When I first started writing, I wasn’t even out of knee-high-socks, and there was no means of writing open to me but the traditional pen (or pencil) and paper. Even now, I can hear the scratch of the writing implement on paper and smell the fresh ink, and these sensory memories take me to a happy place.

I recently visited an exhibition on books at the Bodleian Library, Oxford University. There I saw original, handwritten manuscripts by the likes of Tolkien and JK Rowling. And I found the sight really quite moving. There is something indisputably romantic about a story etched by its creator onto paper. It’s something of an art form in its own right. And I couldn’t help wondering at the sense of pride handwriting-authors feel when they finish a novel – not only have they finished a novel, but they’ve had the skill and discipline to write it all by hand.

By the time I was ready to begin writing novels, my little-girl socks were a thing of the past, and so, for me, was writing seriously straight onto paper. Plotting and planning, yes. Diarising. Jotting down ideas in the notebook I keep permanently to hand. But writing a 100,000-word-plus novel? In the modern era of computerisation, I knew it would make little sense for me to work laboriously on paper. And so I type in word-processing software on a laptop. Quick and efficient.

But sometimes, I wonder, is it lacking in authenticity, and in the ‘soul’ of the writers of history? How would my books transform if I took the time to write them by hand? Would the very act of handwriting increase my sense of romanticism as I write, infusing the writing further? Would slowing down and working hard to get each and every word correct first time (knowing that editing is so much harder in a written manuscript) be beneficial to my craft? Or would, in fact, the reduction of speed and the introduction of close scrutiny for each and every word lead to less creative, less free writing? The first draft would be, I know, a thing of beauty, to be bound and treasured in a way one can never achieve with a Microsoft Word document. But would the result merit the extra effort, the deliberate move away from modernity?

In one sense, you could equate writing to baking. When you make a cake, you want a delicious, comforting end result that sparks nostalgia in you for the cakes of your childhood. You have a choice:

1. Buy the ingredients and make the cake entirely by hand, as your grandmother would have done. Weigh each ingredient. Combine them carefully using a spoon or hand-whisk. Knead by hand on a floured board. Get good and sticky and floury, and make your hands warm with effort.
2. Buy a cake mix, or use a food processor. Both options make baking easier. First, the cake mix. So simple! (Have you ever wondered why all cake mixes require you to add a fresh egg? In fact, manufacturers are perfectly capable of making a mix that includes egg, and requires only water added to rehydrate. But they stopped offering this option back in the 1960s, because the ‘water-only’ mixes didn’t sell well enough – home-bakers felt guilty that ‘baking’ was that easy!) Then, the food processor. Why do any work, or get messy at all, when you can just add ingredients to a machine that will do all the mixing and kneading for you?

I’m not suggesting, of course, that computers make writing a book as simple as adding water and egg to a cake mix or throwing some flour, sugar, butter and eggs into a machine. But they undoubtedly make writing easier. Spellcheck? Inbuilt dictionary and thesaurus? Automatic formatting? Find and replace? Cut and paste? Quick deletions? Quick additions? The question is, do we wholeheartedly embrace the ease that modern technology offers us, or should we be a little more open to the ‘good old way’ of writing?

The answer, I suspect, differs for different writers. But perhaps for all of us, there’s something to be said for middle ground – for writing the odd chapter by hand, with a beautiful pen, in a beautiful notebook, in a beautiful setting, and testing how it changes the writing experience and – crucially – the words that form on the page.