photo: jetheriot
Everything I write starts out with a rough draft in pencil on paper. Then I just keep re-writing it over and over and over until it sounds good.
Sometimes it takes twenty or thirty re-writes, sometimes more, but there's just something natural about writing in long hand that typing on a computer can never reproduce. I just cannot get used to writing that way. And, actually, I'm not interested in learning how. There's something honest about pencil and paper. The pencil feels like a natural extension of my thoughts, and the paper feels like my mind. It's very spatial. I can start at the top of the page, skip to the bottom to jot down the punchline, then go back to the middle and to any other area of the page as needed. With a computer you start at the beginning and you can't really skip around. I hate that. That's not how I think.
I spent the weekend re-writing the iTunes description for my app. I was reminded of Jerry Seinfeld talking about how he took five years to write a joke about a PopTart. I can relate. He said if there's one word too many, it can disrupt the whole flow. So you have to erase and re-configure the parts of the puzzle until, like the perfect song, everything snaps into place. There's no way around it. It's just a long, messy process, involving a lot of physical labor, even if it's just sitting and moving a pencil across a page over and over and over.