I know other writers do this. For example, the Science Fiction Museum has a four-foot high stack of handwritten, loose-leaf paper representing Neal Stephenson's first draft of one of the Baroque Cycle books, complete with spent ink cartridges. Though not, I imagine, all the spent ink cartridges. Unless he usually refills with a plunger, and only uses the cartridges when he has to refill away from home. Also, I don't know if he's always a longhand writer, or if its just a Baroque Cycle thing.

I've run into authors at conventions who have confessed to being first-draft-by-hand writers, and Neil Gaiman has talked about writing the first draft of -- I think it was Stardust -- by hand, out in the garden.

Northwest author Susan Wiggs always writes first drafts longhand, with a particular pen (of course) and particular paper (naturally) and a particular type of ink.

So, the question in my mind is, why? Why have I been faced with a kind of laptop-block on this particular novel? And why does any writer write by hand when typewriters, and now laptop computers, are available?

Exhibit 1: Noise

Harlan Ellison wrote (and still writes) on a manual typewriter long after other writers had gone electric -- he talks about this in some of his essays, and mentions hating the noise, the sense that this humming, whirring machine is sitting there waiting for him.

I had an electronic typewriter for a while, in that awkward phase in the mid 80s when computers were still really expensive, yet, it was already obvious that they were the writing tool of the future.

I hated it, kind of. I learned to type on a manual typewriter(a portable Brother in harvest gold -- wonder what happened to it?) and used it for years and still have a faint nostalgia for it. My electronic daisy-wheel typing device was black, which was nice, but it never really worked right, and it was noisy, and I don't wonder what happened to it. I hope it was disposed of properly, and that any useful electronic parts were appropriately recycled.

Most computers are quieter than electric typewriters, but still, they have those noisy fans, and sometimes-whirring hard drives, and yes, you can listen to music which covers that up fairly well, but writing demands a level of concentration which is so intense that sometimes even music, even instrumental music, is too much of a distraction.

Exhibit 2: Nice weather

So, I don't sunbathe. And I love rain. And yet, I still have that predictable Pavlovian response to summer weather: it makes me want to go, if not outside, at least somewhere where I can see outside, where there's light and movement and air. I start to feel cooped up and annoyed to be in the house.

Now, one of the attractions of a laptop computer is that you can, theoretically, use it outside. But that requires lugging it somewhere, and then you're either limited by the battery life, or you have to find somewhere to plug it in, and I have yet to find a computer screen that is truly comfortable to read in outdoor light levels, and also, I'm always just a bit paranoid about the computer itself -- it's one of the top three most expensive things I own and I don't want it to be damaged by the random moisture and grime to be found out-of-doors.

Or, you know, in a bar with a courtyard.

Exhibit 3: Some things are actually faster

I'm a fast typist -- fast enough that my writing speed is limited by how fast I can think of what to write more than by how fast I can type the words. I'm also a fairly fast longhand writer. I'm sure it's slower than my typing, but, I've never been timed, so I really don't know. But either way, the logjam is in my brain, not my hands.

Even though I assume typing is faster in a strict words-per-minute measure, there are a few things that are actually faster to do when writing by hand. Instant editing -- crossing out a word or phrase to sub a different word or phrase -- is faster. Jumping around to different parts of the story and keeping them straight is faster. A little squiggle meaning "think of exact name later" is faster by hand. Writing notes in the margins is way faster. Can you even do marginal notes in a Word document? They probably have some kind of feature that pretends you can.

Exhibit 4: Instant connection with the sub-brain

Writing fiction, especially fantasy fiction, is kind of a weird thing to do. You invent this world that doesn't exist and then populate it with people who don't exist, and then you imagine them doing things that you think are interesting. Writing is kind of a controlled voluntary sustained psychotic state. Except, most writers aren't actually psychotic. And, anyway, the craft of writing about these imaginary people in their imaginary worlds doing these imaginary things is, itself, non-imaginary. You can't be a writer just by mentally inhabiting your psychotic pseudo-reality, you have to inhabit it and, at the same time, report on it. In what you hope is a compelling manner.

A weird thing to do. Like I said.

Weird, and tricky. You have to enter a delicate mental state, a bit like the opposite of lucid dreaming, where you are mostly conscious but maintain a little thread of connection to the subconscious. Because it's delicate, small things can disrupt it, especially at the beginning of a writing session. I've had scenes that felt like they were playing out in my head and all I had to do was write them down, and then they evaporatde just in the space while I sat down, opened the laptop, and waited for the computer to wake up. Hardly any time at all. And yet, that magical thread just went poof!

So, picking up a pen and writing in a notebook sometimes seems a little less disruptive to the delicate mental state. It feels almost like I'm sneaking up on it.

Exhibit 5: The muse has a sense of humor

I mentioned a writer's magical thread to the subconscious. Without that thread, writers can still, usually, craft words, but often those words seem static and pointless. The story doesn't move forward, it doesn't live -- in a quasi-mystical process that I always think of as like Frankenstein building his creature. You think you've assembled all the parts you need, you apply the juice -- and sometimes it lurches off the table and starts terrorizing the populace, and sometimes it just lies there.

The trickiness, the quasi-mysticalness of writing leads writers to be, often, an incredibly superstitious class of professional (right up there with actors and athletes). The funny part is that writers are usually self-analyzed to a fault, and know perfectly well that it doesn't make any sense for them to need to wear a special hat, or fill their pen with just the proper color of ink, or make a pot of a particular blend of herbal tea in order to write. They just do it anyway, know it's silly, and sometimes call it sucking up to the muse.

Or, maybe, "sucking up" is too crude and they call it something else, like "cajoling" or "supplicating."

Anyway, I don't know if this is an experience specific to this particular novel, or if it's a trick that I can always use if a scene isn't going well. It seems to me that I've sometimes tried longhand writing to overcome writer's block, without success. Maybe it only works if the story already has a certain amount of steam power behind it.

Whatever it is, you can't argue with the muse. Or, I guess you can. It just won't do any good.