Eugene Manlove Rhodes: Yes. Pencil.
Frank C. Robertson: I find it pays to turn the imagination loose until the story is well outlined in the mind before touching paper. Then it is comparatively easy to concentrate upon the immediate problem before you when you sit down to write. I compose only on the typewriter.
Ruth Sawyer: Yes. I prefer typewriter. And when the material is definitely clear and fresh in my mind I prefer dictating.
Chester L. Saxby: Pen or pencil is a greater drag on me than a typewriter is. Due to habit, no doubt. I have never dictated. Oh, yes, ideas crowd on at times; but with a pencil I should find the crowding rushed my writing into chicken-tracks I couldn't read afterward. The very fact that typewriting holds me back I regard as an advantage; the first impulse must too frequently be rejected. Literature should be cooked up in hot blood—and then written cold.
Barry Scobee: I would lose ideas because my imagination travels faster than my typewriter, but I jot down points for my story, even pages ahead, as I go along and they come to mind. Typewriter affords least check for me. Never tried a story with any other tool.
R. T. M. Scott: I lose a few ideas because my imagination travels faster than my means of recording but I usually pick up others, equally good, which I would have missed had my recording kept pace with my thoughts. The typewriter affords me the least check, but I believe that to be a matter of habit. One thing about a typewriter is that you get a better look at your stuff as it goes down.
Robert Simpson: I don't lose many ideas owing to a rapid fire imagination. I haven't got one. Frequently it goes wandering off into bypaths, but the only thing I lose then is time. Everything I write is first written and revised in pen and ink. I detest a typewriter.
Arthur D. Howden Smith: No. Typewriter.
Theodore Seixas Solomons: I seldom lose ideas in that way. From my answer to II you will see that even if I happen to think faster than I can write, if the thought is a useful one it automatically attaches itself to my memory. As to the mechanism of writing, I am only now abandoning the pen and using, for almost all composition, the typewriter. But for the greater legibility and the quickness, when quickness is needed, of the machine, I should continue with the pen, for with me it is most conducive to careful first expression. I write with widely separated lines—about twice the usual spacing, or even three times. This, either with the pen or on the machine. My purpose is to avoid the necessity of making a new draft on new paper when I come to revise. I now use but the one manuscript draft, making all my changes on that. Occasionally I am obliged to prepare some new sheets, but ninety-five per cent. or more of the original sheets are retained. If I happen to be in my stride, or, what is more likely, if the matter happens to be easy to write, a page or two may escape with little correction. Again, I may line and interline, but I have the space and by using a fine script, which comes easy to me, I am able to make great changes and additions while retaining the original page.
The advantages of this will be manifest when one considers the value of having before one constantly, in his revisings, all his past thought and expression. Here, in my way of working, I have before me always the complete history of the fashioning of the thought—the sentence or paragraph. Often I later resume the original form, having found, by the lapse of time, that the improvement I sought and fancied I had achieved involved some objection greater than that I strove to remedy. This and many other advantages of this method would be impossible if a completely new copy were made, for one would never think to go back to the old, and if he did it would be difficult and cumbersome. Incidentally, it is a time-saver. When my first draft is a typed one I revise with the pen on the same sheets.