Extending research on the relationships between materiality and process, this article examines how writers' preferences for particular materials--places, technologies, objects--develop over time. With a specific focus on how materials affect writers and how writers are affected by their writing tasks, this article considers how writers' histories of turning toward and turning against materials shape their writing processes. The findings of this research show that writers' material practices register both materially and affectively and are echoed in writers' processes years later and shape how processes evolve as writers learn to write in new contexts.