Second Choice: With What to Write?

There are so many choices nowadays when it comes to writing stuff down:

Computer (Word, Scrivener, Google Docs, Email to yourself, etc.)
Smartphone
Audio Recording
Notepads
Notebooks
Scraps of paper (index cards, the back of your grocery receipt, etc.)

No matter which writing tool you choose I implore you to write down your ideas. All of them. Even in the middle of the night. There is no time wasted worse than not being able to remember the funny thought you had right before falling asleep. It WILL haunt you. So write your stuff down. It doesn’t matter if it’s in your overpriced Moleskine or that you write an E-Mail to yourself or in one of the many notetaking apps.

Just do it.

My first draft is always on paper. The second draft I do on PC. The reason for that is simple and : Writing it down again, moving it from analog to digital, makes me think about what I wrote once more. The same principle applies if you try your hand at comedy in a different language. Translating your jokes might spark a new angle on a old topic you hadn’t considered before.

I also like that I can’t just delete a note I made when I write on paper. If I decide that that one note actually WAS important, I can go back and read it even if I put a line through it.

In Word that note could be gone for good.

Another thing: My handwriting is BAD. Real bad. I make doctors blush.

And when they see my handwriting, they blush a second time.

So if something convinces me in my handwriting that it’s worth exploring it might actually worth. On computer everything already looks finished. Done. Ready to be printed.

And with paper there are less distractions. No Facebook, no Instagram, no CandyCrush. Just you and your writing pad.

Paper also let’s you think BIG and BOLD. It doesn’t limit your imagination to your screen. It can get as big and colorful as you want. And you can cut paper up into little pieces which has a lot of advantages: You can move your paper scraps around, sort them into themes, literally take a birds eye view on your writing and maybe discover new connections.

Other than that: Computers are amazing. You can move your stuff around without having to pick up scissors, SAVE everything in the cloud so your notes, all your hard work won’t get lost like Moleskines on a train. You can google stuff real good and print it.

But when it gets to the writing programs… Word, Scrivener, LibreOffice, GoogleDocs: You can spend hours formatting your documents and getting them just the way you like it.

Instead of simply writing.

Which you wanted to do.

But didn’t.

A workaround to that problem is buying a small writing pc. With no internet on it. And just your writing program of choice.

I actually have that. It’s a cheap 200 dollar Acer Chromebook. I don’t have internet access and if I had, it wouldn’t be powerful enough to make modern internet sites a pleasure to scroll. I installed linux on it and

LibreOffice and I have on document called “Empty”. Which is just that. An empty document set to my liking.

I copy it. Open it and then start writing.

And my setup is pretty simple.

On the upper right corner there is my title, at the bottom of the page I have a date, my character count and my page count. And on the right side of the page I leave a space of about 2 inches empty (all the space under EMTPY won’t get printed on) so afterwards I can scribble my notes right next to the jokes instead of having to scrunch it in between the lines.

This format gives me a uniform look through more than eight years of writing and I don’t have to fiddle with it at all but can concentrate on getting my writing done.

But that is me. What will work for you will be different. So try out everything and stick to what works best right now.