Besides the interesting fact that Richard Ford writes out almost everything in longhand, with a Bic pen, he fills a three-ring binder with notes. And he keeps all his notes and manuscripts in the freezer, so that if the house burns down, he might not lose all his work.

Don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it. Maybe there’s something to his idiosyncratic behavior because his novel Independence Day became the first novel ever to win both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize.