‘It’s easier to edit crap than a blank page.’ -M.J. Rose

I remind myself of this when I find myself procrastinating on doing actual writing. The main reason I delay writing (in favour of research and note-taking) it’s because I’m scared I’m going to leave something out that’s important. I don’t expect the first draft to be perfect, but I’m aware that once words are on the page, they have a tendency to want to remain there.

Neal Stephenson says this is why he writes his novels longhand.

Cryptonomicon was the last thing I wrote with a word processor. What I was noticing was that I’ve become such a fast typist that I could slam out great big blocks of text quite rapidly — anything that came into my head, it would just dribble out of my fingers onto the screen. That includes bad stuff as well as good stuff. Once it’s out there on the screen, of course, you can edit it and you can fix the bad stuff, but it’s far better not to ever write down the bad stuff at all. With the fountain pen, which is a slower output device, the material stays in the buffer of your head for a longer period. So during that amount of time, you can fix it, you can make it better, you can even decide not to write it down at all — you can think better of writing it.

He goes on to say that editing is easier to do longhand-something with which I completely agree:

Editing, strangely enough, is quicker and easier with a pen. Because drawing a line through a word is just faster than any sequence of grabbing your mouse and highlighting the word and hitting the eject key. That act of editing leaves behind a visible trace of the word that you decided to change, and sometimes that’s useful; you may want to go back and change your mind about that.

And his manuscript sounds beautiful.

I tend to do first draft in a thick nib. And I have different color of ink in each pen. Then I go back the next day with this Waterman, and do the editing pass, so I can see the contrasting colors and line widths, and kind of assemble a history in my own mind of how this page came into being.

From this article.

And the absolute best pens to use for editing are Pigma Microns. They have tiny tips-I can easily fit three lines into the (double) spaces between lines of typed text.