldn't be a plethora of separate apps for different tasks.

When Google Wave first came out, Google touted its ability to be used all over
the web, and to support custom-coded plugins that would get its versioning
support _for free_.

There are tradeoffs to adopting a front-end platform that gives useful stuff
that are consistent across apps or sites for free. It's a very interesting
concept to me nonetheless.

------
pedanticfreak
Etherpad may actually hinder more than help writer archeology.

Would T.S. Eliot's widow have had access to his drafts and correspondence if
they were in Google Docs and Gmail, respectively? Or worse, what if they were
in the now defunct Etherpad?

