Blogocentric Formulations

Is Formatting Passe?

On his blog  , screenwriter John August (Go, Big Fish, Charlie's Angels) recently interviewed author Michael Chabon (Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Wonder Boys, The Yiddish Policemen's Union) about his writing process. Chabon mentioned that he's currently using a program called iA Writer  . What struck me in particular about this program is that it embraces the idea of completely ignoring formatting. In fact, there are no settings for the program. You can't change fonts or double space or insert a header... the only feature it seems to have is an automated spell check that will underline a misspelled word in red, like with Microsoft Word.

In the interview, Chabon said he loved the simplicity of that kind of interface and, on some level, I can appreciate that. But a larger part of me wonders when it became passe to actually format your work. Formatting, for me, has never really been a big deal. It's something you fuss with for a few minutes when you first open a document (and maybe later on when you're editing and want the pages to look perfect), but other than that, I've never really been bothered by the plethora of options and functions available through Microsoft Word when I'm in the middle of writing something. Is it just me, or is it strange to think that people will purchase a completely standalone writing program just so they don't have to take two minutes to worry about formatting when they're just starting a new document?

More importantly, doesn't formatting become an issue eventually? At some point, your words have to leave the safety and confinement of your own hard drive. You have to send a manuscript to a publisher, or submit it to a contest, or self-publish and present it to the world. At which point, your work needs to be formatted appropriately. I wonder what users of iA Writer are supposed to do? Once their work has been assembled in the sterility and simplicity of a program with no formatting settings, does it then have to be exported to a program that will allow you to format it, so the work can be double-spaced, indented, paginated, fitted with a title page, etc.?

For me, formatting is a minor inconvenience at the very start (and very end) of the process. It's not something that invades my waking thoughts when I'm staring at my computer screen, and it's not something I take into consideration when I'm writing my sentences and paragraphs. I'm tempted to give iA Writer a try, just to see what it's like (it's currently only $4.99 in the Mac App Store) - and to test out some of it's cooler features like working over iCloud for my iPhone and iPad - but I wonder if this whole idea of doing away with formatting isn't a bit shortsighted because most of us... at least those without assistants to do it for us... have to tackle the ugly format monster at some point.

Has anyone out there tried iA Writer, or think it would be a welcome relief from the distraction of formatting-capable programs like Word or Pages? I'd be interested to hear other viewpoints on the idea of formatting and whether it's a concern to other writers (or not) at some point in the process.