It used to be that freelancing involved a lot of postal mail, and sometimes couriers (which some publishers seemed to use like they were inter-office mail), whether you were sending typed pages or files on floppy disks. Then faxing got involved on occasion, at least for things like contracts. When I did my first book way back when ("Using Eudora" for the curious), it took a bit to convince the editors to let us submit the chapters through email. After all, it was a book about email, so wouldn't that be a cool tie-in?

These days it's rare to send your work through snail mail or couriers, though if you're sending a master of a large video or other massive file set then it can still be worth it. Instead, you'll likely submit through a combination of email and FTP. This factor means that even if you prefer to work with a pen and paper, or chiseling into stone tablets, eventually your content has to get onto a computer. I'm mostly talking in this post about written works, such as articles, books, courses, screenplays, and other such documents.

People are always asking what the best tools are to use as a writer. The problem is that this answer is actually a very individual concern. Personally, I prefer working on a computer. Whether I'm working in a text file, or a word processor document really depends on what the requirements are. Some clients need the final result in a plain text file so they can do fancy things with it later. Others need it nicely formatted in a Microsoft Word-formatted .doc file, though these days you don't need to use Microsoft Office to produce such files, other suites such as the free OpenOffice.org and Apple's iWork can save into .doc format as well. You can't always use an alternative program, sometimes clients have templates or fancy requirements that require you use Microsoft Office itself, but you can get around that surprisingly often if you prefer it that way. For some people, all of these tools are too modern. I know a New York Times bestseller who still works in a DOS-era word processor.

But of course there's more than one way to get information into a computer. Some people much prefer both writing and editing by hand. My own handwriting is terrible, one reason I took up typing early on in life was to avoid that issue. Others prefer first hand-writing, and then typing as they edit. Yet others have developed problems with their wrists or arms and so have to limit their typing for health reasons.

For those who just find typing to be a chore, investing in a scanner with OCR capabilities--which means that it can read in your handwriting and convert it into text for your computer, as long as it can figure out your handwriting--can be quite useful. For others, speech recognition (also known as or speech to text, or dictation) software spares their hands and wrists and lets them just speak. In the case of OCR and speech to text, you often have to make the occasional correction, but doing so can be much faster than retyping the entire work. For some, trying to get the software to consistently read their handwriting or understand their speech turns out to be too much of a bother. Others completely swear by one of these methods. If you want to try one, I highly suggest experimenting first before laying out any major investments in hardware or software, to see if it really works for you.

Ultimately, as long as you produce and submit results in the format and method that your client requires, it doesn't matter if you started by sending them out by telegraph or beaming them straight from your brain into the computer.