Dead tree blogging

Often when I sit down to write a blog post, I will immediately start distracting myself. Something needs to be looked up or some fact needs to be checked and suddenly I have vanished down an internet-shaped rabbit hole. The post remains unwritten and now I have to do something else.

So as an experiment in distraction-free blogging, this post, like the last one, was drafted using a pen and paper while sitting on the train.

It’s an interesting process and I do find that the draft post comes a lot faster and a lot more easily when I have nothing to do but write. Of course, drafting on paper means that I can’t easily shift text around, but this is probably a good thing (for me, at least) as it means that tidying up and formatting the post is something that has to wait until after the initial draft is written.

I don’t know that I will always use this approach, and I can see some cases where it won’t work, but as a means of unblocking words, it is proving quite effective so far.