I don't think writing longhand is slower - it certainly isn't for me, and I'm a fast, ten-finger touch-typist.

But seeing the words neat and cold and detached up on the screen, immediately, looking like someone else's and waiting to be fiddled with, is very different from your mind pouring straight out of your brain onto the page, plus it's that much harder to back and fiddle, and therefore that much easier to force yourself to keep going forward.

For me a first draft is a brainstorming session, and it was when I realised that I brainstorm with pen and paper, that I took to writing first drafts that way too.

Emma

there's a hack for the iPod touch so you can write not via the Contacts application

I have absolutely no idea what this sentence means… but I want one!

I've given a lot of thought on the pros and cons of a PDA – I was strongly tempted by that Vaio - but in the end I realised I wanted a decent sized keyboard, so I settled for a new laptop. My old one, as some of you might remember, went up in smoke last winter and I had to send the RITE out to buy me a PC before I went into meltdown myself. I don’t actually need a laptop, but I wanted one like crazy, so I had to persuade him it was a necessity. All of which means that that agent who rocked up promising me the moon and the stars came along at exactly the right moment, laptop-wise. We thought I was About To Be Published, so I would need a laptop for various undefined writerly activities, and I rushed out and bought a Toshiba Satellite U300. It is the most gorgeously beautiful thing… of course I never use it because my publishing deal was Not To Be… … but I can recommend it.

Dee

I'm like you, Emma, in that my first draft works best on paper - or at least some of it, to get me going, and then when I edit that into Word it often expands and grows at the same time.

Azel, I'm not sure I agree that people would write a different book if they used longhand, a typewriter or a PC. A typewriter does have restrictions, I agree, but the relative speeds of longhand and typing into a PC depend on how fast you write and how fast you type! I can write very fast but also type pretty fast - I don't think it makes much difference to me. And with longhand and a PC you can delete and add and mess about bigtime without a problem - unless of course you were actually going to present your MS in longhand!

Bugger - my delete key seems to have just stopped working!!!!!!!!!! I guess this means a new keyboard.... I mind because it's a MS Natural and I don't think you can buy them any more.

Deb