My blog is intermittent to put it mildly. I see I haven't posted for 18 months, despite my best intentions. I'm still new at the blogging game. Writing takes up time and energy.
I admire writers of the past who kept up a great correspondence as well as writing huge substantive works without the benefit of any technology except pen, ink and paper. Despite the absence of modern tools, things happened more quickly than we think. The post was excellent, with several collections and deliveries every day. Publishing was fast. Books were printed almost as quickly as the author could write them. Dr Johnson's printer had his boy literally grab the sheets out of the great man's hand as he wrote them. Anyone who has had anything to do with publishing now knows that a book takes months to appear. Critical paths and publication dates slow everything down. E publishing has restored something of the old immediacy. Books can go from screen to publication in hours.
I don't have a printer any longer. Everything I write stays on the hard drive and the back-up flash drives. My first novel, the Dark Backward was written on an Amstrad WP in Locoscript using a pack of floppy disks. Loading and saving took ages. You could make a cup of tea while it chuntered away to itself. Printing was even more of a chore. A daisy wheel printer had to be fed by hand. Printing the 600 page ms took all day. But it seemed a miracle of speed compared with the tedious typing, tippexing and retyping of a manual typewriter.
What hasn't been speeded up are the actual processes of writing, the decisions about character and location and plot etc. These take time to get right, if they are ever right. A poem is never finished but abandoned, said Verlaine and the same applies to prose.
It's worth taking the time over these early stages. The decisions you make can be difficult if not impossible to change subsequently. The major decision that has to be taken in writing any kind of narrative is in my view, point of view, that is, who shall tell the story and how it should be told. Classical fiction is often told by what is often referred to as an omniscient narrator, who is not actually a character in the story but stands outside, but knows what is going on in the characters' heads. However all kinds of games can be played with narrators. It's fascinating for a reader but a difficult act for a writer.
Writing my first novel I remember my shock when I realised that the only way to tell the story I had in mind was to use a first person narrator who had to be a woman. When I got down to it, I saw the advantages. Writing is a feat of imagination and one shouldn't feel there are things that you can't write about. I don't at all believe in writing about what you know. Extend what you know into what you want to write about is my motto. Use your knowledge in conjunction with your imagination to create the picture.
To the extent that men and women have different thought processes, you can imagine what those might be. I'm not a woman but I know and knew lots of women. It seemed a good basis to start. Writing as a different sex is subversive and liberating. I've repeatedly done it and I recommend it. The word subversive is one of my favourites. Art should not only delight; it should shock and disturb and question. If it doesn't, it doesn't interest me. If art were banned, it would force every artist to struggle to be heard, which would improve the art no end. The good thing is you don't stop art by banning it. You improve it, you make it more resilient. Think of Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. In a society where books were routinely burnt, people learned them off by heart, thus perfecting their knowledge.
Writing as a woman was my own personal contribution to subversion. Women are too little heard, even now. Writing sex as a woman was even more interesting, but I'll save that for another time.