Nick Harkaway:
How often do you print?
I just realised this is a thing; that’s to say, a part of the process. Or, of my process. There’s a sense of reality in printing (and reading on paper) a finished novel. In theory, you can go through an entire creative effort without ever producing paper on your desktop, but for me there’s a separate space of “tangible book” which has a particular moment and a set of uses. This morning I printed the first two chapters to look at, and aside from the sense of pleasure in seeing a physical manifestation of work done (in this instance a sort of echo, because I held the whole book in A4 recycled a while ago) there’s a difference between words on screen and words on paper.
Holding paper, I notice different things. The work feels different – different tonal issues arise, new sections I need to rewrite. It’s akin to – but different again from – reading a book aloud and hearing the cadences, the unintentional repetitions and homonyms, the blunt force wrongness of an unmodified word. The text is not different, but the experience is, and of course it’s still the paper experience of my book that most people will have.
Fascinating. I never print! Printer ink is too bloody expensive!