Pretty interesting article from the Wall Street Journal.
The title (“How to Write a Great Novel”) is somewhat misleading. It’s really a look at how some writers — Nicholson Baker, Junot Diaz, Dan Chaon and several others — go about writing.
Richard Powers uses speech recognition software. Russell Banks writes his nonfiction on a computer but writes his fiction by longhand. John Irving starts all his novels by writing the last sentence first.
When it comes to process, every writer is different. And as some of the writers point out, that process can also differ greatly from book to book.