The Silicon Amanuensis, Part 1: The Sorcerer's Apprentice
Steve Beisner -- November 13, 2005
If you're a writer and you don't use a computer, then you have my greatest respect and admiration, but I'll have little to say to you in this series of articles. For everyone else, this series will help you achieve a comfortable relationship with what has become an essential tool for most writers. Like Harry Potter's magic wand, this marvel can free you from drudgery, but if you use it carelessly, or abdicate your responsibilities, you may accidently turn yourself and your work into a horned toad.
Installments of The Silicon Amanuensis:
The Silicon Amanuensis, Part 1: The Sorcerer's Apprentice
The Silicon Amanuensis, Part 2: Microsoft Word Ate My Manuscript!
The Silicon Amanuensis, Part 3: With Microsoft Word It's a Matter of Style
The Silicon Amanuensis, Part 4: A Microsoft Word Template: Order From Chaos
The best computer tools will boost your creativity and the quality of your work, not just make it visually appealing. In this series of articles we'll look at both how to protect yourself from computer disaster, as well as how to use word processors and other software in new ways to improve your work and save time.
The online dictionary at http://dictionary.reference.com defines Amanuensis as "One who is employed to take dictation or to copy a manuscript." What? You mean I could pay someone to copy down the drivel that passes for my first drafts? Yikes! Even if I was rolling in dollars, I wouldn't want anyone one to see that stuff! Like most, I'm thankful to have a amanuensis or secretary who is merely a dumb computer who never criticizes, but merrily does exactly what I say.
Ah, but there's the rub: computers have, from time to time, treated us (the wizard-writers) the way Mickey Mouse does the wizard in the Sorcerer's Apprentice: ignoring instructions and creating a monumental mess. We sometimes find our assistant has gone berserk and performed an unspeakable act upon our darling manuscript, translating it into gibberish, or hiding it away somewhere, never to be seen again.
As someone who has been a gamekeeper to these computer beasts since they first began to climb out of the primordial ooze of "Giant Electronic Brains" filling pages of cheap science fiction novels with glowing electronic tubes, I'd like to share with you what I think you should know to protect your work, get the most out of your slavish amanuensis, and maintain your sanity and self respect.
Basic Skills
But first, a few preliminaries. Many of you will read the following and say "I already know that." Fine... take the day off and come back for the The Silicon Amanuensis, Part 2. Otherwise, you have some work to do.
A surprisingly large number of writers know how to open a manuscript in their word processor, edit, and print, perhaps read email or access a web site, given its address, but not how to locate, copy, rename, delete, move, or archive the files that that hold their precious manuscripts.
If this describes you, then listen up: you are in grave danger. You should immediately make a sacrifice to whatever gods have been protecting you from imminent disaster. Get thee to a computer class, or pay a precocious ten year old to explain the Windows Explorer if you use the computer equivalent of pulp fiction, i.e. Microsoft Windows. An online tutorial covering many of these topics may be found at http://www.duke.edu/~dhewitt/tutorials/explorer/explor.html. Or just Google for "Windows Explorer Tutorial".
If you're lucky enough to own the more literary Apple computer, have someone teach you about the Finder. There are some pretty good tutorials at http://www.macoptions.com/osx/; also, you can get to useful help articles by running the finder, e.g. by double clicking the hard drive icon on your desktop, selecting "Help" from the menu, and searching on a particular topic by name.
In either case, at minimum you have to know how to perform the following tasks well enough that you don't have to think about them; in other words, well enough that you're not likely to make mistakes or forget how to do these things.
- Navigate (i.e. find your way around) your computer's hierarchy of disk drives, folders, and files. Become familiar, as you would with a file cabinet that sits in the corner of your office, with what drawer and folders contain what things. Especially, you need to know where you have been saving your work. Later in this series we'll talk about how to organize your file system to make yourself more efficient, maintain a history of versions, and archive your work in such a way that you'll never worry about losing what you've created.
- Make copies of files and file folders. Create new folders.
- Rename files or file folders. Do you know what a file name extension is? What it means?
- Delete a file or an entire folder. Recover deleted material from the computer's "trash can" or "recycle bin."
- Move a file or folder to a different location within the computer's hierarchy of folders.
If you can do all this with confidence, then you are ready to move from hoping the computer will not ruin your work to knowing how to make your electronic assistant do your bidding. Come back to Ink Byte soon for the next installment of The Silicon Amanuensis.