Overheard a guy at the coffee shop say he writes by hand first

He said typing kills his creative flow because he edits too fast. I tried it with a $2 notebook from CVS and got 3 pages of a story I had been stuck on for weeks. Has anyone else found a weird trick like this that actually works?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_lucas14d ago

Wait, you got 3 pages in one sitting? That's wild. I've been fighting with the same paragraph for two days on my laptop. Might have to try that CVS notebook move. Handwriting sounds slow and painful but maybe that's the point. Typing makes me backspace every other sentence before I even finish the thought. My brain runs way faster than my fingers can type which is supposedly good but it just makes me anxious. Gonna grab a cheap notebook tonight and see if the slowness helps me actually finish something.

williamhill14d ago

I tried the handwriting thing for two weeks with a legal pad from Staples and ended up with 4 pages of rambling garbage that I had to type up anyway. My handwriting is so bad I couldn't even read half of it the next day. Typing lets me get 2000 words an hour and edit as I go, which saves me from having to rewrite everything twice. The whole "slowing down helps creativity" thing just made me lose my train of thought and get frustrated.