Monday 8 May 2023

The Struggles of a Bestselling Author

 The other day, half listening to the radio, I caught part of an interview with Lee Child, who is, I understand, one of the top-selling authors in the world, thanks to his wildly successful Jack Reacher thrillers. At one point he was talking about the mechanics of writing his books, and my ears pricked up. Apart from some early efforts in longhand, he has always, he told the interviewer, written his books on Microsoft Word (me too, Lee, with somewhat less commercial success). He used to be able to do this quite easily, but thanks to endless updates and 'improvements', he now finds himself unable to navigate what used to be simple tasks, notably pagination. Since the latest updates, he simply cannot work out how to paginate his headers. So here's what he does: he works with his previous novel as his document, deleting the text, leaving the pagination intact, and inserts his new copy into the old document. Result: a new novel, duly paginated. Ingenious, but hardly what Microsoft had in mind, I imagine.
   This was good to hear, after the blood, sweat and tears I shed over Word in the course of writing The Mother of Beauty (evidence of which can be seen by the sharp-eyed in certain, er, irregularities in layout, etc). I thought it was just me – but no: here is a massively successful bestselling author defeated by Word and driven to desperate improvisation to overcome the difficulties it throws in the writer's path. Perhaps he should get his pen out and revert to his original method... Why is it that every update and 'improvement' – of practically anything – only seems to make life more difficult?

5 comments:

  1. And heaven help you if you want to remove a “temporary” horizontal black line.

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  2. I was struggling with Word just today. Who determines what "improvements" shall be made, to benefit whom?

    We are accustomed to this sort of thing, though: of having to adjust our writing and speaking because of decisions made -- by whom? I think, for example, of the changes in names for members of ethnic groups -- changes in nomenclature or capitalization. We suddenly perceive that a change has been made and we adopt it. But who decided that the change should be made? It wasn't something done by a vote of the members of that group. I don't get it.

    DN

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  3. Neither do I, Dale. I suspect that with techie things the 'improvements' are to impress the nerdy types and get good reviews – and never mind the rest of us who just need some basic word processing. There must be a market for simple versions of all these things that have been made impossible for so many of us by needless additions and complications.

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  4. I've found virtually every software update of any kind for at least 15 years to be indistinguishable from malware.

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