Hugh Pendexter: Often. But they usually come back to me without any conscious effort to reclaim them. The typewriter is my best medium for setting down the story. I never use pen, pencil, or dictate. But there is no medium ever invented that can keep up with a man's imagination and preserve all the coloring and minutiæ of effects.
Clay Perry: I used to lose ideas because of being unable to get them on paper fast enough, but since I educated my two forefingers to the hunt and touch system on the typewriter that happens very seldom. Having done practically all my fiction work for the past five years on a "mill" and never through dictation, I can not say whether dictation would help more. A pen or pencil would "cramp my style" very badly, now. I've synchronized my mind to the "mill." However, I believe this is purely an artificial, mechanical condition which could be worked out, one way or another, in necessity.
Michael J. Phillips: Newspaper training has disciplined my mind so I lose nothing through failure of speed to transcribe. It is all right for some, but I would be afraid of a yarn that forced me to such speed. The thing would be impossible when I had finished it. Usually use typewriter and copy all of my own short manuscripts, having longer ones copied by stenographer. The newspaper game has taught me to dictate either over the phone or to stenographer; to typewrite; and to write with pencil with equal freedom. I wouldn't care for a pen. Under the circumstances, the typewriter is the most practicable, so I use it almost exclusively.
Walter B. Pitkin: I lose much through inability to record fast enough. I work best when typing myself; next best with a pen or pencil. I am totally unable to dictate anything but the deadest form-letter stuff to even the most sympathetic stenog! I have two utterly distinct styles and manners, one when writing freely and one when talking to a secretary or stenog. The latter is simply awful.
E. S. Pladwell: No. My imagination travels fast but I do not lose ideas because of it. Out of a hundred ideas, five are good. Those five, if good, need not be forgotten. It works out automatically. I remember a good idea. The rest can go hang.
Being a newspaper man, I use the typewriter constantly and now I can not write longhand without a cramp in two minutes.
Lucia Mead Priest: Sometimes my thoughts get ahead of me. If they are not nailed down they are likely never to come again.
I can keep up fairly well—if I do not have to decipher the next day, I am safe.
I do not use the typewriter for several reasons. Mechanical things are irksome; I am lazy.
I use a pencil and a stenographer does the rest.