The answer surprises people who expect a bestselling fantasy author to own something sleek. Martin drafts A Song of Ice and Fire on an old DOS computer running WordStar 4.0, a word processor older than many of his readers. He keeps it walled off from the internet on purpose.
Two Machines, One Job Each
Martin runs two computers and gives them completely different jobs. One is a modern machine for email, taxes, and browsing the web. The other is a DOS box that never touches the internet, and that second one is where the books get written. Nothing can ping him, update itself, or pull his attention sideways while he's deep in Westeros. The writing computer does one thing and does it on a plain screen, and that narrowness is exactly what he wants from it.
Why WordStar 4.0
WordStar 4.0 shipped in the late 1980s, and Martin has never found a reason to leave it. He likes that it stays out of his way. Modern word processors want to help, and their help is the problem. They capitalize letters he meant to keep lowercase and underline his invented names in angry red. He wants none of that while building a world where a character might reasonably be called Daenerys Targaryen or Stannis Baratheon, names the software treats as spelling errors on every line.
It does everything I want a word processing program to do, and it doesn't do anything else. I don't want any help.
George R.R. Martin, on Conan (2014)
The feature he hates most is the autocorrect. Type a lowercase letter and watch it jump to a capital. He knows how to work the shift key, and if he'd wanted a capital he'd have typed one. WordStar leaves his keystrokes exactly as he pressed them, which is the whole reason he sticks with a program most of the industry abandoned decades ago.
There's a practical upside too. A machine that never goes online can't be hacked and can't leak a manuscript, and a story kept off the cloud won't vanish in someone else's outage. For how this habit fits his wider process, see the full George R.R. Martin writing routine.
What You Can Steal
- Give your writing device one purpose. A machine that can't open a browser can't open a rabbit hole.
- Turn off the helpers. Autocorrect and squiggly underlines pull your eye out of the sentence and into the software.
- Old tools are fine if they still work. The best setup is the one you stop noticing while you use it.
- Keep the internet on the other side of a wall. A second device or airplane mode does most of the job.