This is interesting to watch. I notice you type something, you delete it, and then type something different quite a bit. When you write on paper, how do you deal with this constant deletion?
I think more before writing when it's on paper. The medium has more friction. But I haven't written anything for publication on paper since 1991, when I finished writing On Lisp on a stack of legal pads.
That's interesting. I'm the opposite way: I find I think less before writing and edit a lot more when I write on paper. Words on a screen look as flawlessly rendered as words in print, and to me that makes them seem more permanent; I feel like I have to really think hard before I can tell these perfect letters what to do. Stuff written in my own hand feels more tentative and more malleable.
I mean, I guess people wrote books before there were computers, so I shouldn't be that surprised, but I just realized I can't imagine writing anything longer than a couple pages on paper.
I remember arguing with English teachers in middle school that I thought better while typing. They insisted that I hand write my rough draft anyway, and I hated it.
J. K. Rowling did most of her draft work on lined paper:
"There is only one thing that annoys me about living in Edinburgh - well, two, but I'm pretty much resigned to the weather now. Why is it so difficult to buy paper in the middle of town? What is a writer who likes to write longhand supposed to do when she hits her stride and then realises, to her horror, that she has covered every bit of blank paper in her bag? Forty-five minutes it took me, this morning, to find somewhere that would sell me some normal, lined paper. And there's a university here! What do the students use? Don't tell me laptops, it makes me feel like something out of the eighteenth century."
-J. K. Rowling
I was completely dumbfounded when I first saw that stack of paper because I can barely manage to write a one line note to my wife without scratching something out. To undertake something as large as the Baroque cycle trilogy is really beyond my comprehension.
I don't know if he wrote Cryptonomicon this way also but my first edition is full of typos. Something I imagine could happen if you turn over several hundred hand written pages with edits to a typist.
Writing on paper has one advantage: because you can't revise things, you're forced to finish the first draft before you start on the second.
So, what you produce may not be as good as it will get later, but at least it's complete.
The major disadvantage of writing on paper is of course when you have no idea what you're going to write ahead of time, because then your first draft is going to be very, very low quality.
