I’m doing something different as I work on my next novel.  I’ve decided to write the entire thing on my Palm Pilot T/X.

This is easier said than done when you don’t have a keyboard.  But it has already given me some interesting insights into the way that I write.

Firstly, since I have to type the letters in by pecking the little keyboard (or, if I want to, I could try writing the letters on the touch-screen, but unfortunately my handwriting is…shall we say “less than clear”?), I’m already writing much slower than if I were typing.  The last time I was tested, I typed at 120 WPM.  That was 10 years ago, and I know I type much faster now. But pecking out on the Palm I’m lucky if I get 30 WPM. 

This leads to a couple of different things that are, at least to me, somewhat interesting insofar as they seem a bit contradictory.  First, I’m hyper-focused on the individual sentences as I write them; secondly, I leave out a lot of detail because I want to move the action along.

Add to this the smaller size of the screen, and the paragraphs get really short and the action gets very compact.  Right now, I’m averaging less than 1,000 words a chapter (Dan Brown, eat your heart out).  In essence, I’m moving into “minimalist” mode.

Another thing that happens is because I’m so focused on the individual sentences as I write them, I can lose the sense of the entire scope of the novel.  This, thankfully, is corrected a great deal by the fact that I’ve already written a summary of the entire novel and am really just “fleshing” it out for the book form.  But it’s still actually somewhat exciting to pause and go back to the beginning of the chapter and re-read what I’ve just written.  Miraculously, thus far it has all flowed extremely smoothly (again, I owe this to the fact that I already summarized the entire novel so I know pretty much where I’m going with the text already).

And it’s also showing me that sometimes less is more.

Of course, I’ll still have to wait until others read it to know for sure if I need to add back some of the “background” information.

Still, it’s fun writing this way.  It’s more about story and less about character (think Law & Order, for example); it’s not long-winded on descriptive stuff (think the opposite of James Fenimore Cooper); it’s pretty much non-stop action (think The Bourne Supremacy).  And to top it all off, it’s just a blast to write :-)