It Could Be Worse: George R. R. Martin Could Be Writing The Winds of Winter Longhand

Yesterday, there was a bit of a George R.R. Martin-related dustup on ye olde internet when Paste Magazine put forth that the venerable, bearded author might want to throw his fans a bone, re: the anticipated completion date for The Winds of Winter, the six-year-in-the-making sixth installment of A Song of Ice and Fire. Fan site Winter Is Coming quickly fired back (in summary: “No.”).
Yes, everyone is waiting for The Winds of Winter. Hopefully, George R. R. Martin is typing as fast as he can—on his DOS-based computer. Martin is writing his lengthy Song on a DOS-based machine using Wordstar 4.0. Not quite as primitive as the typewriter he was given at the 2014 Emmy Award Show, but he obviously has’t been updating his hardware or software too regularly in the 20 years he has been composing novels on a computer screen. On the Conan O’Brien show, he shared that he keeps using the same computer because it does everything that he wants it to do, and nothing else. If he wants a capital letter, he will type one. Spell check is a pain anyway when you are writing about “the realm of Orbitor.” Martin admits that he does have a second, more up-to-date computer that he uses for internet access, email, blogging—all those things a subset of his fans fear he is doing instead of finishing the darn book already.

Other SFF authors go even more old school in order to avoid distractions while writing, scratching ink in bound books like a Westeros maester. Joe Hill (The Fireman) likes to write long hand in a notebook. “You never get distracted trying to send a tweet from a notebook. A notebook never pings you with an email,” he said. For the same reason, Joe Haldman (The Forever War) writes in longhand, with a fountain pen, in spiral bound books.
But there is more to writing than just avoiding distraction. There’s no question the physical act of writing is slower than typing. But you are not just putting words down on paper like a court reporter; you are creating a story. Many authors find writing longhand helps that process.
Stephen King wrote all 896 pages of Dreamcatcher in longhand. Of writing with pen and paper, he said, “It slows you down. It makes you think about each word as you write it, and it also gives you more of a chance so that you’re able—the sentences compose themselves in your head. It’s like hearing music, only it’s words. But you see more ahead because you can’t go as fast.”

Another long book (1008 pages) written by hand was Neal Stephenson’s Anathem. “Writing is a process for me,” he said. “I found that overall, I’m just as fast writing longhand. There’s a bottleneck where the words go down on paper, but that just means you’re spending more time thinking about them as you’re writing them, and it ends up being just as fast for me.” But Stephenson is flexible: other books, such as Seveneves, he wrote on a Mac with Scrivener software.
Neil Gaiman writes the first draft of his novels longhand. He said: “One reason I like writing by hand is it slows me down a little, but it also forces me to keep going: I’m never going to spend half a day noodling with a sentence to try and get it just right, if I’m using a pen. I’ll do all that when I start typing”
I once read a book on how to write a short story in a single day. It suggested a path to get some of that longhand advantage with a computer: after you’ve planned out the plot and created an outline, when it comes time to start actually writing, the author advised using touch typing with eyes closed, or, if self-control is an issue, even turning the screen off. The goal, as in writing longhand, is to avoid revising and editing as you go. But as the author admits in a later chapter on editing, writing with your eyes closed is going to produce a pretty messy first draft. (A real problem if you are trying to follow Robert A. Heinlein’s Rules for Writers, Number 3: “You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.”)

While there are authors who prefer the pen to the keyboard, many eagerly embrace writing on a screen. Not surprisingly, cyberpunk pioneer Bruce Sterling is a huge fan of word processing. In his introduction to Schismatrix Plus, he reveals it was the first novel he wrote on a word processor (after two books written on typewriters). He says writing on a computer made him feel free of the long shadows of Verne, Wells, and Stapleton.  “I realized that I’d become part of a new generation in science fiction, a generation that had profound, genuine ‘technical’ advantages over all our predecessors,” he wrote. “Now I could do what I liked with words—bend them, break them, jam them together, pick them apart again.” (Sounds like a reflection of what the Shaper and Mechanist characters of Schismatrix Plus did with their genes and cybernetic enhancements.)

I’m not even going to discuss the example of Peter V. Brett, who wrote his mammoth debut fantasy novel The Warded Man on a smartphone. That way lies madness and ligament injuries.
Personally, I am definitely in the Sterling camp. I write notes on scraps of paper a lot. But when it is time to really start writing, I want the electrons flowing, not the ink from a Waterman fountain pen. Sterling’s Schismatrix Plus intro inspired this essay. In my first draft, the paragraph about his book was the lead. I moved and rewrote it at least five times.
Most of the paragraphs were shuffled around too—except the one about GRRM (clearly he belongs up top). And even that paragraph was extensively revised. But it’s time now to invoke Heinlein’s third rule (“Stop rewriting”), and see what kind of editorial orders I get. [Editor’s note: Not too many.]
Do you think better with a pen or a keyboard? (Certainly not a smartphone…)