Before this essay was a file, it was eleven pages of a large ruled Moleskine notebook, the kind that costs about R450 at a bookshop in town, written in blue-black ink at the kitchen table, mostly during the load-shedding evenings of late October when the router was off and the house was quiet for reasons outside my control. I typed it up the following Wednesday, and by then the draft had already lost about a third of itself. The cutting had happened in the notebook, days earlier, without any discussion.
I’ve drafted this way for about six years now, and the reasons have stopped being romantic. Paper does specific mechanical things to a first draft that a screen handles differently, and the mechanics are worth spelling out.
The speed of the hand
Published estimates of adult handwriting speed hover around 13 words a minute, while a comfortable typist runs three or four times that. At 13 words a minute, a sentence cannot reach the page before the thought behind it has finished forming. My thinking speed and my hand speed sit close enough together that the sentence has to exist in my head before it exists anywhere else.
At typing speed my hand finishes clauses I haven’t decided yet, and the paragraph fills up with throat-clearing: “in many ways,” “it’s worth noting,” three false openings before the real one arrives. The essay I drafted entirely on the laptop in February proves the point at my own expense. Its opening paragraph survives in the published version with one sentence out of five. The other four were warm-up acts I typed while the actual sentence was still assembling itself somewhere behind my eyes. The pen makes me wait, and the waiting is where the sentence gets settled. A page of longhand is slow going and almost always denser than the file it becomes.
No cursor at the end of the line
A blinking cursor sits after the last thing you wrote, which keeps the whole page quietly available for repair. It invites fixing: the comma, the paragraph, the section order, all before there is much to reorder. The notebook has no cursor. The line moves to the right, and then it is finished, and the next thing is a fresh line below it. Forward is the only direction on offer.
Crossing out keeps the evidence too. In the file, a deleted sentence disappears as though it never existed. In the notebook the struck-through line stays exactly where it was, so a page ends up recording the argument between the sentence I wrote first and the sentence I kept. Rereading those pages years later, I can watch a decision being made. The word I settled on sits on top of the two words I rejected, and all three of them are mine.
Transcribing is the first edit
The notebook never goes straight to the laptop. It sits for two or three days, and then I type the pages in by hand, reading every line as it arrives. By the second pass, sentences that looked finished at eleven at night have started to stammer. The ones that survive the trip into the file have been read twice and typed once, and they are the only ones I trust.
The typing is the first edit, and it costs no extra time, because the pages have to get into the machine somehow. I type at about 45 words a minute on a good evening, so eleven notebook pages is most of an hour, which sounds like a tax until you price the alternative. An hour of transcription turns eleven notebook pages into seven pages of file, and the laptop gets to start from something worth working on. I use the same two tools every time: the notebook, and a Lamy Safari fountain pen with a fine nib that has outlasted three laptops. A Pilot G2 lives in the kitchen drawer for when the fountain pen is in another room, which happens more than I would like to admit.
The writers who worked this way
The writer whose notebooks are most famous in my house is Bruce Chatwin, who carried little black oilskin-covered books for years and mourned them in The Songlines in 1987, after the small French maker that produced them closed down. When an Italian publisher, Modo e Modo, brought out a notebook of its own in 1997, it took the name Chatwin had used for the originals. My November notebook is a direct descendant of his.
Neil Gaiman has written the first drafts of his novels longhand in notebooks for decades, fountain pen first and keyboard afterwards, and he has talked about the typing-up as a second pass over the book rather than mere copying. John Steinbeck kept a working journal through the months he wrote The Grapes of Wrath, pencil entries dated by the day, and the journal was published in 1989 as Working Days. None of them needed paper to be mystical about the work. They needed it to slow the work down.
When the laptop comes in
The laptop is for the second draft and everything after it: cutting sections, moving them, checking a fact, sending the thing. The notebook is for the stretch where the piece doesn’t exist yet and would be embarrassed to be seen. When I’m traveling I do sometimes draft straight into the file, and the work comes out fine, and it takes roughly twice as long to reach the same place.
The arrangement is simple once it’s running. Paper is for the first contact with an idea, where speed is the problem and doubt is useful. The screen is for the work of making it readable. Six years in, the two tools have stopped competing for the job, and the first draft happens on paper because paper keeps pace with thinking.