Re-Build Your Swing—With A Pen
Hem was not afraid of the pen.
Funny: I am trying to re-build my swing when it comes to writing. A fancy way of saying I want to come up with some new/old methodologies for putting stories together. Oddly enough, my first leap into the future was to write the story Option Right today in longhand on a yellow legal pad. Forty-five pages in all and I don’t know how many words.
The advantage, of course, is that longhand is a lousy medium for revision, the main reason I wanted a word processor so badly in 1980—that’s forty years ago if you’re counting. The good news is writing by longhand is liberating because it truly creates a true first draft that you can’t revise much until you get it into the computer. You have no choice but to let the words flow.
My additional idea is to then read the story into the Otter transcription app to create another layer of creation but mainly what we used to call a machine-readable transcript. From there I go back to my old tooth-and-nail editing/writing.
Will this be faster? Or better? No way to know. But so far, so good.