Pen or Keyboard?

I spend a lot of time trying to decide the best way to do things. I hate to waste time [except for playing 20 or 30 rounds of Alchemy at Yahoo Games now and then] and I hate to waste effort even more.

This has led me to put a lot of thought into the fastest and most efficient way to get words on paper.

I finally figured out that the best way for me to create a first draft is to hand write it. While typing on the PC has the advantage of getting things down where they can be copied and pasted, deleted and moved, underlined and italicized at whim, I find I just work a lot faster with a pen in my hand.

On paper, the cutting and pasting has to be literal. Crossing out doubles for deleting and underling and italicizing can’t really be undone without making quite a mess. However, I can knock out ten pages in half an hour, even if I’m transcribing dialogue as my characters talk in my head.

I write a lot faster than I type and the beauty of writing by hand is that I’m not distracted by misspellings and punctuation errors.

A line like this one from one of my current WIPs:

They all wanted to be the ‘one’ that cured the b tamed beast with in and tumed him into a pupy dog.

will remain blissfully blemished until I get around to typing it up cleanly and well edited on the computer. If I had typed the line above on the PC, I would not be comfortable leaving it that way. I’d have to take time to go back and clean it up, make it look nice, before I could move on to the next line. With hand writing, I’m already two paragraphs ahead.

So I suppose I’ve finally made the decision to hand write all my first drafts. Hopefully this will help me get more words on paper, finish more manuscripts and get more stories out there and I won’t waste so much time correcting things that will probably end up being edited out anyway.

At le(a)st I hops so –hope so.