I’m not one to tell another writer what they should or should not use to practice their craft. Are you a classic Microsoft Word gal? Great! Perhaps you’ve splurged on a more specific word processor like Scrivener and FocusWriter — phenomenal. Do you like artisinal hand-crafted paper made from recycled toilet paper rolls bound in hand-woven twine? I’m impressed with your ability to actually use a fancy notebook, rather than just stare at it longingly waiting for the “right” project.

I’ve bounced between a variety of platforms and methods and have ultimately settled on “just get the words out” as the best method. Most of my drafts nowadays end up in Google Docs but I have notes and prompts scattered across a variety of digital or physical notebooks until I find the time to collect them and get an outline sorted out.

Something I’ve seen recently that gave me pause and set my gears spinning yet again, was the idea that we are currently living in a “physical media desert” – basically, it was a criticism of streaming platforms and how we don’t truly own what media we are consuming anymore. If, say, Netflix decides to cancel your favorite show and doesn’t offer it as a DVD — there’s nothing you can do to save that for future viewing. It disappears.

I frequently think about how this argument applies to writing. I store my drafts and ideas in the cloud across a few different platforms. If one of those were to crash, or if I lost my passwords and backup codes, those would be gone. There’s a tantilizing idea that notebooks will save us from this, but I’m not sure. Notebooks get lost, pages ripped, they could be destroyed by water or fire damage — physical writing is just as fragile as digital.

The difference, I’ve found, is that you can hold it. Holding something we value is so important to humans that it may be written into our DNA. There’s just something so special about flipping through pages of scrawled notes, looking for something you know you wrote down somewhere — it feels like unlocking forbidden knowledge. It has that air of discovery that is so important to us. Certain note-keeping methods can retain this mystery to some extent, but nothing beats going through a collection of old notebooks and seeing physical evidence of your mood when you jotted down that idea you felt was worth saving. Did you bother to dot your i’s, or were you in a rush? Did you press your pen so hard into the paper it ripped through in places, or is there that breezy quality writing gets when the ideas flow just right? There are a lot of memories in handwriting, and that can’t be replicated in a browser no matter how hard we try.

I’m still going to type my drafts — aesthetics aside, typing is simply faster than handwriting for me and is accompanied by far fewer hand cramps. There’s something to be said, though, for a good old-fashioned notebook.

I’d love to hear what your writing habits are. How do you prefer to keep notes? Does it differ, based on what and where you are writing? Let me know in the comments, or send me an email.