pbray

I used to write a great deal of fiction (fiction which, if rediscovering it now, I would be forced to class as Embarrassingly Horrible Juvenilia) in longhand, in notebooks of various kinds. These days, if I write anything in that way my tacit assumption about it is that it's purely for my own amusement, not even worth trying to polish up for (even limited) public consumption. A word-processor allows me, as you say, to type the sentence (or paragraph) out as it comes to me, read it back, futz around with it for five or ten minutes until it's more or less right, go on to the next thing, and still come back to it later for as much further futzing as seems necessary -- without erasings and whitings-out and mess. I can also, when I've written something and it turns out to be unnecessary, excessively purple, going in the wrong direction, or what have you, copy the offending chunk into a Deleted Bits file and thus get rid of it without actually losing it, which reassures me greatly (you never know when some rejected bit of scene-setting or conversation is going to come in handy!).

And I don't think I could be an editor without word-processors and Google and online library catalogues.