<story><title>I am Neal Stephenson, sci-fi author, geek, and now, sword maker – AMA</title><url>https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/11h6hg5/i_am_neal_stephenson_scifi_author_geek_and_now/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>boomboomsubban</author><text>I find the combination of using emacs daily with handwriting his books bizarre. I&amp;#x27;m sure it&amp;#x27;s that he separates the two activities, but it&amp;#x27;s funny to go &amp;quot;OK, I&amp;#x27;m going to abandon the super optimized text editor I&amp;#x27;m using to go write text for my job.&amp;quot;</text></item><item><author>consumer451</author><text>I found this answer pretty interesting:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; DavidGan1x&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; I seem to remember seeing the transcripts for the Baroque Cycle were all handwritten. Are you still handwriting your books and if so, what advantages do you think it has over using a computer?&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; NealStephenson&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Mostly handwritten, yes. It&amp;#x27;s slower, and so each sentence spends longer in the buffer before it gets written out, so first draft quality is higher.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>enneff</author><text>From previous interviews I have seen him say his process for writing those books was to hand write them for the first draft and then transcribe them into emacs as part of the editing process. Seems pretty sensible to me; get the thoughts on the page without an easy way to fuss over the exact prose, and then labour over the exact structure and phrasing later.</text></comment>
<story><title>I am Neal Stephenson, sci-fi author, geek, and now, sword maker – AMA</title><url>https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/11h6hg5/i_am_neal_stephenson_scifi_author_geek_and_now/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>boomboomsubban</author><text>I find the combination of using emacs daily with handwriting his books bizarre. I&amp;#x27;m sure it&amp;#x27;s that he separates the two activities, but it&amp;#x27;s funny to go &amp;quot;OK, I&amp;#x27;m going to abandon the super optimized text editor I&amp;#x27;m using to go write text for my job.&amp;quot;</text></item><item><author>consumer451</author><text>I found this answer pretty interesting:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; DavidGan1x&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; I seem to remember seeing the transcripts for the Baroque Cycle were all handwritten. Are you still handwriting your books and if so, what advantages do you think it has over using a computer?&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; NealStephenson&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Mostly handwritten, yes. It&amp;#x27;s slower, and so each sentence spends longer in the buffer before it gets written out, so first draft quality is higher.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ploum</author><text>I’m myself a writer, geek and my hobby is developing free software. I do every text&amp;#x2F;blog post in Neovim, including emails with Neomutt. I do everything in console. Using the bépo layout (which is dvorak for French).&lt;p&gt;I write my books, my journal and my zettelkasten with an Azerty mechanical typewriter.&lt;p&gt;I think I do really understand his philosophy…</text></comment>