“A drop of ink may make a million think.”

                                                                                                                   Lord Byron

Like most adults of my generation, once my chubby childhood fingers mastered the proper grip and achieved decent motor skills, I started writing with a pencil. On the positive side, mistakes were easy to erase but there were downsides: pencil points broke if you pressed down too hard, the paper could tear if you rubbed too much and the end product was an unexciting gray print.

So I was surprised to learn that some famous authors have professed to love writing in pencil—John Steinbeck and Joyce Carol Oates, for example. Andre Dubus III writes longhand with a Blackwing pencil which he describes as, “… like when you taste a really good wine or a cognac: You know it’s good stuff.” Seems kind of pretentious for a simple pencil. Truman Capote wrote the first and second drafts of his novels entirely in pencil either while lying down or enjoying a cigarette and coffee—unorthodox and unhealthy, but his works were literary classics.

I was excited when I was considered old enough to use a fountain pen. My first was made by Parker, a brand favored by Dylan Thomas. Simone de Beauvoir also wrote with a fountain pen but favored a Sheaffer or an Esterbrook.

Some authors still write books with a fountain pen and lots of paper today. Neil Gaiman owns about sixty fountain pens and enjoys writing novels with two different types. He has said, “I found myself enjoying writing more slowly and liked the way I had to think through sentences differently.” Stephen King started writing longhand when sitting at a computer became too painful after a car accident. Like Gaiman, he found the act of using a fountain pen forced him to slow down and think about each word.

Most of the writing pieces I’ve found from my high school years are written in ink—either with a fountain pen or ballpoint. I liked the elegance of fountain pen script but it could be messy and a blotter was a necessary accessory. Ballpoints were much more convenient for scribbling down ideas and taking notes.

It was pointed out to me that typing would be faster— or could be. My mother was an excellent typist and we always had a machine in the house but it wasn’t until I took a Typing elective in junior year that I learned the basics. My technique relied on visually seeking the letter keys, instead of memorizing the keyboard and trusting my fingers as I read what needed to be transcribed. The process was slow.

In college, I needed to up my game. I wrote term paper rough drafts with a typewriter and white correction tape, which my professors returned with lots of hand-written markings. The final submissions incorporating the feedback often required several retypes to get them perfect without whiteout corrections. (It was before personal computers became widely available.)

It blows my mind that many famous authors say they prefer a typewriter today, even though it’s old fashioned and noisy. Perhaps they like the nostalgic aspect. Danielle Steel has written more than 100 books on her 1946 Olympia manual typewriter and Larry McMurtry pecks away on a manual Hermes 3000. On the other hand, perhaps typing authors are hoping for a cash windfall like the one Cormac McCarthy received. He wrote all his novels with a light blue Olivetti Lettera 32 he bought in 1963 for $50 and sold in 2009 to an American collector for $254,500. (To McCarthy’s credit, he donated the profits to the Santa Fe Institute, an independent, non-profit research and education center.) He wasn’t giving up on typewriters though; it was replaced with another Olivetti Lettera 32.

 I progressed to an electric typewriter in graduate school. The machine was speedier and my typing was a little faster but the process was the same—rough drafts with whiteouts, markups and lots of retypes. I recently resurrected it from the attic and sold it to a mom for her teenage writer child who wanted the retro feel. Perhaps she wanted to channel the creativity of Hunter S. Thompson who typed his books on his IBM Selectric until he died in 2005.

Though there are other authors who still use typewriters, whether manual or electric, the majority use computers as word processors today and I am with them and have been for years.

My first home computer was a cumbersome desktop model with five-inch floppy discs and minimal memory.  As a high school teacher, I found it a word-processing godsend for preparing lessons, writing letters and stories, and accessing educational software that was inserted into a disc drive. I also used it for the first draft of my first novel.

In 1992, I took a new job at a middle school of technology where each classroom was equipped with 3 desktop computers that used the new hard discs. I soon wanted a more powerful machine at home to match my new ones in the classroom.  And it had to be able to handle the emerging Internet phenomenon.  I upgraded to 64 megabytes of built-in memory plus I gigabyte on the hard drive—a lot at that time. It became the workhorse of my personal writing life.

At school, I noticed how computers interested the students and how they soaked up information through technology so I looked at ways to incorporate computers into my curriculum and began applying for grants to obtain more of them. 

With a colleague, and through workshops, courses, and my own research, I learned about advancing technologies that I passed on to the students.  Each year, over nine years, the curriculum acquired more depth, involving, among other things, Internet research, typing informational papers, digital video documentation of projects, computer video editing, CD-Rom creation and web site design— all skills that have helped me as an author.  During that time, my home computer was upgraded to 256 megabytes plus 60 gigabytes of memory on the hard drive and 800 megahertz of power, plus a DVD burner to keep up with the web site management and various other program coordinator tasks. It was still a desktop model though, so I did all of my personal writing in my home office in Maine overlooking the lake.

The marvelous advances of those days seem almost primitive now with wireless and mobile technology. I keep looking forward to more amazing leaps and making sure I keep current as an author using my smart phone for making notes and my laptop for researching, writing, editing, illustrating and publishing books, and using social media for blogs and marketing. The best part is that I can do all of these things wherever I happen to be.

Which writing tools do you prefer?