writers and their media

A lot of writers today still favor longhand. A writer's medium of choice is often a central feature of his or her art. Gore Vidal wrote on yellow legal pads. Stephen King and John Irving write longhand. Jeffrey Archer, when I went to see him at Landmark in Hyderabad, one of many excellent bookstores that city had to offer at one point that had a half life of barely a year, said in his usual important way, greatly overstating the value of his work, that he wrote on paper with a felt-tip pen. Traditional writers tend to take great pride in putting pen to paper.

That doesn't necessarily mean that those who don't are any less worthy. Umberto Eco always used a typewriter. William F. Buckley used a word processor on a computer since the eighties or even earlier, though calling him a writer would be a great act of charity, considering the quality of his output. Henry James dictated to a stenographer, which in my mind is the most tedious way one could go about writing.

I myself have always used Microsoft Word to write fan fiction and other works, though my notebooks in high school were often filled with handwritten pieces and passages that I would type up when I got home. Nicky might remember me writing the first chapter of my FIITJEE story "Bourbon" during a particularly dull hour of distributed computing at GT. Longhand to me is really an obstacle to writing, since my thoughts tend to be faster than my hand, and I'm a pretty fast typer. I also tire more easily when writing on paper.