Old-school writing tools will boost your focus and speed

It’s counterintuitive, but sometimes the fastest route to great work involves taking the slow road. Or at least that is the contention of many great writers who rely on old-timey tools to produce the literature of postmodernity.

 
As the biographer Robert Caro recently told the Wall Street Journal (paywall), he still writes first drafts longhand, finishing his books on a typewriter. Caro, who is not really known for his speed and produces about one major biography a decade, claims,“I’m a very fast writer.” What takes him time is research, not writing, and he relies on the old-fashioned pen and typewriter “to slow myself down, to make myself think.”

Caro is not alone or unusually quirky in this regard. Lots of renowned writers avoid computers when they are first working on a story, and sometimes they avoid them altogether. J.K. Rowling, Neil Gaiman, Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, and Danielle Steel are among the super-successful scribes who draft by hand. And Don DeLillo, a veritable master of literary fiction whose works have predicted the zeitgeist of the future ahead of their time, insists on using an old typewriter, which he continually has to have repaired.

Περισσότερα εδώ:

Old-school writing tools will boost your focus and speed

Πηγή: qz.com