I was chatting to a friend over coffee recently and they mentioned they'd been to a writing course and the instructor told them always to write by hand because it freed up creativity.
I'm sure that's true for some people. In fact I'm sure it's true for many people and I even expect there's research out there to back it up. And obviously helping people develop their writing is in part about helping them with their writing process. But for me the problem comes when a process suggestion becomes a rule.
I used to write longhand, in pencil. (Using a pen paralysed me, it felt as if ink made the words unalterable.) But it turns out I have terrible fine motor skills so my hand could never keep up with the stream of thought running through my arm. Not to mention I can't spell at speed, so looking back on what I'd written was enough to throw me into despair.
Now I can't really type either and I'm still not going to win any spelling bees, but my two fingers can put enough on the screen that I know what I meant and I can go back and fix it up when the flow stops. When I discovered the word processor (I'm that old!) it let me be creative in a way paper and pen just couldn't. I can type anything because with a click it disappears. No one but me will ever know what a shockingly bad sentence I'm capable of.
For me, writing is all in the editing. I used to tell my coding son he needed to write me a program that put random junk on the page so I'd have something to edit. (Careful what you wish for!)
Even in my first draft, I'm editing as I go. I'll write a sentence, a paragraph, a scene and then realise the idea and most of the words are right but whole isn't. I'll reverse sentences, change tense, reorder paragraphs and voila, clumsy, unsubtle text develops flow and depth. (Well, I think so anyway.) I need to shore up the foundations before I can build on them. With pen and paper, I'd have a scrawl of crossings out and intersecting arrows to insertions all covered with a smear of hand-heel ink that even I couldn't read.
Some people (I suspect) use pen and paper because it guides them forward. (It's not called the puke draft for nothing!) They may well be trying to avoid exactly what I'm trying to do. And that's a good way to write, if it's right for you. But it's not the only way, because our brains are all different and each has a different key to unlock it.
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| Word file showing the changes in one scene I've written. This isn't first to last draft because when I try to do that there's literally nothing lining up |
