High Wire Act: Why I Started Writing By Hand

Essays
April 11, 2012 | 36 4 min read

This essay is the first piece of writing I’ve done by hand, start to finish, since 5th grade, 1992. I drafted it using a Uniball Signo pen and black notebook while sitting at my desk. I edited it in the same way. When it came time to enter the essay into the computer so that it could appear on this website, I typed it in almost exactly as I’d put it down on paper.

I had several reasons for wanting to write by hand. The first is that I don’t have positive associations with writing on the computer. In fact, just thinking about a blank Word document makes me sweat. At the same time, switching from the computer to my notebook might do little more than prove the adage my dad likes to quote: Wherever you go, there you are.

But I think there are legitimate reasons to believe that writing by hand might be a better kind of process. I compose bits of essays in my head during a great percentage of my idle brain time — when I’m running or brushing my teeth or trying to fall asleep. I’ve noticed that the writing I compose in my head usually feels more fluid and articulate than what comes out when I sit down at my computer and try to translate those thoughts into typed words.

Now, there’s reason to be skeptical of the quality of the “writing” I do while lying with my head on a pillow and the lights out. We’ve all had the experience of having brilliant insights when we’re half-awake, only to emerge into the light of day and realize that our midnight ideas seemed brilliant only because the side of our brains that knows the difference between crappy writing and not-quite-as-crappy writing was turned off.

This is the first piece I’ve written start to finish by hand, but I’ve done a lot of drafting by hand over the past year. In that time I’ve noticed that both the experience of writing and the end product are different depending on whether I use a computer or a pen.

When I write by hand the correlation between the thoughts in my head and what ends up on the page is a lot closer to 1:1. This is good in one sense: When I write by hand the process doesn’t prevent me from putting into words what I already know. It might be bad in another sense: My ideas as they come straight out of my head aren’t necessarily my best ideas; it’s possible that all the reconfiguring I do on the computer produces more sophisticated thoughts and better forms of expression. I don’t know.

Writing by hand also alters the relationship between forming a thought and recording it in words. When I write by hand I almost always form a complete sentence in my head before I write it down. When I write on the computer I tend to start typing at the onset of an idea or a sentence that I then figure out how to complete during the process of recording it.

Put another way, my process for writing sentences by hand looks like this:

THINK THINK THINK THINK WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE

Whereas my process for writing sentences on the computer looks like this:

THINK WRITE THINK DELETE THINK WRITE THINK DELETE THINK WRITE

I find my thoughts come out cleaner by the former process. Whether they come out better is a different and still unsettled question.

The different process leads to a different product. When I write by hand I use simpler words. In the last year I’ve typed essays that have included the words “garrulous,” “neophyte,” and “bivouacked.” When I’m walking and thinking I never use those words. Instead of “garrulous” I think “talkative” or “annoying sonofabitch.” Instead of “neophyte” I think “inexperienced.” My word choice tends to be simpler; my sentences also tend to be shorter. Because I hold a complete thought in my head before I write it down, my complete thoughts are briefer.

At the same time, writing by hand produces some flourishes that writing on the computer does not. When I write by hand I’m more intent on following the thought-track in my head. The whole process is slower, which allows me to notice detours in my thinking. That bit in the last paragraph about “garrulous” and “neophyte” is an example of one such detour. I’m almost positive that it never would have occurred to me to write that if I’d been working on the computer. Or if it had occurred to me, it’s a fair bet I would have ended up deleting it on the grounds that the detour was more interesting to me than to anyone else. You can be the judge of that.

I haven’t come up with a way to fit this thought into the rest of the piece but I wanted to include it anyway. This desire is an example of how writing by hand can be more self-indulgent than writing on the computer. Anyway, here’s the thought: Writing by hand takes more of your brain’s RAM than writing on the computer does.

I find writing by hand to be a lower pulse-rate activity than writing on the computer. Writing on the computer feels like going to war with myself. Consider, for example, that in the process of writing this essay I’ve crossed out exactly 47 words (and half of those were in one ill-considered sentence back in the sixth paragraph). If I’d been writing this on the computer the carnage would have been 10-times as severe.

Of course, easier processes almost always produce inferior results. Thus there’s considerable reason to be skeptical of writing by hand, at least if its only bona fide is that it’s less likely to give me a heart attack.

Overall I think there’s greater variance in the quality of the writing I produce by hand. The good stuff I write is cleaner, more honest, less stylized, more well-considered. The bad stuff is more obvious, more ponderous, more self-involved, maybe weirder. In fact, this is definitely one of the weirdest pieces I’ve ever written. Writing on the computer drives my writing towards some average value — I think/write/delete/think/write until I have something that’s decent but maybe less vibrant than the ideas as they were conceived in my head.

Writing by hand is higher risk, higher reward. More than writing on the computer, it’s a skill in its own right that can be improved upon, which I intend to try and do.

Image Credit: Piqsels.

, a staff writer for The Millions, writes the Brainiac ideas column for the Boston Globe and blogs about fatherhood and family life at growingsideways.wordpress.com. You can follow him on Twitter at @kshartnett.

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Essays

“Who Will There Be to Talk To?”

Essays
November 16, 2010 | 5 5 min read

(Photo courtesy the author. The author’s father is in the center, flanked by his brothers.)

My father is a quiet man. He is eighty-eight and, characteristic of his generation, stoic. He comes from German stock and I think he was indoctrinated with the nineteenth-century Teutonic notion that discourse upsets the digestive system. He has never had, to my knowledge, a digestive problem, so presumably the practice has served him well. It came as a great surprise, consequently, to learn that he was writing his memoirs.

I was returning home to Maine and called my father during a layover at the Detroit airport. I’d been away a week. My father lives alone, only a few steps from my door. He gets lonely when I am out of town. I was expecting his lonely or his bored voice to answer the phone. He picked up. “I’ve got a little project going on,” he said, sounding full of joy, and perhaps even excitement. “I’ve got a manuscript I’m working on.” My father finished high school–barely–went to war, returned from war, went to work at International Harvester in Indiana, retired, and eventually moved close to me after my mother, his wife of fifty-three years, died suddenly three years ago. He is not a writer, though his camp letters to me many years ago betrayed an ability to fashion the written word in a surprisingly vigorous manner, particularly when stacked up against the troubled verb conjugations of his spoken words. “What do you mean, Dad, a manuscript?” I asked.

“I’m writing the story of my childhood, of three brothers growing up in Ft. Wayne during the depression.”

“That’s fantastic.”

“My days just fly by,” he continued. “I sit down at the computer and start writing and before you know it, the day is gone. I even forget to eat sometimes!” He laughed at himself over this.

A few years ago I began feeding dad books I thought he might enjoy. There was no reason to think he would take my advice and read them. I have no childhood memory of seeing him with a book. He had magazines and would flip through those, and he’d skim the newspaper, but no books. On a hunch, I loaned him Paul Theroux’s book about exploring the islands of the south Pacific, The Happy Isles of Oceania. He devoured the book and asked for more. I gave him another Theroux. Again, he tore through it, as he did most of the books I pushed his way, chiefly adventure and travel books. My mother used to say, “Your father is a dreamer.”  She laughed at this, but was in essence complaining. He had, over the years, dreamed of homesteading in Alaska, sailing around the world, exploring remote and lost islands, as well as many lesser adventures. To her point, he never seemed settled, was always a pulsing nerve shy of rest. I wondered if books had suddenly allowed him to exercise his dreams; if, like a pacing dog, he could now just stop, book in lap, relax. I stocked a tailor-made library for a man who had suddenly discovered the world of the book.

But somewhere along the line, the enthusiasm for books left him. It took a couple of years, but when it happened it happened with the same abruptness with which it began. It was as if a switch, suddenly turned on, had just as suddenly been flipped off. I kept bringing him books, but he had lost what he’d so startlingly discovered. To this day, now a half dozen years later, he laments the loss. “I just can’t concentrate,” he recently confessed.

“So, dad. Am I going to get to read this manuscript of yours?” I asked from the airport.

“Oh, yes. I want you to,” he said. “But I need an editor. Can you help me?”

I assured him I would help and that I looked forward to reading his memoir.

“My what? Memoir?”

“Yes,” I said. “Memoir. It’s a way of telling your life story. I think that’s what you’re working on.”

“They make memoirs into books?”

“Yes, in fact, it’s a very popular genre right now.” I winced at the word genre.        

“I want to write like Mark Twain,” he said. “I want to use normal words like normal people, people like me, use.”

I told him I understood, but mentioned that Twain had an impressive command of the language. This gave him pause. “Regardless, Dad, just write the story the way it sounds best to you,” I said. “If you do that, you’ll be fine.”

I stopped in to see him as soon as I got home. He was bent over his computer keyboard, hunting and pecking, papers on the floor, a cold cup of coffee on the kitchen table. He looked up and acknowledged me. He didn’t ask about my trip. He didn’t ask how I was. He asked me to read something and handed me a page. (Subtlety is an attribute my father never managed to develop.) “The Great Depression had its grip on us,” it began. The story continued:

Life became a struggle for everyone. There were few jobs to be had, if any. Dad spent many days looking for work of any kind and would come home discouraged only to start out the next day and try again. He got lucky one day and landed a job hauling coal to homes and unloading it. He would save his last load for our house. Mom would have a hot supper ready for him and he would eat while still covered with coal dust. Mom would unload the coal, shoveling it down a shoot into the basement. We would watch through the frosted window. I felt sorry for her but we couldn’t help. We were too small.

“It’s a wonderful image, Dad,” I said. “Your father covered in coal dust, eating, while grandma shovels coal into the basement. The brothers watching through a frosted window. Very nice.” He smiled and handed me another page.

Looking back at the thirties, in perspective, people would say that we were poor and maybe we were, but we didn’t know it. We had a lot of company and thought it was the norm. I wore Ralph’s clothes and when I got done with them they went to Ken, if still wearable. We were great fixers, even glued rubber soles on our shoes to extend their use. Even so, it was a simple life. In those days there was no refrigeration. In the summer the ice man would come in a horse-drawn wagon with a canvas over a big block of ice. He would chip off a piece for our ice box and with tongs carry it into the house. While he was gone we would gather up the loose chips and suck them. In the winter we had a box on the window sill and kept our food there simply raising the window to reach it.

And so the stories flowed: The brothers running catfish lines on Lake James at night. A beloved family dog poisoned.  A rifle accidentally discharged. A near drowning. Motorcycle accidents. I was not familiar with many of them, my father being, as I stated, of that silent generation. Suddenly he was an open gushing spigot. Then, just like the reading, and without warning, the spigot clamped shut.

“This writing business is hard work,” dad complained one afternoon as I was visiting him. I acknowledged that it is, indeed, hard work. “I don’t know how you do it everyday, write like you do.” I joked that there are more days than not when I wonder the same thing. He had abruptly ended his story as the three brothers, now grown, headed off to war, “tapped on the shoulder by Uncle Sam,” as he put it. “Are you going to tell the story of the war?” I asked. He said no, that he did not want to “open that can of worms.” He stated that he had successfully kept that experience under wraps and intended to continue doing just that. I said that sometimes writing is like drawing from a well and if you rest for a time the well refills. Maybe, I told him, he’d someday want to write more stories. He said he didn’t think so. He has more stories, he admitted. But, he confessed, he didn’t want to carry on. And that was that.

There is one line in his memoir I find particularly poignant. It is a clunky line that I wanted to fix but resisted. My father and his brother Ken had recently been talking, recollecting stories for the memoir. My father writes, “Just the other day Ken said, ‘When one of us is gone who will there be to talk to, that not having been there will understand?’” To which my father simply replies, “How true.” It is, in some fashion, the question every writer asks. How true.

Essays
| 5 5 min read
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Essays

Reading Andre Dubus in Iowa

Essays
September 10, 2008 | 2 6 min read

This guest post comes to us from Sana Krasikov. Krasikov is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the author of the debut short story collection, One More Year, which the New York Times calls, “a sensitive book about the economics of relationships: how they can become subtle transactions by people trying to pull off the trick of occupying more than one place and more than one time.” Khaled Hosseini has declared her “a brave new writer.” Her stories have previously appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, and Zoetrope.My first January in Iowa City, I rented a house from an elderly artist couple who were spending the winter in Spain. I’d been looking for a cheap place to live, and they needed someone to keep their house heated so its hundred-year-old pipes didn’t freeze up and burst. A few days after meeting with them, I moved into an antique, three-story Folk Victorian with a painting of a human-sized demonic cat in the entry hall. The house was a writer’s paradise – its wide windowsills were crowded with giant spider plants and birdcages. The rooms were divided with sliding wooden doors which disappeared inside the walls. Canvases of psychedelic dreamscapes lay piled in the corners. Upstairs, I found a studio that still smelled of turpentine, with a drafting table perfect for setting up a laptop. In the kitchen, cords of red Christmas lamps shaped like jalapeño peppers hung from the ceiling. The first few weeks, I awoke every morning to the light from the giant bay window, still not believing my luck. I invited friends and cooked dishes with herbs the artists had planted in their window-boxes. Then the first hail storm hit and the sewage pipe in the storage room froze and burst, flooding the whole basement. Because the house’s ancient heating system was also in the basement, it became impossible to warm the rooms without drawing up the smell of rot through the iron vents. In the end, I found myself relegated to a single room of my giant mansion — the kitchen, which I could heat by turning on the stove and opening the oven door. And so, I spent most of the winter at a round breakfast table with my back to an oven, reading. On the artists’ shelves, I had found the Selected Stories of Andre Dubus, whom I’d never read before. The first story I turned to was titled, “The Fat Girl.” “Her name was Louise,” it began. “Once when she was sixteen a boy kissed her at a barbecue; he was drunk and he jammed his tongue into her mouth and ran his hands up and down her hips. Her father kissed her often. He was thin and kind and she could see in his eyes when he looked at her the lights of love and pity.”The pleasure of discovering a new writer can quicken your senses. My feet were cold and my back was hot and I had never read anything like this. The prose was practically weightless but as direct as a lance. Here was Louise – a girl who couldn’t escape seeing herself as men saw her: the object of a boy’s careless, drunken lust and of her father’s love and pity. Between these two extremes, one already sensed the gaping chasm, the romantic love for which Louise secretly yearns and which she believes she’ll never have.I read on. Louise’s high school years are spent going on and off diets. “When she was out of the house,” Dubus writes, “she truly believed she was dieting; she forgot about the candy, as a man speaking into his office dictaphone may forget the lewd photographs hidden in an old she in his closet.” She chooses a girls’ school in Massachusetts for college and when her parents discuss it, “everyone so carefully avoided the word boys that sometimes the conversations seemed to be about nothing but boys.” When her roommate, Carrie, discovers Louise’s midnight snacking, she tells her in the dark that should eat chocolates in front of her, whenever she feels like it, and Louise, initially mortified that her “insular and destructive” vice has been exposed, finally agrees. The moment of intimacy between the two friends in the darkness of their dorm room is as poignant as any you’ll read in literature. When Carrie finds a boyfriend and Louise grows depressed, her friend decides to help. “I want you to be loved the way I love you, Louise,” she tells her, and begins cooking all of Louise’s meals on a small stove in their room, serving her black coffee and scrambled eggs every morning, and documenting her weight loss in a journal. Surrendering to her friend’s help, Louise begins to see the world in a new way. “The campus was pretty, on its lawns grew at least one of every tree native to New England, and in the warm morning sun Louise felt a new hope.” So complete is Dubus’ empathy for Louise that a reader senses that he loves her the way God might love mortals – for all the vices that cause them shame, and all the flaws they try to eradicate in themselves. But there is another side to her journey. From then on, Dubus tells us, “Louise entered a period of her life she would remember always, the way some people remember having endured poverty.” There’s a moment when as a reader you pause and discover that the author has brought you much farther into his vision than you imagined. Louise’s ritualistic relationship to food, her battles with her urges, her vowing to set herself along a more abstemious path are like the struggles of a person grappling with her faith, trying to be good in the face of being human. Dubus never resorts to the pseudo-medical language of “dysfunction” and “disorder,” never turns to the too familiar vocabulary of “recovery.” Instead, the territory he charts is a distinctly religious one. For Dubus, a lifelong Catholic, fiction was first and foremost a moral form. In an interview, he’d once said he didn’t know how somebody without a religious or philosophical background could exist in the world without despair. His isn’t the sort of writing you can compliment by calling it “impressive” in that it doesn’t try to impress on the readers its author’s own intelligence. It offers something better than that: a spiritual inquiry into being human that’s free of sanctimony. In one of Dubus’s most famous stories, “Killings,” Frank, the son of a small-town doctor and a music teacher comes home from college to spend the summer working on the boats of their fishing-village and falls in love with an older woman whose ex-husband eventually shoots him. When the local authorities declare the murder an accident, Frank’s father, Matt, decides to kill his son’s killer to spare his wife the pain of seeing the man walk free. He knows that what he does is both wrong and necessary. He carries out his plans quietly, while his wife Ruth sleeps. When he returns to their bedroom the next morning, Ruth is up, waiting for him. She asks simply, “Did you do it?”If there was ever a story that’s evidence to what the short story form can accomplish, “Killings” ought to be one. What novels can’t always make immediate, the compression intrinsic to the short story does. The intensity of reading a great story is a little bit, I think, like sitting with your back to an open stove in a cold kitchen, feeling its heat grow hotter against you as you sit still. It’s something almost physical, an act of intimacy between you and the writer’s words. Dubus reminds me of why I can’t bear to be in a room where thirty other people are reclining on folding chairs, listening to a writer read out loud from his work. When reading becomes a communal activity, it’s too tempting to treat prose as spectacle, to set people up for punchlines or to feel a need to deliver the kind of redemptive moment we’ve become so used to from watching TV and the movies.The impact of great fiction is delivered slowly and cumulatively. Of all the arts, fiction concerns itself the most not with what is visible, but what is invisible. It raises the question of who we are underneath the complex mess of our observable qualities: age, IQ, sex and social position. After Louise becomes skinny, she marries a young associate from her father’s firm, a man who takes her on foreign vacations and holds her hand on the plane, where she thinks herself “cunning,” as if the life she is living isn’t really hers. When she tries to recount for him her youth as a fat girl, he gets bored as though she were telling him about a childhood illness. Louise believes that if she can only “command the language” to tell the story of her inner life, her husband “would know and love all of her and she would feel complete.” When she begins to gain weight after the birth of their child, her husband treats her with uncomprehending contempt. In turn, she tests the limits of his frustration by getting bigger. Beneath their arguments, Dubus writes, “lay the question of who Richard was.” Her husband, Louise knows, can see her only as the slender girl he courted at the wheel of his boat. He cannot love her the way her friend did, and his efforts to help Louise do not approach the “compassion and determination and love,” that she remembers on Carrie’s face. And so, shedding her disguise as a skinny girl, Louise drives the wedge in further. It is often amusing for me to hear interviewers asking an author about his background or personal life. Readers naturally want to draw connections between the art and the artist and the fascination personal detail is understandable. But reading Andre Dubus, a middle-aged war veteran who was able, with such clarity and compassion, to convey the girlish longing and the steely single-mindedness of an overweight teenager, also reminds you that an author’s personal history is possibly the least interesting thing about him. Artists create from a far deeper place than their personal selves, something Dubus probably understood better than anybody.

Essays
| 2 6 min read
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36 comments:

  1. Another benefit is that when I write by hand, there’s no temptation to fiddle with the page margin sizes or font. I don’t switch to another window to look for more suitable background music. There are no brightness or color saturation controls to tweak until the work area looks “just right”.

  2. Think of great literature written hundreds of years ago. Those authors wrote by hand and we’re still reading their books today.

    My friend passed along this essay and I’m glad I read it–keep up the writing by hand. (By the by, I wrote this comment directly on my computer. It might have been more interesting if I wrote it by hand, but I have to leave for work in a minute. ;) )

  3. Thanks for this essay. I always wrote journals by hand in college and never strayed from it as I got into fiction and poetry. Someone early on in my writing life told me studies had been done where writing by hand created 20 percent more brain activity. Something like that. Aside from this, though, I find the computer difficult to look at for too long (especially after looking at it all day at work), and writing by hand feels like meditation, especially in the early morning or late at night.

  4. Two benefits from writing by hand that weren’t noted. First, the crossed-out words are still visible, and available for inspiration (they came from somewhere, didn’t they?), unlike deletions on the computer, which are gone forever. Second, the juicy visual placement of words on the page — those insertions that scale the right-hand margin, in the tiniest font, their smallness somehow related to their urgency.

    I like to write first drafts by hand and then put the handwritten paper on my copy stand while I type the second draft. A triangle forms between the paper, the screen, and my mind, and there’s energy there.

  5. Even as someone heavily immersed in digital publishing, I think writing by hand makes a lot of sense. It imposes another level of editorial where you are probably more closely reading the piece than you would had you first typed it out.

  6. Here I thought I was the only one with this problem. I always find that I start my written work by writing it by hand or I do all of it by hand first before entering it on the computer. For some reason, when I look at a blank screen I can’t seem to get anything out. I feel the slower pace of writing allows me to process my thoughts before I get them out, while when I type everything moves so fast that I don’t get to process it all as thoroughly as I hope. So I find myself stopping to think about what I was trying to write, and it all goes downhill from there.

    I also find I become distracted with the formatting and the misspelled words underlined in red, and the spacing, and the periods and the…you get my drift. It could be a matter of conditioning. Most people currently in their late 20’s and above were taught to write out their rough draft first and then type their final copy on the computer. It is possible that going to the computer first to type your first draft still feels foreign or not natural. Some theorizing…great post!

  7. Am certainly in sympathy with this. Last year I went to a specialist pen shop and said, “This is how I hold a pen, this is how I write: what’s the best pen for me?” They sold me a fountain pen for £16 (approx $25) and it’s turned out to be one of best productivity aids. Overall, I don’t think it’s ‘handwriting good, word-processing bad’ – it’s more a case of the two technologies each having their own strengths and uses.

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  9. I guess it is more of a personal choice. I don’t exactly agree that your brain is stimulated better when in front of paper – depends on how you train your brain.

    I prefer writing when I’m composing something big needing footnotes, to-dos, etc. However, while blogging or writing one-page articles, I do prefer typing. Basically, if something ends up typed (soon after), why write first? Especially, if it needs online research.

    It is just a choice.

  10. Pingback: Writing by hand | morris.wm

  11. I enjoyed the essay very much. The biggest draw back writing by hand for me is my penmanship. I have found that I try to write as fast as I think, and therefore the quality of my penmanship gets kicked down the rabbit hole with Alice and strange things along with it. I had a professor in college give me an A on a term paper with a note saying, “If the half of the paper I could not read is of the same quality of the half I could make out, you did very well. Slow down!” Perhaps I should try again slowing down my brain, or at least my writing speed.

  12. Great essay! I also have often thought about the differences and benefits between methods of writing. I prefer to draft on my typewriter and up until a year ago I even wrote blog posts and articles there that would eventually see light on the computer screen. But that took a lot of time. Besides from my more personal work, I use the typewriter when I have to work out a problem in my writing, the kinks seem to untie more easily—I think there is more space for my thoughts to flow. I love the tangibility and that my fingers get inky.

  13. There is a certain pleasure in the act of writing with a good instrument and the right sized notebook and quality of paper. Positive associations that can only serve to make the process more enjoyable.

  14. I only write by hand–at least the things that I’m trying to make count–unless I’m in a hurry, which usually doesn’t bode well for the writing anyway. But there’s also something to the process of allowing yourself to get it all down on the page without pre-editing as you compose. The real editing comes through in the drafting and re-drafting, I think, which is a process of taking the typed up copy and writing all over it about seventeen times. Ultimately, the computer is a tool for translating the work to a readable format.

    Come to think of it, I don’t really like reading words on a screen, either, so call me a luddite.

    So, yes, it does take more time, but what’s the hurry? Ars longa, vita brevis (I did have to look that up, one of the benefits of typing on a laptop.)

  15. I really enjoyed this essay. In a writing courses several years back, my instructor made the point that …”to backspace is to interrupt the natural flow”. Well, I believe that, and have developed a habit never to do it.

    This is not to say that I think it’s better to write- at least, to create- with some sort of word processor. Quite the opposite, I value the pen and paper- or graphite pencil, or colored pencils and or inks- yes, I really value the essence of the hand-to-paper experience.

    My problem with hand-to-paper when dealing with words is that I become so frustrated with not being able to write quickly enough. Everything tends to become such scribble, and then there’s the re-write- at which point I am thankful for modern word processing.

    Not to suggest that I’ve devalued the other- on the contrary, I’ve decided it should be better training for me to dedicate more time to handwritten story telling. Not only this, but to dedicate myself to doing it deliberately enough so that it remain very neat in hand. Forcing my mind to slow this way while constructing may eventually lead to more good surprises.

  16. RE: “Think of great literature written hundreds of years ago. Those authors wrote by hand and we’re still reading their books today. ”

    Actually, there is very little of what was written hundreds of years ago that we’re still reading today. So you could also make the case that writing by hand produces ephemeral creations that are doomed to disappear.

    For some processes I find writing on the computer more useful and for other processes writing in long hand. It’s just a matter of the right tool for the right job.

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  18. I’m part of the last generation to have written its first fiction on the typewriter. The beauty of that process — as with handwriting–was how it slowed you down and made you more familiar with your work, its scale and iterations. I find it hard to have that sense of familiarity with a screen and the virtual pages lurking behind the current page you’re typing on at any given moment. For the most part I treat the laptop as a typewriter, printing out pages for review, making multiple versions of everything, editing by hand. I often find that when I’m really stuck with a passage it pays to write it out by hand. It must engage your mind and imagination in a way that the computer does not. I also have the need to spread pages all over the floor when really grappling with a work as a whole or in pieces.

  19. neophyte: three syllables.
    inexperienced: five syllables.

    Garrulous: three syllables
    Annoying son of a bitch: seven syllables.

  20. I have a question: Do you think your writing by hand makes your prose more embodied? And if so, how would that manifest itself?

  22. Pingback: The beginning… « Novel Telegraphy

  23. As Egypt Steve mentioned…. not one of your examples for words chosen due to writing by hand is actually shorter than the computer-written words.

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  25. Pingback: This essay is the first piece of writing I’ve done by hand, start to finish, since 5th grade | RC Gale

  26. Bravo! I for one would write by hand other than for the problem of not being able to decipher it afterward (a genetic flaw in the basal ganglia).

  27. I am ancient enough to have attended college several years before personal computers were conceived for 99% of the population, to have had a penmanship teacher visit my first grade and teach us how to print and write cursive properly, putting us through gymnastic exercises to combat writer’s cramp and promote muscular development. So, writing by hand is not alien to me and it is how I have kept book and cooking journals for the past 35 years. It is how I begin the process of all writing, but it is not how I finish: word processing promotes faster, tighter editing. Despite the journaling, my penmanship has deteriorated to the point that personal letters are best generated on the computer if they are to be comprehended by the recipient. But in the end, writing by hand creates an irreproducible bond with thought and words that binds them to memory, and that’s why we should all keep at it some way.

  28. hi,
    Well said. Intreated writing long hand for all of those reasons, but reverted back to the computer after the first draft of my short story collection. It just is too cumbersome to have it later all converted to a digital file.
    Thanks for the article.
    Johanna van Zanten

  29. I loved this article. Thank you for sharing! I have been thinking the same thing for years, but thought it was my imagination until reading this. What a relief.

    If so many great works were written by hand, the only gadgets we still need are pen and paper. Nothing else.

    And to that I say just one word: Amen.

  30. If you don’t handwrite it first, then you miss out on the jolt of moving it into type.

    Writers need that jolt.

    We need all the jolts we can get.

  31. On 4/16 I asked if you thought your handwritten prose was more embodied and if so, how would that manifest itself? You then asked what I meant by “embodied prose.” To me ep is less abstract, more concrete; it appeals to our senses with descriptive images that evoke touch, taste, smell; it can be intensely visual but also visceral; nouns can literally refer to the body; action verbs can physicalize experience. Sports writing falls into this category; ditto fiction and reviews that require bringing experiences to life. Embodied prose can also be poetic; e.g., he punched her in the arm until her mind turned blue. To these questions let me add another: You have said that the relative slowness of handwriting seems to produce writing that is simpler and more direct. I’m also wondering if writing by hand gives you more direct access to your thoughts and feelings—for better and for worse—because there is no digital interface to distance you from your material. By distancing I refer to your editing your sentences before you complete them. Your article made me wonder if the body’s processes could be argued to be more efficient/economical than our speedy, time-saving computers.

  32. Pingback: Skin a Cat: Keeping a Journal | thethingaboutflying
  33. Pingback: #50 Skin a Cat: Keeping a Journal | thethingaboutflying
  34. Pingback: Hand writing | eric.r.shelton

  35. Great article! I just have 2 suggestions. The first is to use draftin.com as it is amazing for writers who want to write without having the need to delete words. The website also saves drafts of your work so you can compare your work. Also it is free. Second suggestion is to use a program like Dark Room to have a distraction free writing environment set up. It can be downloaded from cnet and is free. I use both to write and it has helped me very much when I write. I no longer need paper and pens.

  36. Thank you very much for your insights.

    I used to write a lot, always by hand, when I was a kid or teenager, and I’m on a personal project of going back to this habit, maybe start publishing. I also noticed that writing by hand was more creative for me too… of course it’s a matter of choice, but you explained very well your feelings about it and I think you are right.

    That said, I think it’s possible to take the same writing workflow for good writing software (maybe not a word processor), yet that requires discipline and clear thinking. For example, training oneself to think a full sentence before typing instead of being compelled by the keyboard to type all the time.

    In any case, I’m learning a lot from your article, thank you. (Sorry, english is not my native language).

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Essays

The Writing of ‘Hand D’: On Shakespeare’s Collaborative Career

Essays
November 22, 2013 | 6 7 min read

In 1592 in London, a pamphlet called Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, bought with a Million of Repentance was published, supposedly containing the bitter last words of Robert Greene, a member of the group now known as the “university wits,” writers and playwrights who had been educated at Oxford and Cambridge and who had written, individually and collaboratively, many of the best plays of the previous decade. Greene had died in poverty a few months before, and the Groatsworth contains a letter addressed to his fellow wits, Marlowe, Nashe, and Peele, warning against “those puppets” and “apes” (the actors) who not only didn’t pay their writers enough but who even had the audacity to “newly set forth” the wits’ old plays, adding a few new scenes or retouching some passages and then claiming sole authorship, and sole revenue. Greene holds a grudge against one writer in particular:
Trust them not, for there is an upstart crow beautified with our feathers that, with his ‘Tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide’, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.
Shakespeare. In 1592, he was 28 and had probably been in London for three or four years, starting out as an actor of bit parts and perhaps then trying his hand at mending a few speeches here and there during rehearsals. Starting around 1590, he began writing his own plays.

Establishing a composition date for Shakespeare’s early plays is tricky, but by 1592 he had at least written the three plays in the Henry VI cycle (Greene quotes from Part Three above), and possibly also Titus Andronicus. Parts two and three of the cycle, written first, were wholly by Shakespeare, though Part One, first performed in March 1592, could  be Shakespeare’s revision of an earlier play by Nashe, and Titus is now thought to be partly by Peele. The notoriety these plays gave Shakespeare is perhaps what earned Greene’s ire.

The popular image of Shakespeare’s career is that he collaborated on a few plays as a young man, as a kind of apprenticeship. Proving his ability, he went on to eschew collaboration for most of his career, until just before his retirement he again collaborated on a series of plays with his own apprentice and successor, John Fletcher. Broadly speaking, this is true. But it doesn’t explain why Shakespeare, after the runaway successes of Henry VI parts two and three would collaborate on the prequel, writing only about 20 percent of it, or why in the middle of his career, he would collaborate with Middleton on Macbeth and Timon of Athens, and George Wilkins on Pericles. And then there’s the issue of the four plays from the 1580s and early 1590s — a tragedy about Hamlet, prince of Denmark, Victories of Henry the Fifth, King Leir, and The Taming of a Shrew — none by Shakespeare, but all curiously related to his own later plays.

Greene called Shakespeare “an upstart crow beautified with our feathers,” an allusion to a passage from Horace warning against poetic plagiarism. Part of Greene’s problem was that Shakespeare was not a university man, and therefore not a gentleman. He was an “ape” who was stealing not only the vocation and the paychecks of gentleman playwrights, but also, according to Greene, plagiarizing them. Shakespeare was stung by Greene’s accusations, somehow getting Henry Chettle, who had prepared the Groatsworth for the press, to print an apology. Greene was bitter and likely unstable, but his accusations and Shakespeare’s reaction do lead to the question: how often did Shakespeare “mend” plays? It was common practice for theater companies to bring back old plays in repertory with a few new ones each year, sometimes updating and revising older plays to fit a current vogue. In his position for most of his career as company dramatist, first for the Chamberlain’s Men and then the King’s Men, wouldn’t Shakespeare have done some of this updating?

A new anthology collecting those plays that may contain evidence of this kind of work, William Shakespeare & Others: Collaborative Plays, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen and designed to be a companion to the RSC anthology of Shakespeare’s works, provides just this kind of portrait of Shakespeare the working playwright. It is the first collection of plays on the fringes of the Shakespeare canon — those plays, in other words, that may or may not have been collaborations in which Shakespeare took part — in 100 years, since C.F. Tucker Brooke’s The Shakespeare Apocrypha in 1908.

It includes some usual suspects. The riot scene in Sir Thomas More is now included in the acknowledged Shakespeare canon and is frequently included in anthologies of Shakespeare’s works. More is one of the few plays from that period to survive in manuscript form, and it is doubly unique for containing the handwriting of playwrights Anthony Munday, Henry Chettle, Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, court censorer Edmund Tilney, and William Shakespeare. The pages containing “Hand D” (Shakespeare’s) are among the most precious pieces of literary history, and are housed in the British Library in London. Other than six signatures, they contain the only samples of Shakespeare’s handwriting to have survived.

The evidence for Shakespeare being Hand D rests on the comparison of the handwriting to the surviving signatures, which share with it unique letter forms (a spurred a, a strange flourish on the k) unlike the handwriting of any other Elizabethan or Jacobean writer, and also on stylistic evidence. Will Sharpe’s exhaustive “Authorship and Attribution” essay at the end of the anthology explains the authorship studies done on each of the plays included in the collection, as well as giving an overview of the history of authorship studies on each. Computer analysis has made authorship studies easier and more accurate, allowing quick searches through the entire corpus of drama from the period. Stylistic evidence relies on matching an anonymous passage to the stylistic fingerprints of one author. Fingerprints could be the use of contractions (i’th or in the), oaths (‘sblood, zounds), prepositions (amongst or among), pronouns (you over ye), verb forms (hath over has), and metrics (adding extra syllables to poetic lines). Added to the evidence of vocabulary, spelling, dating, and which theater company performed the play (if any), it is sometimes possible to identify the author.

In the case of Hand D in More, the internal evidence of handwriting, spelling, and poetic style is a slam dunk. The trouble is that it doesn’t fit the traditional picture of Shakespeare. More is a play that, given everything we know about Shakespeare, he should never have been involved in.

More was originally written circa 1600 by Anthony Munday, possibly collaborating with Henry Chettle. It was part of a mini-vogue of plays about Henry VIII’s councillors and dramatizes Thomas More’s rise to power after helping to quell the Ill May Day riot of 1517 against foreigners living in London and his fall after refusing to sign the Act of Succession. But the reason for his fall is necessarily fuzzy, since it was the Act of Succession that recognized the legitimacy of the then-reigning monarch, Elizabeth I. In addition, the 1590s had seen a series of riots and hostilities against foreigners in London that seemed to echo the riot the play presented. For these reasons, censor Edmund Tilney refused to let the play be performed, writing on the front leaf of the manuscript, “Leave out the insurrection wholly with the cause thereof…at your own perils.”

Presenting politically sensitive material in a play was grounds under Elizabeth for arrest or imprisonment, and quite a few of Shakespeare’s colleagues at one time or another found themselves in hot water for their writing — Marlowe, Kyd, and even Ben Jonson — but never Shakespeare. So why would Shakespeare involve himself in trying to patch up a play already rejected by Tilney for containing dangerous material, and not only be involved, but agree to write one of the stickiest scenes in the play? It certainly challenges popular conceptions of Shakespeare.

Shakespeare & Others claims Shakespeare’s presence in More and Edward III, another common candidate for Shakespeare’s involvement. It is now generally accepted that Shakespeare contributed the countess scenes in Edward III (I.ii-II.ii and IV.iv) and that the rest of the play is by Kyd, Peele, or Nashe. Both plays are now included in anthologies of Shakespeare’s works. Shakespeare & Others also, however, puts forward Arden of Faversham, The Spanish Tragedy, and Double Falsehood (which I have previously written about for The Millions) as “almost certain” to contain passages by Shakespeare.

Arden of Faversham, written around 1590, is the earliest example of a domestic tragedy in English drama, as well as the first example of a detective procedural. Most of the play concerns the attempts by Alice Arden and her lover Mosby to hire someone to kill her husband, including two villains named Black Will and Shakebag (surely there’s a joke there). They finally kill Master Arden themselves, and the end of the play shows Arden’s friend Franklin uncovering the clues to their guilt. Shakespeare & Others suggests Shakespeare’s involvement in scene 8, in which Mosby and Alice quarrel and then reconcile in what is surely the sexiest makeup scene of the 1590s, and which contains stylistic and linguistic similarities to Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece, written at about the same time.

The Spanish Tragedy is Thomas Kyd’s masterpiece of a revenge drama, and influenced Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Hamlet. It is usually anthologized in its late-1580s version, and it is less-known that someone revised it a decade later for the Chamberlain’s Men, adding new scenes that increased the part of Hieronimo, the Marshal of Spain who feigns madness to gain revenge for his son’s murder. Shakespeare & Others attributes the additions to Shakespeare.

Double Falsehood is a different animal entirely, being perhaps the 1728 revision by Lewis Theobald of a Restoration-era revision by Thomas Betterton of a circa 1612 play by Shakespeare and Fletcher, Cardenio, based on an episode from Cervantes’s then newly-published Don Quixote. This anthology agrees with recent scholarship, including that of Brean Hammond, who edited it for the Arden Shakespeare series, that the play does represent, as it were, the grandchild of an authentic Shakespearean play.

Also included are Mucedorus, a play the editors describe as “worth considering” as partly-Shakespearean, as well as four plays they have determined are most likely not Shakespearean collaborations at all: A Yorkshire Tragedy, The London Prodigal, Locrine, and Thomas Lord Cromwell. The editors’ criteria for the table of contents of this anthology, therefore, seems to be the best of those plays that have, at some point in the past 400 years, been suggested by some scholar as possibly Shakespeare’s, or in other words, the best of those plays that belong to the group known as the “Shakespeare Apocrypha.”

The title of the anthology is therefore somewhat misleading. It does not present plays by “Shakespeare & Others” but by “Shakespeare, & Others.” However, presented this way, those plays that Shakespeare does appear to have a hand in are freed from the heavy trappings and gravitas the “Works” volumes lend, and can be examined not only for their literary qualities, which in the plays here are sometimes great, but also for the evidence they contain about Shakespeare the working writer. These plays can now more usefully be compared to the other canonical and collaborative plays, like Timon of Athens and Pericles and Macbeth. More attention to Shakespeare’s collaborative career, now known to be larger than was thought, may yield a new portrait: a playwright who was also a shrewd businessman and a company man, who likely spent more time in the day-to-day thinking about the bottom line than the immortality of his verse. And that is a more likely and more useful way to think about the man from Stratford.

Essays
| 6 7 min read
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Essays Reviews

A Genre Is Born: The Babylon Rite Slaughters Its Darlings

Essays Reviews
June 18, 2013 | 5 min read

Walter Benjamin would have loved this guy Tom Knox. In our age of mechanical reproduction, for starters, Tom Knox is an immaculate work of artifice. He keeps cranking out books even though he doesn’t exist. Tom Knox, you see, is the pen name for Sean Thomas, a peripatetic British novelist, journalist, blogger, and travel writer. What’s more, The Babylon Rite, the fourth novel by “Tom Knox,” works overtime to live up to Benjamin’s dictum that all great works of literature must either dissolve a genre or invent one.

Actually, The Babylon Rite doesn’t just dissolve a genre. It pours half a dozen genres into a literary Waring blender, hits the puree button, and serves up something that can only be called the first archaeological Knights Templar Meso-American whodunit Dan-Brown-send-up international drug-cartel Mafia splatter-fest of a cult thriller.

There’s hair on the walls of this novel, to quote one of the killers in Truman Capote’s genre-dissolving “non-fiction novel,” In Cold Blood, which may be the ur-text of the trend Walter Benjamin yearned for back in the 1930s. In fact, there’s so much blood gurgling through the pages of The Babylon Rite that it seems almost beside the point to say that the novel is a three-headed beast. Three groups – a journalist and a grieving woman in England; a team of archaeologists in Peru; and a pair of overworked London homicide cops – are all trying to unlock the secret ceremony of the medieval Knights Templar, the so-called Babylon Rite, that turned them into crazed, fearsome warriors and now, apparently, is causing corpses to pile up on two continents. Since the beating heart of this novel is the ingenious ways Tom Knox kills off his darlings, maybe the best way to understand this new genre is simply to catalog the slaughter. Here, then, is the coroner’s report, including victims and means of dispatch:

1. Museum curator, killed by truckful of gasoline ramming into a gas station that sits over a secret underground archaeological museum. Apparent murder.

2. World’s foremost authority on the Knights Templar, killed by driving his car into a brick wall at high speed. Apparent suicide, possible murder.

3. Russian ambassador’s nephew, killed by severing his own feet and one hand, then trying to cut off his own head, all with a very expensive kitchen knife. Apparent suicide, assisted by gay porn videos and, possibly, drugs.

4. Heir to a German fortune, killed by self-decapitation with chainsaw. Stone cold suicide, no doubt about this one.

5. Journalist’s lover, killed when crushed by a car while riding her bicycle at night in Australia under the influence of alcohol. Apparent accidental homicide.

6. London party girl, dies after slicing off her own lips, nostrils, earlobes and cheeks. Apparent suicide.

7. American archaeologist in Peru, shot twice outside a tomb of the pre-Colombian Moche civilization. Murder, possibly by members of a Mexican drug cartel.

8. Daughter of world’s foremost authority on the Knights Templar, dies after slitting her own throat during drug-induced sexual frenzy. Apparent multi-orgasmic suicide.

9. Murderous Italian mafioso, shot by police sharpshooter. Justifiable homicide.

10. London homicide cop garrotted during stake-out. Murder, no known suspect.

11. One Amazon riverboat captain and one deck hand, decapitated by drug cartel bad guys. Double homicide.

12. Amazon guide, killed when a drug cartel leader slices open his thigh and inserts a carnivorous “vampire fish” in the wound, which proceeds to devour the hapless Amazon guide from the inside. Murder.

13. Mexican drug cartel boss killed when his intended rape victim slits his throat with a razor blade concealed in her mouth. Justifiable homicide, self-defense.

14. Cartel bodyguard, killed by single gunshot. Homicide, but nobody will miss this dirtbag.

15. Zeta cartel thug, shot by a journalist. Justifiable homicide, leaving artsy spray of blood and innards on wall.

16. Archaeologist heroine, killed by self-inflicted throat slashing. Drug-induced suicide, partly explained because she realizes she is suffering from terminal Huntington’s Disease.

So there you have it, well over a dozen dead bodies killed by the whole arsenal – explosives, kitchen knife, chainsaw, gun, motor vehicle, piano wire, straight razor, hit-and-run, machete, and intestine-eating fish. If this book were a movie, it’d be a shoo-in for the Joe Bob Briggs Drive-In Hall of Fame.

For all this rococo violence, though, the prose is generally pedestrian and frequently downright laughable. Here’s Dan, the head of the team of archaeologists examining pre-Colombian ceramics in Peru, in conversation with his lover/understudy Jessica:
(Dan) gazed right back at her. “Of course, if your theory is in any way correct it means virtually all the erotic practices of the ceramicas, the cermicas eroticas, must depict sexual acts the Moche actually performed. Rather incredible, no?”

“Not incredible. That’s my perception. They did it.”

“Sex with animals?” Dan was half-laughing, yet his expression was sickened. “Women masturbating dying men, men who had been half-flayed?

Sex with skeletons, foreplay with mutilated corpses? Christ.”

“Bestiality and necrophilia, in fervent variety. Yep, I reckon that’s what they did.”
Yep, I reckon that’s what they did – coming after such a litany of kinky death, that sentence is all the proof you need that “Tom Knox” has ears made of pure tin. I thought it was impossible to top that line, but I thought wrong. Here’s the Aussie journalist Adam, zonked on a sex- and violence-inducing drug, gunning down a Mexican drug cartel thug, (killing #15 from the above list):
The urge was orgasmic. And irresistible. Adam lifted the gun, and he fired, exultantly. He had never shot a gun in his life: but this was so good. The bullet slammed the man to the wall, silhouetting him with a corona of his own blood, another Jackson Pollock on the wall, the abstract expressionism of death.
This writing is so bad. But people don’t read books like this for the lambent and lyrical prose found in most literary fiction about emperors or maladies or the incredible lightness of splendid suns; people read such books for the storytelling, period. And while it’s often possible to hear the gears of the plot groaning, there’s no denying that the pages fly by as The Babylon Rite races toward its drug-fueled, hyperventilated blood bath of a climax. That, in all fairness, is not nothing.

There has been a lot of giddy talk lately about the crumbling of the walls that once divided literary genres into tidy fiefs. In our brave and blurry new world, categories matter far less than the quality of the writing. Cross-pollination is king. Elmore Leonard’s crime novels have drawn raves from highbrows, including Walker Percy. To the delight of many readers, myself included, writers as diverse as Patricia Highsmith, Neal Stephenson, China Miéville, William Gibson, John le Carré, and Philip K. Dick have busted out of the ghettos of their various genres and attracted readers who once steered clear of literature’s shadowy precincts. As Emily St. John Mandel put it here recently, “Le Carré is worth reading whether you like genre fiction or not.” The literary novelist Kate Atkinson is now rubbing shoulders on the bestseller lists with that prolific corporation known as James Patterson, with no apparent discomfort to either party. Claire Messud’s new novel, The Woman Upstairs, is literary fiction that owes a large debt to such psychological horror films as The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. Everything is fair game for the novelist today – horror, thrillers, porn, fairy tales, pulp, splatter, comics, text messages, vampires, computer games, e-mail, tabloid headlines, sit-coms, spies, zombies, and, yes, such conventionally lofty sources as Shakespeare and Jane Austen and the Bible. And readers are richer for it.

It turns out that Capote’s “non-fiction novel” did more than blend two forms. It stretched the way we categorize and think about books, inspiring other hybrids that would have once seemed oxymoronic, even sacrilegious, but are now perfectly acceptable. One such book is The Roadmap by the former Burmese political prisoner Ma Thida (writing under the pseudonym Suragamika), which bills itself as “documentary fiction.” In a very real sense, In Cold Blood made The Roadmap possible.

In addition to genre-dissolvers, -creators, and -blenders, there is also a new crop of genre-jumpers. John Banville writes literary fiction with his right hand, then shifts gears and writes noirish crime novels, as Benjamin Black, with his left. Banville has called Black “my dark twin and brother.” The two appear to get along famously.

Which doesn’t mean that all writers who mix, dissolve or create genres automatically produce great literature. Sometimes, quite the opposite. Bad writing is still bad writing, no matter what the label says. With The Babylon Rite, Tom Knox has proved this beyond any doubt. Yep, that’s what he did.

Essays Reviews
| 5 min read
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