“How” do you write?
For my writer friends, what is your preferred method for putting it all down for your reader? Ours are at the bottom, but please drop yours in the comments. We want to see inside your process.
- Pencil + paper?
- Ink + notebook?
- Chisel + stone
- Fire + blanket
- In the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
- Not at all (writing words down robs them of the freedom to be what they want to be)
DAVID RIKE: I only write in a notebook these days if I’m somewhere interesting enough (beach or mountainside) to justify the extra step of typing it up later. Otherwise it’s on a laptop, in an empty room, with mood music.
STEPHEN PATRICK: Pen + paper. I carry a notebook with me almost everywhere, specifically this one. I’ll burn through 2-3 each year (typically one in the Spring and one in the Summer), filling them with story seeds, character ideas, plot threads, lists, and all sorts of things. Sometimes they come to live in a work-in-progress. Other times they survive on the bookshelf until I hit a wall and skim through them, mining them for new ideas. I regularly find a solution to a problem that hasn’t arrived yet. Most recently, I’m using MS OneNote for the formal storytelling, using it to build up to a final draft in MS Word.