Graham Greene wrote 1500 words a day, each morning, then played the rest of the day. Wrote them in a leather journal using a fountain pen.
Hemingway squeezed out words by the tens and hundreds, using a pencil in a Tom Brown note book, usually standing at a podium.
Hammett and his protégé Hellman hammered on manual typewriters, as did John D. and others of the hard-boiled school.
Georges Simenon dictated several novels at once, going down the line of typists.
Updike claims to have had five rooms in sequence down a hallway, each with its own IBM Selectric, each with its own novel for him to work on.
Neil Gaiman uses a fountain pen, as do I, and others, before moving to computer for second and subsequent drafts.
Samuel Beckett, an Irish writer remember, wrote everything in French first, by hand, then translated it, still by hand, into English, and only then typed it up.
Does not matter how many or how you snag them, just get the words down in fixed form somehow. It’s not a race. It’s not a competition to pile words. Writers write. What that means varies with each writer and work.
/ Samael Gyre
Drawing courtesy of SLE, all rights reserved by SLE
