Here I am, ninety years old and ready for the cooling board, using a brand new Macintosh computer, and there you sit, twenty-two and gorgeous, fresh as a new peach, yet scrawling on a yellow legal pad like an old maid in a Victorian romance.
I write on a computer, but I've run the complete gambit. When I was very young, I wrote with a ballpoint pen in school notebooks. Then I got pretentious and started writing with a dip pen on parchment (I wrote at least a novel-length poem that way). Moved on to a fountain pen. Then a typewriter, then an electric self-correct. Then someone gave me a word processor and I was amazed at being able to fit ten pages on one of those floppy discs.
I have heard of novels started in the middle, at the end, written in patches to be joined together later, but I have never felt the slightest desire to do this.
I hate typing but I love to write manually.
Writers kid themselves-about themselves and other people. Take the talk about writing methods. Writing is just work-there's no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type with your toes-it is just work.
Since great writers communicate a vision of existence, one can't borrow their methods. The method is married to the vision.
Writing is just work-there's no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type or write with your toes-it's still just work.
The idea of using actual clippings came about as a way of characterizing Gold. Gold uses clippings because he hates doing research and is not even really interested in the books and articles he writes.
For so long, the model for writing has been, you sit in a room alone for a number of days or weeks or months or years and figure it out. But now, you don't have to do that; you don't have to be alone in the room anymore.
I write fiction longhand. That's not so much about rejecting technology as being unable to write fiction on a computer for some reason. I don't think I would write it on a typewriter either. I write in a very blind gut instinctive way. It just doesn't feel right. There's a physical connection. And then in nonfiction that's not the case at all. I can't even imagine writing nonfiction by hand.
I write with pen and paper, my first draft, on legal pads.
As I search the archives of my memory I seem to discern six types or methods [of judicial writing] which divide themselves from one another with measurable distinctness. There is the type magisterial or imperative; the type laconic or sententious; the type conversational or homely; the type refined or artificial, smelling of the lamp, verging at times upon preciosity or euphuism; the demonstrative or persuasive; and finally the type tonsorial or agglutinative, so called from the shears and the pastepot which are its implements and emblem.
We think of writing a book as a process, but the very word - process - suggests that there is one: a template to follow, a map to guide us. If that were true, someone would have surely figured out some marketable method we could all buy.
There's many, many ways to write a song. But generally, sitting down at a table and writing is not one of them.
I have always preferred paper and ink to a computer screen and I still write most of my lyrics by hand.
I don't have any system. I dictate a lot, through a machine, and I also have a secretary. But I used to type just like everybody else.
I think that's more a reflection of the fact I've never been a student of any particular school of writing, or even listening.
I love writing with pen and paper; I hate technology.
Novelists seem to fall into two distinct categories - those that plan and those that just see where it takes them. I am very much the former category.
I always have some way of putting the stories together that works for the book. I've always switched points of view in my books. I'm a Gemini.
I usually write on a computer - unless I get stuck, at which point I switch to write by hand. I think that's common among writers if they get cornered on something.
Sometimes you start flowing and shits starts adding on to whatever cipher you're dealing with. Meanwhile you got all of these thoughts in your head and you don't get enough time to put them down. That's another reason I started writing from the last word to the front word. It's methods to the madness. Sometimes I can't understand it or explain it but it is what it is.
