A few years ago I took a class on design. To be clear, when I say ‘class’ I don’t mean anything as grand as a college course. It was a two-day workshop taught by a travelling instructor that took place in a banquet room at a small local hotel.

My background is in graphics and art. I was not always the *ahem* brilliant *ahem* computer mastermind I am today. I used to want to be an artist. Or a web designer. Or a photographer. Something artistic (you know, like writing). So I had volunteered at work to help rebuild the company website, and this workshop was going to help me learn about how to make appealing layouts. I had convinced myself that it would instill in me a couple of the more visually artistic qualities I was lacking.

It didn’t. I’m not even sure we covered anything more than the basics any design student learns. Things like use fonts and white-space appropriately. And the instructor spent an awful lot of time showing us how to use PhotoShop, and I have to wonder if he got a cut for every piece of software he sold.

In the end, however, I did take away one important thing. It’s the only distinct thing I remember from the class. He told us, whenever pitching a design idea, draw it on paper first. Make the first rough draft presentation a pencil/pen sketch.

The reason is, the moment you start drawing a layout up on the computer, you bring in all sorts of new elements and expectations. For instance, on a piece of paper, you draw a few boxes to represent pictures and text, and maybe you write some words. It gives an idea of the layout, but no one expects the final product will look anything like that.

If you do your rough draft on a computer, first you’ll spend a lot more time picking the right font for those words, and the right images to fill those image spots. And when you show it to the client, even if the words and pictures are only meant to be placeholders, the client will tend toward judging the project and concept on those details, instead of on the big picture. You’ve spent more time than you needed and you’ve given them an image that comes with unneeded preconceived notions.

And I laughed at this concept (not out loud, because that would have been rude). And over the next few years found it to be very, very true.

Fast forward to two weeks ago. I was out driving, enjoying the very quiet 7 am on a Saturday, with all of the people home sleeping because it was New Year’s Eve and not Christmas Eve, therefore no one had to be out finishing their shopping before the stores closed for the holiday. I made a brief stop at one of the few stores open that early and found myself in the stationary section. A very pretty journal-type book caught my eye, and because I’m prone to buy these things even though I never use them, I bought it.

I took it across the street with me to a very empty diner. They sat me by my lonesome in a corner booth, took my order, brought me coffee, and left me alone. I fiddled with my phone, checked my email and Facebook even though it was 7 am on New Year’s Eve and no one was actually up to be doing such things, and then I stared at my notebook. I had some thoughts in the back of my head from the revision I’m working on, and I started writing them down.

The food came and I ate and the empty plates went, and an hour later I was still scribbling. As an aside, I’m not fond of writing by hand. I’m so spoiled by my computer that my fingers don’t like to grip a pen, and they protested that morning. But the thing was, I was drafting. Because of the nature of the medium, I wasn’t worried about things like punctuation, or spelling, or dialogue tags. If I wanted to remember a description, I wrote a big block of descriptive text, and if I had a question for myself as the author I buried it in the narrative.

Because I knew 1 – no one would ever assume this was meant to be a final product and 2 – even if the only other thing I expected of it was for it to be legible, I’d have to transfer it to a computer so I’d have a chance to fix any glaring errors at that point.

As an example, this is what one paragraph in my notebook says (spelling and grammar errors and all, but not the bad handwriting): She asks what its like there & he’s giving her a vague answer because his mind is whirring thinking about how he came back early, how Lucifer was stunned. & She’s going on about Venice & how she wants to see the world. How she knows its selfish but she was hoping Loki would take her somewhere new. How its so easy to talk to him & is he sure theyve never met.

It’s an oddly liberating feeling. Anything I use as an excuse to not write when I’m in front of the computer evaporated. I didn’t have to worry about rules, or details, or punctuation, or spelling, or how cheesy my dialogue sounded. Because it was so very distinctly a draft.

And now I’m able to work from those notes as I get into revisions. Instead of staring at a blank computer screen wondering if I should change the font or adjust the spacing before I start writing, and wondering how the scene opens, I have it all in front of me. I have to spruce it up a little as I go, but it means I dive in right away to the writing.

On top of all of that, I’ve heard rumor that the handwriting is good practice. It strengthens my hands or something and reintroduces them to motions I’ve deprived them of since I was in school. My fingers cramp a little, but so far it’s all worth it.

And there seem to be few better places for me personally to find a quiet block of time than 7 am at a Village Inn with limitless coffee and fresh toast.

How do you force yourself to start those difficult scenes and stories?