Why I Still Use WordStar:
             An Interview with Robert J. Sawyer
                     for Technically We Write


1. Let's start with an introduction: Who are you and what do you 
do?

I'm a Hugo and Nebula Award-winning science-fiction writer living 
just outside Toronto.  I suppose I'm best known for the 
FlashForward TV series on ABC, which was based on my novel of the 
same name, and for which I was one of the scriptwriters.  My most 
recent book, my 25th, is The Downloaded, which is available for 
free as an Audible Original and also in print and ebook forms.

2. You use WordStar to write your books, so let's start there. 
What version of WordStar do you use, and how do you run it?

I started with WordStar 2.26 on an Osborne 1 CP/M computer in 
December 1983, and I updated as each new version came along.  The 
final version, WordStar 7.0, is what I've been using since 1992.  
Since WordStar was first released in 1978, fourteen years 
earlier, I'll point out that WordStar 7.0 been the current 
version of WordStar for thirty-two years now.  Although WordStar 
4.0, which some users cling to (hi, George!), was certainly a 
wonderful program, WordStar 7.0 is so much more sophisticated.  I 
run WordStar under DOSBox-X (not plain DOSBox, which is aimed 
mostly at gaming) on a Windows 11 Pro computer, specifically a 
Framework 13 laptop, with two external monitors and an ergonomic 
keyboard attached.

3. What makes WordStar a great word processor?

I outline this in depth on my website (and in the file 
WORDSTAR.WS):

                https://sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm

But to just mention one significant thing: WordStar is ideal for 
touch-typists.  You can do everything -- everything -- without 
taking your hands off the home typing row.  In Microsoft Word, 
even something as quotidian as backspacing to correct a mistyped 
character requires breaking the flow of typing by forcing you to 
lift your right hand from the home-typing row to hit the 
backspace key; in WordStar, backspacing is a simple 
home-typing-row command that doesn't break the creative rhythm at 
all.

4. Authors need to stay focused on their writing, and not get 
distracted by the tools for writing.  What about WordStar makes 
it really easy for you to focus on writing?

WordStar's interface is very customizable, much more so than is 
Word's.  I prefer a clean screen, so I have just a single line at 
the top of the screen for WordStar status messages -- the very 
specific messages I want to see -- and a single dim character at 
the far right showing me my relative position in the document.  
WordStar had the ability, if you wanted, to have a night mode 
decades before Word offered that; I write with cyan letters on a 
black background, and I have WordStar fill the entire screen: no 
Windows crap visible at all.  It's a totally distraction-free 
setup.

5. Eventually, you have to share your document with someone else 
-- for example, you will have to transmit your manuscript to your 
editor.  Do you convert the WordStar file to another format, or 
does the other person do that?

WordStar 7.0 comes with a program that can convert its files to 
Word .doc format, as well as .rtf, which can be read by any 
modern wordprocessor.  But I'm very picky about manuscript 
formatting and layout, so ages ago I created my own system for 
conversion, using WordStar macros, to produce .rtf files that are 
perfect, better, in fact than what you'd get using Word; type 
"Election '24" in Word, and you'll get a single open quote at the 
beginning of the abbreviated year instead of an apostrophe -- 
madness!  I then just load the .rtf file into Word and save it 
as .docx.  In fact, I wrote the answers to this interview in 
WordStar but used the system I just described to produce the Word 
file I've sent you containing them.

6. What are some things that you can do in WordStar that you 
can't do (or are more difficult to do) in another word processor?

Here's a simple one.  Mark a block of text.  See that in the 
middle of the block, you've used the word "inane" instead of 
"insane" -- both good words for describing the Microsoft Word 
interface -- and move your cursor to add the missing s.  In 
WordStar you get the logical result:  the block stays marked, and 
the word is changed, and you can go do whatever the heck else you 
wish to do.  But in Word, the moment you type that s, all the 
text -- possibly thousands of words! -- is gone.  And God forbid 
in Word that you should mark a block and then decide not to deal 
with it right away.  WordStar lets me do operations in any order 
I wish, not in a prescribed sequence of steps that must be 
carried out in exact order, as you have to do in Word.

And, of course, WordStar lets you see the formatting codes (or 
hide them; WordStar invented reveal codes, a feature WordPerfect 
later adopted but Word never got), and, in WordStar, you can 
treat formatting codes as you would any other part of the 
document.  Try to block mark a font designation or a color 
designation in Word and then move it or copy it somewhere else.  
It simply can't be done in Bill Gates's monstrosity, but it's 
effortless in WordStar.

7. WordStar has "control" codes for inline formatting (bold text, 
italic text, etc.) and dot commands for document formatting 
(footing, line height, margin, new page, etc.). When you write 
your books in WordStar, do you use control codes, dot commands, 
or both?  How do you use dot commands?

WordStar actually has three kinds of formatting codes: simple 
ASCII control codes for toggling bold or italics, or putting in a 
nonbreak space, and so forth; dot commands (lines that begin with 
a dot, or period, are treated as commands in WordStar); and 
formatting tags for things like style sheets, font choices, 
footnotes, and more.  And I use them all.

The dot commands can be very powerful; they can contain math 
equations or conditional statements -- so you can, for instance, 
edit on an eight-inch ruler line but print out on a 6.5-inch one; 
try that in Word -- or, with a dot command, convert all the 
footnotes in a document to endnotes, and so much more.

I use the ruler dot command to set margins and tabs so much more 
quickly than you can do it in Word.  You want paragraphs indented 
half an inch, the right margin at 3 inches, and tabs at, say, one 
and one-and-a-half inch?  I can just type a line that does that:

L----P----!----!-------------R

Want to change any aspect of that?  Simply edit the ruler-line 
dot command as you would edit any text.  Want to convert a 
regular tab to one that lines up on the decimal point instead?  
Just overtype the ! with an #.  You can do all that in seconds 
just by typing, rather than going through a complex multitabbed 
dialog box, as you must in Word.

But, yes, my most-used dot command is the ".." command, which 
lets me insert a comment to myself.  And, of course, if you 
consider the dot commands a visual distraction, just hide them 
until you want to see them again.

By the way, although obviously the creations I've made with 
WordStar that I'm most proud of are my twenty-five novels, I'll 
point out that my website, with over a million words of text 
spread over 800 documents, was entirely hand-coded in HTML with 
WordStar.  Please give it a visit at https://sfwriter.com.

=================================================================

To type a .rr ruler-line command like the one above, enter .rr at 
the beginning of a line, and then end that line not by hitting 
the Enter key but rather by issuing ^P<Enter> or ^PM to insert 
only a carriage return without a line feed; the next line will 
then be considered part of the dot command.

=================================================================


Do you have a favorite font for print, and what is it?

I'm old-school so for print I love Courier, but emphatically not 
the spindly Courier New that comes with Windows.  I print my own 
working-copy manuscripts in Courier Prime, which is a free, 
darker Courier available from Quote-Unquote Apps, and edit in a 
beautiful and free sans-serif font called Iosevka Fixed.  Again, 
try to do that in Word: have one font on screen and another in 
the printout.  It simply can't be done there.

One space after a period, or two?

Two!  If you put two spaces at the end of sentences, it's 
trivially easy for the recipient to change it to one via a single 
find-and-replace operation if that's what they prefer.  On the 
other hand, if they prefer two spaces and you give them only one, 
it's enormously complex to do the reverse: changing one space to 
two only at the end of a sentence, when periods might appear 
mid-sentence as part of abbreviations and sentences might end 
with periods, question marks, quotation marks, or other 
punctuation.

Ever wonder why Microsoft Word has one mouse click select a word 
and two select a paragraph?  It logically should be one for word, 
two for sentence, three for paragraph.  But with only one space 
between sentences, there's no easy way to identify a sentence, 
and so Microsoft Word simply ignores that grammatical unit.  But 
writers, as opposed to publishers and book designers, have to 
work with isolated sentences all the time -- moving them, 
deleting them, and so on.

And, of course, saying, well, just search for a period is not a 
good answer, since sentence can end with several different 
punctuation marks singly and in combination.  There are nine 
sentence in the following paragraph; with two spaces at the end 
of each, they'd be easy to separate one from the other and mark 
as single units; with only one, it's a game of dragging and 
moving the mouse; there's simply no way to automate it:

       Let's hear it for Rev. King, Ph.D. and Dr. Fauci, 
       M.D. Dr. Smith has offices on Oak Dr. and St. 
       George St. I don't know ... sometimes I have to 
       pause and think. "You really feel one space is a 
       good idea?" "Those mad Americans put the 
       punctuation inside quotation marks!" `Those crazy 
       Brits sometimes put the punctuation outside the 
       quotation marks'! We highlighted the range A1..A4 
       in the spreadsheet. Power is down to .6!  Robert J. 
       Sawyer uses WordStar 7.0 but George R. R. Martin 
       uses WordStar 4.0.


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