=Eugene Manlove Rhodes=: Yes. Pencil.
=Frank C. Robertson=: I find it pays to turn the imagination loose until
the story is well outlined in the mind before touching paper. Then it is
comparatively easy to concentrate upon the immediate problem before you
when you sit down to write. I compose only on the typewriter.
=Ruth Sawyer=: Yes. I prefer typewriter. And when the material is
definitely clear and fresh in my mind I prefer dictating.
=Chester L. Saxby=: Pen or pencil is a greater drag on me than a
typewriter is. Due to habit, no doubt. I have never dictated. Oh, yes,
ideas crowd on at times; but with a pencil I should find the crowding
rushed my writing into chicken-tracks I couldn't read afterward. The
very fact that typewriting holds me back I regard as an advantage; the
first impulse must too frequently be rejected. Literature should be
cooked up in hot blood--and then written _cold_.
=Barry Scobee=: I would lose ideas because my imagination travels faster
than my typewriter, but I jot down points for my story, even pages
ahead, as I go along and they come to mind. Typewriter affords least
check for me. Never tried a story with any other tool.
=R. T. M. Scott=: I lose a few ideas because my imagination travels
faster than my means of recording but I usually pick up others, equally
good, which I would have missed had my recording kept pace with my
thoughts. The typewriter affords me the least check, but I believe that
to be a matter of habit. One thing about a typewriter is that you get a
better look at your stuff as it goes down.
=Robert Simpson=: I don't lose many ideas owing to a rapid fire
imagination. I haven't got one. Frequently it goes wandering off into
bypaths, but the only thing I lose then is time. Everything I write is
first written and revised in pen and ink. I detest a typewriter.
=Arthur D. Howden Smith=: No. Typewriter.
=Theodore Seixas Solomons=: I seldom lose ideas in that way. From my
answer to II you will see that even if I happen to think faster than I
can write, if the thought is a useful one it automatically attaches
itself to my memory. As to the mechanism of writing, I am only now
abandoning the pen and using, for almost all composition, the
typewriter. But for the greater legibility and the quickness, when
quickness is needed, of the machine, I should continue with the pen, for
with me it is most conducive to careful first expression. I write with
widely separated lines--about twice the usual spacing, or even three
times. This, either with the pen or on the machine. My purpose is to
avoid the necessity of making a new draft on new paper when I come to
revise. I now use but the one manuscript draft, making all my changes on
that. Occasionally I am obliged to prepare some new sheets, but
ninety-five per cent. or more of the original sheets are retained. If I
happen to be in my stride, or, what is more likely, if the matter
happens to be easy to write, a page or two may escape with little
correction. Again, I may line and interline, but I have the space and by
using a fine script, which comes easy to me, I am able to make great
changes and additions while retaining the original page.
The advantages of this will be manifest when one considers the value of
having before one constantly, in his revisings, all his past thought and
expression. Here, in my way of working, I have before me always the
complete history of the fashioning of the thought--the sentence or
paragraph. Often I later resume the original form, having found, by the
lapse of time, that the improvement I sought and fancied I had achieved
involved some objection greater than that I strove to remedy. This and
many other advantages of this method would be impossible if a completely
new copy were made, for one would never think to go back to the old, and
if he did it would be difficult and cumbersome. Incidentally, it is a
time-saver. When my first draft is a typed one I revise with the pen on
the same sheets.
=Raymond S. Spears=: I can keep up with my typewriter, when writing
stories. If my mind jumps ahead too fast, I make a pencil note to recall
the look into the future of the story.
=Norman Springer=: The mind always runs ahead of the work. It plays
around the sides of the story, so to speak. But I don't think there is
any loss. If an idea isn't used, it sinks back into the mind and some
day it pops up again.
I compose on a typewriter. It is a plodding business. But fast enough,
for I find myself pausing only too often.
This query brings up another item. It is the difference between
_thinking_ a story and writing it. And I find that this too is a common
experience among writers I know.
Thinking up the story is fine work, pleasant and exhilarating. When you
have your materials and your characters you think out the yarn from
beginning to end. Everything seems crystal clear, every detail in its
proper place, every difficulty solved. It appears to you to be a very
good story indeed and ridiculously easy to write.
You begin to write, and alas, the story that seemed so clear in your
mind turns out to have been not clear at all, but nebulous. As you
thought it, it was beautiful; as you write it, it is a mess. No matter
how hard you try, you can never get down upon paper the wonderful story
you _thought_. The best you achieve is a caricature.
Another common experience is what I call "bumping into the stone wall."
There comes a time in every story, usually toward its end, when you get
stumped. By this time, anyway, you are usually pretty well disgusted
with the tale. It is so inferior to what you planned, so different from
the fine story you saw when you thought it out. Your mind is also eager
to be at new work. So you bump into the stone wall.
This wall is usually some little hitherto unconsidered detail that
suddenly assumes huge proportions. It seems to have wrecked your story.
There is nothing to do then but plug, and pretty soon the difficulty is
surmounted.
I mention this because I've noticed that the "stone wall" is the place
where the new writer is apt to throw up the sponge.
=Julian Street=: I have that tendency but have trained myself to catch
the ideas as they come by. The fancies that come when one is writing I
have often called "butterflies of thought." One must be ready always
with the net and _get_ them before they fly out of the window again.
=T. S. Stribling=: I never lose my ideas if I catch any. Anything will
do except a stenographer; I can't bear to have another person in the
room while I work; they disturb me just as much sitting silent and
motionless as if they were raising bedlam.
=Booth Tarkington=: Sometimes. The pencil is best for me.
=W. C. Tuttle=: I have never dictated any copy. I am not fast on a
typewriter--using only two fingers and profanity--but I am never more
than two chapters behind my imagination. Seriously, I never know what
the next paragraph is going to contain.
=Lucille Van Slyke=: I'd like to kid myself along by thinking I lose
heaps of ideas that way, but common sense tells me they aren't very
impressive or I wouldn't lose them. Typewriter. Except at those
heavenly, rare--awfully rare--moments when I get a faint inkling (no pun
intended!) of how it must feel to be an inspired writer instead of a
bungling, struggling tortoise of a scribbler who is handicapped by being
a trifle softheaded and by having to carry a beloved house around on her
back as she crawls. At those times I like a big fat pencil, a whole box
of big fat pencils.
=Atreus von Schrader=: No. Typewriter.
=T. Von Ziekursch=: Find the typewriter most satisfactory. Occasionally
have stopped to jot down a note on some touch that I know I wanted to
add later in the story and might forget in the fever of the story.
=Henry Kitchell Webster=: I don't think I ever lost an idea because my
imagination had outrun the means of recording. I sometimes dictate,
sometimes write on the typewriter; I think the difference is
unimportant.
=G. A. Wells=: My imagination would move miles ahead of my writing
instrument if I let it. I therefore adjust the tempo of my imagination
to keep pace with the recording instrument. I think the use of a
recording instrument depends upon the mood. I have trouble using a
typewriter in artificial light. Can not use a pen during the day with
the same facility as at night. I detest a pencil and very seldom use
one. My mind is more free with a pen than with a machine, though most of
my writing is done altogether on the machine.
=William Wells=: No, because I can call them back. Typewriter; can't
dictate, get all balled up; maybe lack of practise.
=Ben Ames Williams=: I use a typewriter and find it satisfactory; to use
pen or pencil for more than a few minutes tires me, physically, and my
handwriting becomes entirely illegible.
=Honore Willsie=: Sometimes. Soft pencil.
=H. C. Witwer=: I have lost many ideas, plots, titles, bits of dialogue,
etc., because my imagination has traveled faster than the means of
recording it. It has not always been convenient to make notes. For
example, I might be working on a story and later be at a theater or
almost anywhere, and an idea for a funny or dramatic scene in this
particular yarn will strike me. By the time I get back to my story,
intervening events may have driven the idea entirely out of my mind. Yet
weeks afterward it will crop up again most unexpectedly, apropos of
nothing at all, and I'll think, "Darn it, I should have used that in
such and such a story!"