Your Word Processor Is Irrelevant

There seems to be a consensus that you can only write a publishable, profit piece of writing if you do it with the right software. However, as any logical mind can conclude, what you write your text with is largely irrelevant. If you don’t believe me, then here’s why your choice of word processing software does not truly matter.

Writing Is the Important Part

All in all, it’s the text that holds the value. In theory, people could enjoy your published work in print format, or something as rudimentary as a .txt file.

The quality of the writing trumps whatever it was written in. MacWrite, which was one of the first commercial word processors, launched in 1984 alongside the first Apple Macintosh computers. By today’s standards, it is beyond primitive. However, like any word processor, it can still process, save, and export text.

I have never heard of anyone refusing to read or enjoy something because of the software it was composed in, especially regarding literature, essays, and articles.

Formatting & Feature Set

The importance of formatting is really down to what your end goal is. If you simply want an environment to do some basic writing, then all you need is the basics:

Most other features become luxuries. Think of the baseline that Microsoft Word set all the way back in the 1990s when it began evolving into more than a pure word processor. Even by 1996, MS Word was capable of handling many things, such as page setups; automatic tables and indexes; automatic formatting; custom dictionaries; auto-capitalisation and limited autocorrect; footers and headers; multiple fonts at once; importing images, clip art, and even other MS documents; drawing 2D and 3D shapes; emailing files; macros; templates… I think you get the point.

All this was present in software from 1996 or earlier. In all honesty, it’s not like we’ve become extremely advanced since then. Even modern-day Word (or alternatives like LibreOffice Writer and Google Docs) have merely refined Word 97’s feature set, whilst improving overall compatibility and stability.

So it’s important to ask why you really need to pay for modern writing suites. LibreOffice is entirely free for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and older versions of Word (yes, even 97) still function on Windows 11.

Specialist software for final editing work is an understandable investment. But whether you write your latest piece of fiction or non-fiction with 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, or 2020s software is not going to have any major effect on the quality and commonplace features available to you as a writer.

Software for Authors

Scrivener and affordable alternatives boast themselves as being writing software that is developed with authors in mind. Here’s the thing… for every author that uses Scrivener, I’d say there are several who do not.

Many successful, mainstream authors have noted that they use Microsoft Word to write their bestselling fiction. In an interview with Literary Hub, Kazuo Ishiguro—an acclaimed author with a $5,000,000 net worth—stated that he writes his stories using an entirely offline computer that ‘dates from 1996.’

This not only plays into my last point about modern features, but is a clear expression that software like Scrivener, which launched in 2007, is not necessary for writing great works. Its extras are handy, but not essential. Everything offered in Scrivener and its competitors can be achieved through Microsoft Word and a notebook to track ideas, character details, daily writing progress, and whatever else.

Software for authors is a buzz term designed to lure in naive writers who think they’ll get the jump by buying all the gear. It’s the same as people saying you need a modern Mac to excel at writing, when that is clearly not the case.

Software Is Optional

When you were a child, you probably wrote simple stories in notebooks and on stray A4 pages. No autocorrect or spellcheck, no punctuation assistance, and a totally personalised, one-of-a-kind font (your handwriting). Let’s not forget typewriters were commonplace since the late 1800s, long before the word ‘digital’ was relevant to everyday life.

Stories can be created in many ways, and writing does not necessarily have to be done digitally, even for professional works. Many authors draft their stories out on paper, refining them when translating that into a digital format using their chosen word processor. Even Ishiguro notes in that same interview that ‘[he prefers] prefer to work by pen on [his] writing slope for the initial drafts.’

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The choice of software, whether it be Notepad, Word, Scrivener, or one of the thousands of other options, can come later. The core point of this entire post is that software is not the decider in how well a story is written, or how it is received. All of that comes down not only to the writing, but the proofreading and editing, the cover design and advertising, the momentum that is gained or hindered through a positive, mixed, or negative reception.

All of this should convey how irrelevant word processors are once the writing stage is complete. This type of software processes words, not fate or fortune. Much of the outcome is dependent on the people involved in the final product, far more than the role any particular piece of software plays, and that’s the simple reality of publication.

So use your brain and don’t break the bank on MacBook Pros or premium subscriptions to ‘professional’ software if you’re an aspiring writer. Even the professionals and bestsellers still use hardware and software from the twentieth century, rather than all these snazzy iterations supposedly developed for them.