Writing surfaces:

The gradual shift away from papyrus occurred around 30 B.C.E., after which medieval scribes began increasingly relying on other materials for their work. As mentioned earlier, wax tablets offered an easy, inexpensive surface on which to write (or, in reality, carve), and were "impervious to water" (Graham and Clemens 4).  After the decline of papyrus, hastened by the collapse of the Roman Empire (which made it difficult to obtain the reeds necessary for making the material), wax tablets began to be used for note-taking surfaces, for rough drafts (as they were easily correctable), and perhaps most famously by the French royal court for traveling documents.  These wax tablets made good travelling documents due to their inexpensive and waterproof nature (Graham and Clemens 4).  A brief tutorial on the creation of wax tablets can be found here.

Like wax, wood was inexpensive and easily correctable, needing only a bit of sanding to erase mistakes.  Plato records wooden tablets as having been used "for ballots, legal records, and votive offerings," and use of boards for writing extended into the fifteenth century (Graham and Clemens 5).  Our word codex, generally applied to books of bound parchment, was originally used to describe books of linked wooden writing boards.  Much of our understanding of the construction of wooden codices comes from a 1986 archaeological find in Egypt, which "brought to light two codices, a farm account book and a compilation of Isocrates' Cypian Orations" (Graham and Clemens 5). Wood was also used in the form of the tallystick, a small wooden plank on which financial contracts could be drawn.

Beyond wax and wood, metal surfaces were also used for writing.  All of these surfaces would be supplanted by parchment, and ultimately by paper.