I still write by hand on legal pads. And the reason for that is I think about a story months before I ever sit down to write about it. I use sort of the compost method where I put a lot of ideas in my brain and let them kind of cook and they kind of write themselves so that when I go to actually write the story, a lot of it’s pretty well formed.
And but that means I have a lot of stray ideas, ideas that may not fit in the story. And so if I’m working on a computer, you would of course edit those out. You would lose those ideas and I’m afraid that if I hit the delete button on that idea or that line or that paragraph, I may not think of it again. So I want a paper trail because a lot of times I will go back to those legal tablets and mine those and say, “Oh, it didn’t work here, but it’s going to work in this story over here.”
So I like writing by hand and I like the feel of writing. I guess I’m old-fashioned in that way. But one of my favorite things to do is in New York City there’s a library called The Morgan Library. And the first thing J. P. Morgan did, the first thing he bought was the manuscript for The Christmas Carol. That’s the first item in the whole museum. And it’s so fascinating ‘cause you can go and you can see Dickens’ handwriting and you can see where he crossed out a word, uses a better word, crosses that out, uses an even better word.
And you get a real sense of his footprints. His fingerprints are all over that story of making all these little tiny adjustments that add up to this brilliant story. And so I love the reaction of — I will show when I’m in school, I’ll show like a slide of, you know, the finished page of a book. I’ll say, “You know, this book did not start out looking very pretty. Let me show you what this book looked like the very first day I started writing it.”
And my slide of the legal pad comes up and kids, you just see them move back in horror and they know that if they had ever turned in anything that looked like that, they’d probably be staying after school. But, yeah, and they all look at their teacher like, “See what he does?” You know, “Don’t give me a problem.” And on this manuscript page, I have a little thing circled, which doesn’t look very important at all. It’s the apple pie — Amelia Bedelia’s First Apple Pie manuscript. It talks about different apple names and you — that might have been deleted if I were working on a computer. It became a central part of the book finally.