![I write by hand. I’ve been writing stories my entire life, and as a kid whose grandfather owned the first available PC (a thing from RadioShack [RadioShack!!]) my fiction was typed from the get-go; Microsoft WordPerfect on Windows 3.1, then years of iterations of Word. I remember plots and dreams and starts for dozens and dozens of stories, novels, series, sagas, books I attempted as a kid, a high-schooler, and a few as a college student. 99% went unfinished. All were computer-drafted, failures in Times New Roman or, eventually, Garamond. (Because of course a classier font improves your capabilities as a storyteller.)
Then I was sitting in a cafe, bored, a month before graduating from the University of Maine, and needed to be reading for a course. I got distracted by an attractive female and started a story on the yellow legal pad I’d intended for note-taking. I finished the story in a few sit-downs. It was the first complete piece of fiction I’d written in more than two years, and only the second finished short story of my college career. I did a few more like that, by hand, on a lonely summer on Martha’s Vineyard post-graduation, and started my first honest attempt at an inevitably doomed novel, also by hand. By then writing by hand had a talismanic quality I could justify with logic, but I knew, and know now, it’s just the way I like doing it.
For me, it’s not slower if I get cranking—which is most times, because keeping the pen moving is essential. Without a backspace bar, an insistently blinking cursor and assorted other looming computer distractions (even with the wi-fi off, a computer is a disastrously distracting thing) the words that wind up on the page are more per-minute—much more—than if I was typing.
I’ll welcome a glowing screen on the second and all subsequent drafts (and do, and have, with short stories), but for this novel and any fiction work in the foreseeable future, first drafts are notebook-only.
___________](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lv84txiiXV1qa2kvco1_r1_500.png)
I write by hand. I’ve been writing stories my entire life, and as a kid whose grandfather owned the first available PC (a thing from RadioShack [RadioShack!!]) my fiction was typed from the get-go; Microsoft WordPerfect on Windows 3.1, then years of iterations of Word. I remember plots and dreams and starts for dozens and dozens of stories, novels, series, sagas, books I attempted as a kid, a high-schooler, and a few as a college student. 99% went unfinished. All were computer-drafted, failures in Times New Roman or, eventually, Garamond. (Because of course a classier font improves your capabilities as a storyteller.)
Then I was sitting in a cafe, bored, a month before graduating from the University of Maine, and needed to be reading for a course. I got distracted by an attractive female and started a story on the yellow legal pad I’d intended for note-taking. I finished the story in a few sit-downs. It was the first complete piece of fiction I’d written in more than two years, and only the second finished short story of my college career. I did a few more like that, by hand, on a lonely summer on Martha’s Vineyard post-graduation, and started my first honest attempt at an inevitably doomed novel, also by hand. By then writing by hand had a talismanic quality I could justify with logic, but I knew, and know now, it’s just the way I like doing it.
For me, it’s not slower if I get cranking—which is most times, because keeping the pen moving is essential. Without a backspace bar, an insistently blinking cursor and assorted other looming computer distractions (even with the wi-fi off, a computer is a disastrously distracting thing) the words that wind up on the page are more per-minute—much more—than if I was typing.
I’ll welcome a glowing screen on the second and all subsequent drafts (and do, and have, with short stories), but for this novel and any fiction work in the foreseeable future, first drafts are notebook-only.
___________
