Writing Advice: Pen and Paper
Shirou asks: “Do you do any story writing on physical media these days? (Outlines, doodles, rough drafts, character notes etc.) if so, why and how?”
This is a really interesting question. My reflexive response was “No, not anymore,” but then I thought a little more deeply.
“No” is a generally correct response, but not 100% accurate, and I think it’s worth thinking about the times in which a mostly digital writer would turn to pen and paper. I have in the past written on pen and paper, most notably in 2010 on a cross-country flight where the entertainment system broke down (the guy trying to fix it almost ended up flying to California with us before the flight attendant shooed him off) and my laptop was out of battery—this was before my iPad writing rig and USB power on most flights. I handwrote a couple thousand words of a story over six hours of the flight, continued it in a small blank journal a friend had gotten me, and never finished it, and also have never had the energy to go back and type it into a form where I could send it to other people*. So there’s a drawback to pen and paper.
(*Don’t worry, it wasn’t that good and I’ve recycled some of the ideas.)
But most of my examples aren’t that extreme. When I’ve finished a first draft, I will often write up a summary, print it out, and then go somewhere away from a computer and read through it so I can focus on the story, making notes on the paper. That’s a really helpful exercise that COVID stopped me from doing for a couple years (the last time I went to write in a coffee shop was March 13, 2020). Writing out the summary helps you focus on what your story is about, and having it all printed on paper is nice because you can see the whole thing rather than just what fits on your screen. As I’ve said before, one of the tricky parts of writing a novel is keeping a high-level view of the story while also being able to focus on the specific scenes and chapters, and having a printout helps.
I also sometimes scribble outlines on paper when I’m coming up with ideas. It feels like a more natural venue for free associating, writing ideas in margins, drawing arrows to connect one idea to another, etc. Putting it in the computer makes it feel formal and finished—there’s not much visual distinction between a list of random ideas and an ordered, finished list in Word or Scrivener. But looking at a mess of scribbled ideas on paper can feel like the work is still in progress and maybe give you more freedom to mess around with it some more.
It’s worth noting, too, that there are computer tools designed to give you the freedom of working on paper. Literature and Latte, the company that makes Scrivener, also makes a tool called Scapple that lets you jot down ideas and move them around on a free-form board. But one of the freedoms of pen and paper is that paper does not get Twitter, or Telegram, or any of the other wondrous obstacles to focusing on your work. If you’re good at managing that focus, then these programs might help you. If, like me, you sometimes need a break, then try taking some paper and a pen to a different room than your computer is in and jotting down some ideas. Sometimes it’s helpful just to shake up the setting you usually write in.
See what works for you! Just thinking about this question made me want to print out the summary of the novel I’m working on and go sit in a coffee shop with a chai and a pen, staring down at the paper and seeing what ideas spring to mind.