The twenty-first century: from paper notebooks to keystroke logging

In the twenty-first century, the digital medium has become an indispensable part of the literary writing process and can hardly be neglected in the study of the literary draft from this – yet very recent – millennium. In this chapter, we examine four manifestations of the twenty-first century literary draft on a spectrum ranging from fully analogue to fully digital: the paper draft of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, the self-archived digital draft of Bart Moeyaert’s Het paradijs, the hybrid draft of Gie Bogaert’s Roosevelt, and the keystroke logging draft of David Troch’s story “Mondini”. These types of drafts offer their respective levels of granularity to examine the writing process, and especially the latter type of draft presents us with a hitherto unprecedented degree of detail, opening up the document’s nanogenesis.