I write a lot of things longhand these days. I've found that, over the past year and a bit, the kind of (games) projects I've been working on have benefited from starting in very rough form for draft content.
Starting on pen and paper gives everything a 'rougher' feel. I often refer to it as 'implicit permission to be shit'. The output doesn't look anything like a finished draft. It has no pretences. You can scribble things out, insert words, draw arrows and lines to reroute meaning.
Technically, you can do most of the same sort of thing on a screen. But I find that, in addition to the implicit sense of 'this should be better because it looks more presentable', typing directly into a word processing program forces my brain to work more linearly. In Notepad++, for instance, I do find it reasonably easy to 'explode' a paragraph, throwing down some disjointed fragments and stitching them together. Which is fine if I have a strong handle on what I'm trying to say and the order in which I want to say it, but that depends on the level of organisational complexity for the writing and the amount of existing work I've done on that when breaking a story.
Also, if you're working on paper, you inevitably have to type it up if it's going to be usable. Which bakes a light-but-mandatory improvement pass into the process. This, like the other factors, are mostly psychological props, but they are important onces.
I've been thinking about this more this week. In theory, it does take a bit longer to get to usable draft content this way, since you're writing it out at least twice to begin with. The gamble is over whether generating raw material more quickly because you're getting out of your own way outstrips that doubling up.
Often, for me, it does. But I was curious about when that stopped applying. I can't really imagine writing a whole dang book this way, for instance. Which had me asking: is this a thing that works for me in games and not elsewhere? Or are there other conditions which make this the more or less effective approach.
In my current draft (still games), as I've moved into the middle of the piece, I've experimented with going back to typing-first. And that's actually been okay! I've still needed to work out some pieces on paper (usually the flow of what's happening and in what order -- what information does it need to convey, and how do we progress between the required start state and the necessary end state for onward flow to make sense -- although also filling in details like scene framing can be what's missing), but those parts have been more bare-bones, and I've been able to turn out quick first drafts directly in a text editor (and definitely more quickly than typing it out twice).
My current working theory is that the paper-draft approach is most useful in a few situations:
- When you're trying to find your way into a new piece of material
- When the content is especially 'bitty' e.g. several storylets that all represent separate slices of different scenes, rather than something more contiguous. This is definitely a common one in Fallen London, where you might be putting together a mini scene that's no more than a single storylet or branch.
- When you're stuck for some nebulous reason. There are definitely other tools that help 'unstick' me, and it usually comes down to looking back to purpose and effect or some aspect of scene framing/the place of this element in the overall story -- but sometimes the best thing is just to 'get writing' by throwing a bunch of bad words down, and then parleying them into better words, or using them as diagnostic inputs to the other tools.
Which means that, the more settled one is with a project or the more contiguous a project's narrative units are, the less useful this approach likely is for me.