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

[flambeau.livejournal.com]

I do the bulk of my writing in wordpad, but usually the initial idea exists on paper, as well as some central lines of dialogue and/or Moments of Emotional Insight *snicker* and for longer stories, I end up with lots of little pieces of paper as I scribble down whatever occurs to me when I'm not at the computer, whether it's a few paragraphs of solid narrative or just a lot of sketchy three-word possibilities for the next scene.

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

... whether it's a few paragraphs of solid narrative or just a lot of sketchy three-word possibilities for the next scene.


Ah, yes. Those three word scenes that you go back to a week later and think, 'so, brain, explain to me exactly what you meant by 'bicycle nail-polish death probe?'

[flambeau.livejournal.com]

Yes, exactly. I have a lot of notes along the lines of Character A does it, not character B! where I have no clue any more what "it" refers to. One day I will learn. One day.