Hey friends,
I recently mentioned that I would be drafting a newsletter issue soon about Typeset Tools. This is that newsletter. But in Non-Slop Fun fashion, I have no interest in monologuing at you from across the Internet about a business I’m building. Instead, I want to talk about a book.
Stoner, by John Williams, was originally published in 1965 and is set in the decades prior, spanning roughly 1910 to the mid-1950s.
It first came across my radar when my skip-level manager recommended that I read it. He was a tech bro among tech bros, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. With the modern connotations of “stoner” as a descriptor, I half expected either an admonishment or endorsement of cannabis. Still, I made my way to bookshop.org, read the description, and placed an order.
Stoner is one of those novels that is hard to explain in casual conversation in a way that makes someone else want to pluck it from the shelves. In a nutshell, it follows the life of William Stoner, born to poor Midwestern farmers, who goes to college to study agriculture, falls in love with literature while interpreting a sonnet, and becomes a professor of English. Along the way, he gets married, has a brief affair with a PhD student (which he calls off when he and his paramour are threatened with scandal), and quietly commits himself to his vocation despite being often underappreciated and not receiving accolades in the eyes of the world that are commensurate with his devotion to his craft.
Are you sold yet?
As I said, Stoner is a hard book to pitch on the surface. In many ways, it’s in the vein of Cather’s writing, where it really starts to shine once you take the prose itself into consideration and unpack the themes that it teases out. About her own work, Cather once articulated that it wasn’t written for anyone under the age of forty– that her writing was best suited for those with a vantage point of lived experience. Though I disagree with her (still under-forty gang, where are we at?), I understand her point and think it applies to Stoner as well: the themes the novel explores may feel boring and unrelatable until you have wrestled with questions about your own purpose and whether or not you’ve made the right decisions in life– whether you can live with the path that you are on.
Williams sums up this sentiment in a passage in which he writes,
You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. Remember that while you're trying to decide what to do
The character of Stoner is situated against the backdrop of two world wars, and Williams was writing the novel during the 1960s, when the Vietnam War, Cold War, and Civil Rights Movement were ongoing and fresh in the cultural memory. And yet, when discussing Stoner’s efforts to wrestle with his sense of self, he chooses to describe the sense of inner conflict as another kind of war to underscore the significance of something that, on the surface, is as mundane as a man choosing to be a professor. And he makes this tension universal by describing it as spanning the human race despite not being recorded in the annals of history.
We see this deep sense of conflict manifesting in Stoner as he tries to figure out not only what he wants to be in terms of his career, but also who he wants to be in terms of how he lives and expresses himself. Williams writes,
The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print—the love which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly.
His love of language and literature, which set him on the path he is on, is deep and profound within him; he hides it “as if it were illicit and dangerous.” It’s only over time that he learns to display and find pride in his vocation.
And that, dear reader, is exactly why I wanted to talk about Stoner in relation to Typeset Tools.
Last weekend, I was staying with my parents for the night so that I would have easier access to the airport before a work retreat. I spent a couple of hours of the evening drafting a press release for Typeset Tools, as I would like to earn some media coverage for it. When my mother asked me what I was working on, I don’t suppose I could have hedged my language more. I stated simply that I was “teaching myself to write press releases, in case I wanted to publish one for one of my many side projects.”
Like Stoner, I was afraid to be excited about Typeset Tools. It felt dangerous to state– even to my own mother– that I had built a software tool for writers that excited me, and which I felt had potential to help thousands of writers. To help me with my own writing. To help me create a second, independent income to grant me a sense of security and purpose in light of my industry’s tumultuousness. To build a real business on the back of my skills and ambitions.
I tell myself that I just need to rehearse my elevator pitch. If I could only articulate in a few quick sentences why someone would choose Folio by Typeset Tools™ over something like Scrivener or Google Docs, then I wouldn’t hesitate and hedge and waffle when asked about my business.
But, the truth is, it’s scary to be excited about something. Believing in yourself and having a dream is a vulnerable act. It’s risky. When it feels like something you’ve created is a part of you and your identity, then if it fails– if people don’t get it– it feels like a rejection of you as a person.
In some ways, I find myself envious of the sales folks and tech bros I know, who always manage to approach pitching with such confidence that it practically convinces you that they must be right even when you know they’re wrong or lacking nuance.
That’s not how my brain works. I genuinely believe that Folio is an amazing tool. I have enjoyed using it for my own writing. It has been such a learning experience to put it together and push myself to be the best product manager I can be to get it ready for real audiences. And yet… my mind still goes blank when put on the spot to pitch it and champion it.
So, I’ll rehearse with you. Here’s my elevator pitch.
I decided to build Folio because I got tired of seeing the Gemini icon at the bottom of my manuscript when writing in Google Docs. The more Grammarly and Gemini and a million other AI tools tried to insert themselves into my writing, the more I felt like I was losing my own voice and willingness to put my head down and just write. I’ve used Scrivener quite a lot in the past, but found it hard to use and frustrating to keep up with as I got new computers and bounced between my personal device, work device, and phone. I wanted a writing tool that would let me plan and brainstorm about my projects, keep track of all of my worldbuilding for fiction and research materials for nonfiction, and I wanted something that would kick AI to the curb and keep track of how my projects came together so that if AI accusations ever come up, I’d have a paper trail to point to the work I’d done.
So, I built Folio. With Folio, you have a “corkboard” for planning out your chapters or sections, an editor with a built-in focus mode and Pomodoro timer, a worldbuilding binder to keep track of every character and place and source and idea, and an authorship report that keeps track of your writing sessions and the ratio of typed to pasted to dragged to imported words.
It’s all easy to use, clean, and simple without sacrificing robustness. Everything stays synced in real time, and paid users get a downloadable Progressive Web App (PWA) that makes it easy to engage in distraction-free writing without the temptation of opening a new browser tab and scrolling mindlessly when the drafting gets difficult. Since it’s server-based, you can log in and write from any device, have everything stay in sync, and save your projects locally on your main device whenever you want.
Please check out Folio for yourselves. Head over to https://typesettools.com/folio to sign up for free. I would LOVE to get feedback about the product, especially from readers of Non-Slop Fun, so that I can keep making it better. If you try it and like it, I would also greatly greatly greatly appreciate hearing what you like about it so that I can start to get reviews and quotes up on my website.
I created a video walkthrough here if you’d like to see what it’s all about.
Until next time,
Blake
PS– I also quite like this quote from Stoner but didn’t have a direct means of incorporating it, so you get it in the postscript: “It was himself that he was attempting to define as he worked on his study. It was himself that he was slowly shaping, it was himself that he was putting into a kind of order, it was himself that he was making possible.”