Why I Still Draft on Paper

The screen autocompletes. Paper does not even autocorrect. That asymmetry is the whole argument.

A draft on paper has exactly one feature: friction. The hand lags the mind by a full clause, and in that lag the sentence gets a second interview before it is hired. Crossing a word out leaves a corpse on the page — you see the cost of your bad ideas, which is how you stop having them.

Then, yes: I type it here, where it can live properly. Paper for the argument, the garden for the archive.