Like a lot of writers, I had started a novel more times than I could count. I’d knock out a few great opening chapters—and then nothing.

I always blamed the usual suspects: kids, work, life.

But when all those distractions faded, so did my excuses. Finally, when I reached this point in my life, I sat at my computer, ready to write… and froze.

It felt like work.

And writing in a Word document made it too easy to delete, start over, second-guess, and loop back to square one.

Then it hit me: I’d spent my whole life writing on a computer. What if I tried something different?

So I went old school—pen and paper.

Once I discovered fountain pens and smooth, high-quality notebooks, everything changed. The obstacles I’d faced melted away for five key reasons:

  1. It slowed me down. I became more deliberate, more thoughtful with each word.
  2. It felt personal. Intimate. I was physically connected to the words as they flowed.
  3. It kept me moving forward. Sure, I scratched things out here and there, but I wasn’t stuck in an endless loop of revision. The page encouraged momentum.
  4. It stopped feeling like work. It became therapy. Soothing. Gratifying. More creative and less clinical than typing.
  5. It gave me a process. After a session, I’d dictate the handwritten pages into my phone, convert them to text, and clean them up with spellcheck or ChatGPT before pasting into my manuscript.

Using this method, I handwrote over 500 pages—five full notebooks—of a very rough first draft.

Of course, that was just the beginning. I’m now deep in the editing phase, working with a professional editor to restructure and refine what I hope will be my final draft.

But here’s the truth: You can’t edit what doesn’t exist.

Finding a process that excited me was the breakthrough. For the first time, I actually finished a draft. And that alone was a major victory.