Paper or typing?

[louiselux]

My writing output for the past few months has been mostly fragments. It's partly to do with RL intruding but also something to do with the way I write: how I physically get the words down. I often write by hand somewhere where there's no pc. If I don't get something typed up, then I never finish it.

I often (nearly always) start on paper, because I'm often on the train or in the garden when I'm thinking about a story, not at my pc. I don't have a laptop - if I did perhaps that would change things.

Writing on paper is slower and there's always the feeling that when I type it up, I'm going to polish it up and finish it off - very much the feeling that this is a rough copy. It's a guide, and I often find that by the time I'm at the pc, things change quite drastically. I vastly prefer to read my typed rather than handwritten stories. Its simply easier to read a nice neat typed page, rather than a mess of crossings out and inserted, scribbled lines.

The again, I love having that copy, and I find that for short things like drabbles, I can write pretty much the finished thing by hand. Writing things down by hand means there's a paper copy written in a nice coloured pen and more than that, it's a record of my thought processes- you don't get that with typing. I get an obscure pleasure from looking over a handwritten story and seeing the final version peeping out from around the edges of furious crossings out. But then, if I read something on screen, I find it harder to spot errors. I always have to beta on a paper copy, for example, and that's not just because I like to do it in the bath. Only joking. Er.

But the end result is, if I don't get it typed up then it's going to sit unfinished. Physical resources matter too. I simply don’t have enough paper in my small travel notebook to rewrite whole stories. And of course, writing by hand takes longer than typing something, or it does for me at least.

[Poll #300178]

***

I'm off until Wednesday now. Long weekend here I come! After the chores. The house needs cleaning, we seem to have spread every item of clothing we own over the bedroom, the bills need sorting out so goodbye sweet monthly salary. I've eaten too much bread this week so I'm uncomfortably bloated and podgy and my waistband is too tight. But on the upside, I have a party to go to, a pile of postcards to write and send and a birthday present to get, which pretty much means slavering over DVDs in the bowels of HMV. Maybe today is the day to finally get Firefly?

Comments

[daegaer.livejournal.com]

I used to be a paper-first writer for everything, which is why I still turn up bits of a longhand, fountain pen first draft of my thesis from time to time. Then I became a computer-only writer, in the name of saving time. This had the effect of making my handwriting incredibly bad from sheer lack of practice. During the Great Virus Infestation of last summer, I became a pen and paper writer once more, and now I alternate (it's a lot lighter to carry a little notebook around after all).

One tip I picked up - from derryderrydown, I think, although it may have been cicerothewriter - is to switch from typing to writing or v.v. as a way of breaking writer's block. It works most of the time which is very nice.

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

It's rather sad that so many people are losing the ability to write by hand well - mine is pretty bad appalling, and it was even worse before I began handwriting every day. Someone in the poll mentioned that they'd sometimes write by hand if they had a nice pen. I like having a pretty notebook and writing in it with a good pen. That sounds a bit ridiculous, I know, but it's definitely a pleasure.

That's an interesting tip about breaking writer's block - it definitely works, I think.