![]() ![]() Ten, eleven, twelve, one, two, three, four-this is every day. I sharpened pencils in the old days when pencils were sharpened. But I go hours before I’m able to write a word. You’re out there completely on your own-all you’ve got to do is write. Even titans of the field like John McPhee, the Pulitzer-winning pioneer of literary journalism, has confessed to The Paris Review that he can’t do it without first procrastinating mightily: Occasionally, you have those magical days when you look up and you’ve done 4,000 words, but they’re more than balanced out by those evil days where you manage 150 words you know you’ll be throwing away.Īs Gaiman notes, writing remains hard work. A good day is defined by anything more than 1,500 words of comfortable, easy writing that I figure I’m probably going to use most of in the end. Often I use two pens with different coloured ink, so I can tell visually how much I did each day. You won’t find just one color among the pens in Gaiman’s bag, either: The prolific Brit has written everything from comic books to novels to movies, and says writing in longhand helps him resist the allure of online distraction. ![]() Newfangled gizmos aside, there remains a place for old-fashioned pen and paper in the hearts (and desks) of certain writers – Neil Gaiman among them. The New Yorker published Jennifer Egan’s entire science-fiction story “Black Box” as a series of tweets, each one like a line from a poem. Novelists crank out tens of thousands of intimate words on tiny handheld keypads. ![]() Journalists use smartphones to quickly file breaking stories from the field. ![]() Over the past decade, the mobile phone has supplanted familiar writerly standbys like word-processing software. And while writers who can afford spare homes along the French Riviera are the exception and not the rule, plenty of folks still succeed at making a career of it. The trouble is, for some of us, writing isn’t so much a choice as a necessity, akin to oxygen and Wi-Fi. Honing a voice that stands out can feel like an impossible gig to take to the bank – which is where, if you’d listened to your parents, you’d be working, instead of haunting cafes and coffee shops with your laptop, trying to grind out a living as a writer. What she means is that the commodity you’re offering – your writing – is hard to sell, because the web has made written words more readily available than ever. Your coffee has suddenly gone cold, and so has the conversation. “We live in a content-saturated world,” your editor shrugs. ![]()
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