I took a Brother portable to Korea with me, used it for everything – letters, poetry, essays (none of the foregoing survive, mercifully). The open parts of the letters were filled with paper fiber. One of those square jobs that weighed about 30 pounds. When I was a kid my dad brought home an old office typewriter that his employer had discarded. I dislike writing out anything longer than a name and address. If it sounds complicated, yeah it sort of is once you start, but it’s turned into a huge time save in the long run.Ī fascinating topic. I can see a timeline of all my changes over time (the usefulness of which depends entirely on how well I annotate my updates) But mainly it allows me to go back to any previous version of a draft and pick what I want out of it so I’m not afraid to delete things. So on any computer I want, I pull down that Scrivener project off of Github, do my writing, then commit my updates to the project.
This service mainly exists to keep track of software projects, but it doesn’t *not* let you upload Scrivener projects so… So I take the folder where the guts of my Scrivener project lives, and commit it to a version control system called Git that lives online on my Github account. There’s a bunch of power-user features too like keywords that can be attached to scenes so you can do something like mark all the times you consciously harp on a specific theme or mention some plot device or whatever, but that’s not the real draw. It’s very useful to have chapters and scenes cut up into clickable, rearrange-able, segments. And also file folders for research, character background, pictures, really whatever you want. Picture your manuscript as a file cabinet with each chapter being a single file folder. I’ve been somewhat outspoken on my use of Scrivener ( ) Whatever the case, it is an important part of my personal process, and I love a good old fashioned Composition Book. Maybe it’s because I’m an artsy-craftsy person, or maybe it’s because I grew up jotting stories onto whatever scraps of paper I could find nearby. I don’t think I’ll ever let go of the paper and pencil part of writing. I still have that crazy bump on my middle finger where the pencil likes to sit.
I come away with splotches on the side of my hand because I’m left-handed and my skin runs over the words before they’ve had time to dry. I like how visceral the inked words are on a piece of paper. Each word is present with me because it’s being formed out of my brain and my hand. It’s far less organized and I can only focus on what I’m jotting down each second. Sometimes the story feels more organic that way. I don’t know how many words I can write per minute, but I write fast and messy and it flows. There are bits and snippets of things that I had to get down on paper when they wouldn’t come to me on screen. The stories in the notebook are not whole. It’s too easy to look back to pause to go in and edit even if it’s a first draft. These nimble fingers can keep up with the speed of my thoughts and narration, but I can’t sustain the momentum without getting distracted. According to the online typing test I once had to take, I can average 66 words per minute. It’s too easy to hit the delete key or get distracted by the red underlines that point out every typo. Sometimes that blank screen just stays blank.
Though I type out all my writing now, I keep notebooks handy at all times. This was the bottled stuff that got everywhere. And I’m not talking about the new white-out tape. I drafted school reports on yellow paper with blue lines and then carefully transcribed each word onto clean white paper with blue lines. We didn’t get a family computer until later.
We had a computer in my house, but that’s because my dad worked for Digital (which became Compaq, which became Hewelett-Packard). I’m part of that nebulous, transitional generation that almost – but not quite – grew up with modern home technology. I’m supposedly a Millennial, but computers weren’t important to my writing process until I was heading into junior high. How are people writing these days? By computer? By hand? A bit of both? I bet there are some adventurous types out there banging away on a typewriter just for the heck of it.