This is a picture of long-handing it on an iPad Pro. It seems excessive and wasteful to use a $1,000 tablet as an electronic legal pad, but I’m very much digging the advantages it has over paper.
You don’t have to drag around multiple notebooks, you have an endless supply of paper of whatever kind you want, you have pen tips of all kinds and inks in all colors, and everything you write is automatically backed up via iCloud and shared with the MacBook Pro on my desk. When I am done with the drafting phase, I can either print out the longhand, or export it to PDF or DOCX to split-screen it next to Scrivener and transcribe everything. (My handwriting doesn’t play well with the handwriting recognition programs out there, and I enjoy the on-the-fly revision inherent in transcription anyway.)
The iPad Pro also does Scrivener now, so it has become a full-blown Swiss Army knife of productivity hardware. I can type in Scrivener or Word, longhand in Notability, make sketches in Notes or Paper, and then bring it all together in Scrivener on the laptop.
Before I got the iPad Pro, I used the Microsoft Surface Pro 3 for the same job, and it does it almost as well. The pen is almost as good as the Apple Pencil, and the new handwriting features in Windows 10 are great. I would not be heartbroken if I had to switch back to the SP3. But the iPad Pro has a bit of an edge if all the rest of your gear is Apple stuff too because everything integrates just a little better.
I still enjoy writing on proper, actual paper with nice pens, but there is something to be said for being able to carry around as many notebooks and pens or pencils as you want in a single pound-and-a-half folio case, and have the peace of mind of instant backups and digitization. But for the final assembly of the Novel-Length Textual Product, I still go to Scrivener on the Mac, which has been my main writing software since Book 1.
That is a awesome looking tablet. I like your series. Keep writing & publishing.
How far into a novel can you get before your hand hurts? Its been so long since I’ve written things long hand that I’m afraid my arm will fall off!! 🙂
I’ve been wondering about this. I interview people and write notes long hand. I’ve been wondering how well the Apple pen writes. Trying this on an iPad Air and the rubber tip pens feels more like using a marker, a fat marker. How does it feel compared to a pen and paper?
It’s leagues better than the rubber tip stylus. Virtually no latency. It feels just like a very slick rollerball on a very smooth piece of paper. (That’s the only thing that isn’t quite like the real thing–the glass screen of the iPad Pro doesn’t have the slight friction of paper, so the pen is “quicker”, for lack of a better term.) It’s by far the closest anyone has come to duplicating the feel of a real pen on a real notepad.