Summer is here, and I love to be outside. Even, or maybe especially, when I’m writing. I don’t want to take the beautiful days for granted. Now some of my friends laugh when I say that because I spend winters in the Bahamas, but I grew up as a Canadian conditioned that summer days are precious and not to be wasted. Do we ever forget lessons drilled into us when we were children?
The computer is usually my place of writing. The words may work their way onto a piece of paper, but somehow the scene doesn’t seem written until I type it in. Maybe that’s weird, but hey, everyone should be allowed a little weirdness now and then.
Top 5 reasons to write with paper and pen:
- Practice spelling – no cheating with spell checker.
- Create scene descriptions through doodling and drawing.
- Make notes in side margins when an idea strikes.
- Don’t get interrupted by social media – no announcements of email, FB messages, etc to distract you.
- Burn paper if writing is really terrible – this is particularly satisfying.
Does your imagination get sparked by using a new medium?
Thanks for reading . . .
Creative Story Editors 
There truly is something freeing about writing with a pen and paper. And, I’ll admit, I actually enjoy the fact that I don’t have to spell everything correctly or worry about my punctuation. To me, the ideas flow faster when I’m not pausing to look back at my misspelled words and fragmented sentences.
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Jill, that is certainly a benefit. I hadn’t looked at it that way, but ideas do tend to flow when other concerns, like typos and grammar, don’t distract the mind.
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I carry a small notebook & pen in my purse and jot things down sometimes. It’s more convenient than a computer.
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I also carry a small digital recorder. It gives me a way to keep notes if I’m somewhere I can’t write. Sometimes my grocery list gets covered with writing ideas, so who know what I buy for dinner? Maybe I should upgrade to a small notebook in my purse.
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Chapters has a nice selection, including Moleskin.
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Ok, you’ve given me a reason to go out and shop!
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I write by hand quite often, and though I’m a decent speller, I like the freedom to skip all that blasted punctuation! On paper the characters seem freer to talk with dashes and ellipses sprinkled willy-nilly between them. Commas can go in later too, or not. I like the feeling that I am sketching the story out on the page, rather than committing it to pixels …
And it’s funny, because now that I consider it, the pixels are actually more mutable than the paper pages are!
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Kirsten, I wonder if it’s the pleasure of texture when it comes to pen and paper. A keyboard is handy, but the pen and paper seem more romantic. And I agree with the spelling. Sometimes it’s distracting having a the spell checker point out errors when it’s time to focus on the message and not the medium.
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