It's not romanticism and it's very important for me too. I spend a lot of my time drawing out what I'm trying to do before I actually try to do it. I tend to work on greenfield embedded projects though for context. Coding and debugging is hard to get good at and are obviously important, but you still need to figure what to actually build and those tools won't get you there. For me, I use a pen and paper to actually figure out what I need to do.
When trying to figure out what to code or how to solve a problem, pen and paper is too "concrete" for me for some reason. If I'm waiting for inspiration I would rather just go for a walk or pace back and forth or just stare at something (monitor, wall, whatever) and think it through. When I write something down (or especially when I type it into a document) it becomes too set in stone for me, and if I do it too much I get way too "close" to it to see the solution.
Pen and paper is more helpful when I'm trying to see how the solution I came up with fits into the code, at least for me. I can't visualize at all, so even basic things about how data flows will be helpful if I write them down. The more concrete I'm getting, the more I use pen and paper or text documents. Otherwise it's just give myself time to work through the code as I know it, thinking of things and discarding them quickly, and waiting for inspiration to strike.
