Computers may have streamlined the writing process, but will the absence of rough drafts and writer's doodles deprive future generations of a great literary legacy?

In theory, a writer's tools are the most minimal possible - pen and paper. In reality, few writers nowadays write exclusively using this age-old method. As computers and laptops have become cheaper and a standard part of almost every commercial office, many writers now consider technology to be their most essential tool.

What this means for future generations of literary detectives is not yet clear, but the paper-trail that previously marked the development of the creative process will certainly be greatly reduced. With the arrival of instant and disposable e-mail, fewer people write the letters which have traditionally been a potentially rich seam of information about writers' lives. Does this bother writers?

"I don't know how useful all that academic probing is," novelist Bernard MacLaverty says. "To me, the book is the thing, rather than the nit-picking process of how it was written."

MacLaverty, who has written eight books, started his literary career as a schoolboy by writing longhand into examination paper booklets, handfuls of which he pinched at the end of each exam. "They were 18-24 pages stapled together and were the perfect length for a short story." Having gone from biro and paper to manual and electric typewriters, the typical low-tech to high-tech route for many writers, MacLaverty now uses a computer, which he upgrades at intervals.

"The only thing about writing on to a computer is that you don't see the amount of work you've done; you don't see how a page radiates all the crossings-out it's taken to get to an edited stage."

Every writer who uses a computer fears losing their work into some virtual black hole. "You can sail very close to disaster," MacLaverty admits. He backs everything up on CD. He still has notes and all the paper drafts of his early books, in "various cardboard boxes. Maybe I'm being over-precious but I feel that even with the worst thing you've ever written, some day the light might fall on it and it might lead you to a great novel."

All his letters are now either e-mailed or typed on the computer and printed off, and he's not too concerned about the disappearance of the hand-written letter and deleted e-mails. "Did anyone ever want the Collected Phonecalls of Graham Greene?" he says. "We take it for granted you lose conversation, so why regret losing e-mails?"

Novelist Anne Enright now does all her work on computerand plans to get a new iMac specially in order to back up on CD. "At present I back up online, e-mail stuff to various addresses. The problem with technology is that everything is so impermanent. I used to keep things on floppy disks and I found my daughter taking one apart the other day!"

She admits that she writes up to 24 drafts - "I fetish my sentences" - which she names A to Z. "You couldn't print out 24 drafts, but they are all saved on disc. Given that I have scraps of paper I wrote on when I was 13 that I haven't thrown away, if I didn't live in a computer age, I'd be swamped by paper."

When she got an Amstrad in 1986, she recalls talk that computers would herald "baggy novels. But it didn't happen. If anything, with computers, you can distil things down too much by editing. It's hard to keep a balance." She's not troubled by the decline in letter-writing, though. "Letters remind me of a light that's been left on when day has broken. They are essentially ephemeral."

However, poet Justin Quinn does not agree. "Letters will be a terrible loss. I've got so much pleasure out of reading letters from poets I love, such as Elizabeth Bishop, and the idea of being denied that is hideous."

Quinn hand-writes all his poems in pencil. "One of the reasons I wouldn't want to write directly on to a computer is that it ties you to a desk," he explains. "With a pencil and paper, I can literally work anywhere." He approaches the computer only when most of the work has been done and he wants to see what the poem will look like printed. "It's a moment of clarification when a poem is typed. There is one way computers have given poets freedom; you can experiment with fonts and move text around. Most novels look the same typographically, but poems literally come in all shapes and sizes."

Quinn is also co-editor of the literary journal Metre, which he couldn't have edited from Prague (where he lives) without e-mail. "The Internet and e-mail are a crucial lifeline to the poetry world in English for me. I e-mail the typescript for Metre straight to the printers in Ireland."

He doesn't keep his drafts. "I like clearing out the stable. For six years I destroyed everything straight away, and now I do so sporadically. As a literary critic, I've never got much out of looking at drafts of poems. As a poet, I don't think drafts are anyone else's business."

Novelist Jennifer Johnston does keep her drafts. "I gave all my papers to Trinity, so I feel I have an obligation to them. I always keep my messy copy with scribbles from which I have made my tidy copy."

When she started writing first, she employed a secretary to type up a tidy copy of her novels to send to the publisher. "They changed my grammar and various sentences, which drove me crazy," she recounts. As a result, she got a computer 12 years ago, which "liberated me".

Johnston seldom writes letters and doesn't have e-mail on her iMac. "I've watched people with e-mail and it's a terrible waste of time, like watching Neighbours." Most of her communication is by phone, "even to my publishers".

Novelist Philip Casey writes all his novels longhand before typing them up on screen on his laptop. "I wrote my last novel on handmade Nepalese writing paper. It was very physical work, a labour, but to me, the creative stage is more immediate. Looking at a screen gets in the way."

He has kept all his paper drafts. "The house is stuffed with them. Some day I'll sell them for millions of dollars!"

Casey finds his computer "a great editing tool, but the really big change for me came with the Web. It changed computers from editing tools to research devices; I use it constantly."

He sends lots of e-mails, but although he tried to save them, a lot have been lost through system crashes. "I regret losing the correspondence from my publishers," he admits. Casey has also created three websites: a personal website and two which focus on Irish writing and writers in general. "As a writer, I think it's essential to have your own website. It's like a business card. If your books are out there, people will want to know more about you." He administers his two Irish writing sites (www.irishwriters-online.com and www.cyclopedia-ireland.com), which report several hundred hits a day, "for the kick. I do it because I can".

What seems to most concern 21st-century creative writers about the records of their creative processes is whether there will still be the technology to access and read what is currently stored on countless floppy disks, hard drives and CDs.

Justin Quinn wonders whether the next generation will be able to retrieve information from what will inevitably turn into obsolete computer programs. "Is anyone working on that?" he asks.