Steven Johnson has a piece on Boing Boing about his writing process, and how he uses DevonThink to avoid the intimidation of an empty screen:

Instead of confronting a terrifying blank page, I’m looking at a document filled with quotes: from letters, from primary sources, from scholarly papers, sometimes even my own notes. It’s a great technique for warding off the siren song of procrastination. Before I hit on this approach, I used to lose weeks stalling before each new chapter, because it was just a big empty sea of nothingness. Now each chapter starts life as a kind of archipelago of inspiring quotes, which makes it seem far less daunting. All I have to do is build bridges between the islands.

I went to hear him speak at Powell’s a few weeks ago, and he shared another aspect of his writing process: how to approach a final draft with fresh eyes. By the time you have finished a book, he explained, you have read your own material so many times that the color has drained out, and it is difficult to tell what is working and what isn’t.

To minimize the re-reading, he writes each chapter straight through, and makes a note at the end of each day about where to start the next day. He tries to only read each chapter once, until the final edit phase. This yields a messier first draft, he admitted, but also a better perspective for the task of tidying up.

And it is quite a contrast to Joan Didion’s approach:

When I’m working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm.