Anne Shannon Monroe: Yes, I am never able to keep up with my ideas; often I have to stop typing and make a note on a scrap of paper, of something on ahead, fearful lest I forget it when I come up with it. I use a typewriter altogether.
L. M. Montgomery: I don't think many ideas ever get away from me by reason of slowness of recording. My aforesaid note-book habit has been of tremendous value here. I write with a pen and couldn't write with anything else—at least, as far as prose is concerned. When I write verse I always write on an ordinary school slate, because of the facilities for easy erasure. But for prose I want a Waverly pen—this is not an advertisement—I just can't write with any other! a smooth unlined paper and a portfolio I can hold on my knee. Then I can sail straight ahead and keep up with any ideas that present themselves. But these are only personal idiosyncrasies and have nothing to do with a writer's success or non-success. So no aspiring beginner need despair because his or her stationer is not stocked up with Waverly pens!
Frederick Moore: I sometimes lose ideas because my imagination travels too fast. It may be that those ideas are like the fish that got away—not so big. But just the right angle on a situation will sometimes slip away and won't come back for days. Then it is not wise to chase it too hard, for it seems to get out of reach entirely if pressed too close. It frequently comes back under the queerest circumstances and when least expected. The writer works all the time—at the theater, walking, and sometimes when talking with another person on other subjects. My own hands on the typewriter beat everything in the way of creating. I have tried all others. The other person, in dictating, seems to act as a barrier with me. I find myself watching the effect of what I dictate on that person, or the secretary makes faces or looks bored, or makes a noise when he breathes, or looks at me. So I have to do it myself to avoid assault and battery. And I won't allow machine copying, for I find that if I copy myself, I change the turn of a sentence or add to something that makes an improvement. And a stretch of writing is more exhausting than a similar period at the hardest of labor. Only the writer knows what a sapping, wearing job writing a story happens to be. That is what makes 'em so cranky.
Talbot Mundy: The typewriter seems best, but I am going to try a dictaphone by way of experiment. As regards the losing of ideas, "when found make a note of" is probably the remedy. Then the only difficulty is to force yourself to consult your note-book and, having consulted it, to link up again the hurriedly made note with the wonderful winged idea that inspired it.
The only stuff really worth writing is poetry, although I'd hate to have to read nothing else! The stuff I enjoy reading most of all is philosophy and metaphysics. Next after which, good books of travel and treatises on finance and bee-keeping hold the board.
I believe that the apex of exquisite enjoyment is, for instance, reading Kant or John Wesley and shooting their arguments all to pieces. But I can't afford to enjoy myself.
Kathleen Norris: To "lose ideas" seems to me to imply an untidy sort of brain. The imagination needed for a story should not be a spasmodic, incoherent, impulsive sort of business, but an orderly production. A person who would lose ideas would also lose her purse, her friends, her petticoat, and eventually, I should suppose, her mind.
Anne O'Hagan: I think I'll answer this the other way around, naming the things that oppose the most check in their order—pen, stenographer, typewriter, pencil.
Grant Overton: I always compose on the typewriter. I should lose ideas if I had to write by hand, but I generally sit down to a day's work of possibly three concentrated hours with only a vague idea of what I shall write about. I may know a sentence or two. I let it build itself up from moment to moment. All the ideas and most of the pictures grow out of the moment before.
Sir Gilbert Parker: I could not dictate a word, and I never used a typewriter. All I do is written by hand with a pen.