Many happy returns

I write longhand and type it up on a computer. When I'm typing I'm really word-processing but I think of it as typing: I write in chunks which I then print out and revise and print out again. I work the same way I first worked on a typewriter. I like watching the pages build up in a stack and no matter how much technology advances there is no mechanism more useful than changing the order of the pieces of paper and flicking through them to see how the text reads. If something's no good I put a line through it; if the page is revised I score a diagonal from upper right to lower left corner; if my revisions become too dense I change ink colours, from black to red to green; if I run out of space I draw an arrow with "PTO" next to it and write on the back of the page in case, re-reading the page, my other self forgets to turn it over. (My revising self consistently underestimates my writing self.) I have doctor's handwriting: a draft ms can be tachiste.

I use a lot of notebooks and when the novel is finished go back through them, fillet any pages that might prove useful and throw the rest out. Raymond Chandler kept an exemplary notebook – there's at least one copy in stacks in the Auckland Library – as did Patricia Highsmith: her cahiers, she called them. I collect things on my laptop: text grabs, PDFs and images, so in terms of research my computer notebook is my real notebook.

But the finished novel is created on a computer so it matters to me how they work. New iterations of the Mac OS are doing away with the "Save" feature. Instead of entering a command to save a document, the system will back it up automatically. This is logical, Jim, because it's a computer but when I first heard about it I felt a twitch. Saving a document is the writer's late 20th / early 21st century equivalent of hitting a typewriter's carriage return: a self-confirmation that yes, you wanted to keep the words (data) you've just typed (entered). Says Michael Gartenburg at Computerworld:

I've long argued that we must get past the need to use a save command. This vestigial remnant of the early days of computing has caused more than one user to lose hours of work as penalty for not saving often enough. Next thing you know, the power fails or you inadvertently close an application thinking your work has been saved. Auto Save eliminates that problem, and it also helps make Versions a great new feature. With Versions, you can "go back in time" (à la Time Machine) to see older versions of any document.

Do writers want to go back in time? If I'm making a major revision to a digital manuscript I save a draft and go to work on the new one. The drafts are numbered in case I need to go back, but I never do. The early drafts are the same as my notebooks: I spot a few useful things here and there – a few pages' worth – and dump the rest. Not that one needs to dump digital drafts. A life's work will fit on a cell phone, with enough room spare for a movie.