Every now and then, I’ll wonder if it’s just an affectation, the insistence on writing a full draft of the book in longhand – and then something happens to confirm the hunch on which it’s based.

I keep my chapters fairly short, most fall somewhere between 3000 and 5000 words. Each chapter is made up of several parts, anywhere from three to eight. I plan these out to varying degrees, on cards or in a large unruled notebook. Then I write the chapter up over two or three days. At the end of each day, I usually type up what I’ve written, making edits along the way.

Yesterday, I’d got to within three or four sentences of the end of part four of a five-part chapter. This was material I’ve written about elsewhere, though that doesn’t necessarily make it easier to write it in the way that’s needed for this book.

So I type up the day’s pages, and then I try carrying on, thinking that I already know what those last few sentences are going to say. I find myself backing and forwarding through the next sentence, get a few words down, delete, rewrite, delete again. Within a minute or so of this, I can feel a fuzziness coming on that wasn’t there when I was typing up the words already written. Stop, a voice says now, you’ve lost the line.

And maybe this will sound like affectation, but the sense of it was visceral. On paper, there may be crossings out, but there’s an onward movement, and hesitation ends when the hand starts to move, like feeling a twitch on a fishing line. There can be frustration, pages that get abandoned, or that turn out to need something else before them. There are days when nothing works – and, earlier in a project, those days can be months. But there is a kind of disorientation that happens to me tapping words into a window that never happens when writing by hand.

Everything doesn’t need to be written this way. I’m tapping out this note now, quite happily, straight onto the screen, having been thinking these thoughts on my morning walk. But for an essay or a book, I need to find the line and follow it. I learned about this from writers a couple of generations ahead of me who said that they could always tell whether a book had a line running through it or not, and that lineless books were a new and strange phenomenon that had come with the word processor.

Maybe this is why I don’t find it in me to go to war against the LLMs, because at least for the kind of writing that I care about, the word processor – used as anything other than a back-up and editing tool – was already a step too far. And I know that there are other things that people do with words, to which the rules I’ve learned may not apply. All I can do is notice my experience and report it.