On my table I have a leather-bound journal, a kindle, and several yellow stripy Hb pencils. I write in longhand and in pencil. They are my old friends. I mastered the use of this technology at about the age of three and since then I haven’t looked back. They require no special consideration or concentration. They require no power outlet and in special circumstances they write upside-down whilst I’m watching TV.
This is my preferred method.
If I am sitting in my kitchen away from my desk then I have my laptop. It is bright and shiny. It is capricious. We eye each other with suspicion. Sometimes it pings grumpily at me and I mutter
” Pencils don’t ping! “
I don’t think this is making the relationship any stronger. You see the laptop will always be second in my affections. It is my second draft workhorse and not the playground of my imagination.
How do you write?
I write in my moleskine first, and then I type it up on the iPad, and after that paste it into scrivener. I don’t know. I have a complicated writing process I should probably work on fixing, but it gets the job done!
Anything that gets the words on the page is the best process. The one thing I do love about my laptop is Scrivener. Makes it so much easier to slash n trash (cough), I mean edit.
I love that it makes eBooks so you can read it a different way, making it easier to spot typos!
One way I’ve found the check for typos and stray punctuation is to turn the page upside-down and skim it. Often relieves the boredom of the second pass through and the offending articles tend to jump out for me at that point. They just look wrong. So I mark them and re-visit.