Muji notebooks, fountain pens, 30″ Mac monitors, tape recorders, voice recognition software, colored ribbons, index cards, French lined paper, and cheap school exam books are some of the various tools you can use to write a novel, according to the Wall Street Journal.

This isn’t really about ebooks or “the future of publishing,” but it’s an entertaining look at how writing happens, and how people combine old and new technologies in unique ways to fuel the creative process.

Some of my favorites:

• Nicholson Baker once grew out his beard, dressed as the character he wanted to write about, and filmed over 40 hours of himself in character delivering lectures.
• Edwidge Danticat creates a sort of visual storyboard on a bulletin board using photos, magazine cutouts, and other images.
• Danticat also reads the entire first draft aloud and records it, so that she can revise any sections that trip her up.
• Junot Díaz read the Lord of the Rings trilogy six times in order to get in the mind of a character obsessed with fantasy fiction.
• Laura Lippman creates elaborate, symmetrical, color-coded charts on bulletin boards using different colors of ribbon. She says people find them “mildy disturbing” due to her obsessiveness over them.
• Orhan Pamuk writes on every other page of graph-paper notebooks, using the blank page for revisions made in “dialogue-like balloons”; he relies on a speed typist for transcription.
• Richard Powers dictates to speech-recognition software while lying on his back in bed, sometimes for up to nine hours a day.

Read the full article at the Wall Street Journal (note: it will only be available for non-subscribers for 7 days).
(Photo: Laineys Repertoire)