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 courtesy the author

, 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.

● ● ●
Essays

How Not to Be an Italian Mother

Essays
January 26, 2018 | 5 min read
I did another thing Italian mothers frowned upon: I left an eight-month-old baby for two weeks and flew to the other side of the world to work. This meant sleeping in a mice-infested cabin in a commune in the woods with no cell reception or wireless, partaking in dance therapy classes, getting naked, and letting a total stranger embrace me during a scream-themed energy healing session where I was encouraged to get in touch with my primordial feelings towards my mother.
Essays
| 5 min read
● ● ●
Essays

Homo Sovieticus: Russians on Russianness

Essays
February 14, 2014 | 7 min read

“Anyone who doesn’t regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains,” Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin once said. Back in 2000, he personally ordered the restoration of Soviet “icons of dictatorship” in St. Petersburg that Russians celebrating the collapse of communism had stripped away years before. In doing so, he was practicing a particular kind of nostalgia that defines an entire generation’s relationship to present-day Russia, a generation now producing a body of post-Soviet literature that’s just in its infancy. These authors are children of the Soviet Union — their parents were taught to worship the impossible ideal of the Socialist Realist “New Soviet Man” before they boldly transported themselves and their children to the mythical West. They are neither of Putin’s Russia nor other to it, nor are their books.

Gary Shteyngart, in his much-lauded new memoir Little Failure, writes of a certain “vulgar nostalgia, the ‘poshlost‘ Nabokov so despised.” Poshlost is Nabokov’s term for “dishonest pseudo-literature” — it “speaks in such concepts as ‘America is no better than Russia,’” Nabokov told his Paris Review interviewer. Nostalgia for the Soviet Union does often lead to such poshlost, but its vulgarity may not be entirely legible to an American audience, much like Russianness itself. Without having witnessed the reality of life in the Soviet Union, it’s easy to mistake its comedy as farce. Indulging nostalgia for the USSR is also a way of dipping one’s toes back in the treacherous genre of socialist realist literature, which now as then enables you to view Russia “through a mist of rosy nostalgia,” as Anya Von Bremzen writes in her memoir, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing. “Nostalghia — it’s the MOST HORRIFYING emotion known to mankind!” — and yet amongst the Soviet Union’s former comrades, she notes, it’s now “fashionable.”

Nostalghia has understandably compelled many American-Russian authors, all of whom have parents who left the rodina, the homeland, in Soviet times, to make return trips to Russia. Von Bremzen, Gary Shteyngart, and Gregory Feifer in his forthcoming Russians: The People Behind the Power all chronicle their revisitations of Russia in their semi-autobiographical works, treading where their grandparents, parents, and younger selves tread before. Each has his or her own style: Von Bremzen’s is culinary, Shteyngart’s humoristic, Feifer’s journalistic. They are just as much Soviet social histories as they are personal histories (Von Bremzen and Shteyngart’s are also testimonies to the food and publishing industries, respectively). They tuck family heirlooms — old photographs and recipes– into their pages. They returned to warily reacquaint themselves with the landscape of their youth and history, primed to report back to their audiences back in the United States.

For Von Bremzen, returning to the USSR only made her want to leave, to “flee from this insane asylum where history has been dismantled and Photoshopped into a pastiche of victims and murderers, dictators and dissidents, all rubbing sentimental shoulders together.” Within Russia, nostalgia has taken the form of patriotism: “In today’s society, one so desperately lacking an anchoring national narrative, the Kremlin was once again exploiting the cult of [the Great Patriotic War] to mobilize what was left of national patriotism, to bring generations together in a tightly scripted rite of remembering,” Von Bremzen explains. The result is that the cult of Stalin is still alive and well in Russia, along with the glorified Socialist Realist imagery of Soviet Russia and the “bureaucratic Sovietspeak [that] inadvertently stripped the language of Pushkin of much of its greatness and might,” as Shteyngart put it. To restore some of that greatness — and to provide some context for the systemic dysfunction of Russian culture — seems to be the common goal of these writers, who themselves have a fraught relationship with the rodina. Writing of their one-time home from the safe harbors of New York and Boston, they are uniquely positioned to start piecing together a national narrative — or rather a narrative of the Russian people.

“An outsider’s perspective means being able to see the forest for the trees,” Mark Lawrence Schrad cautions in the preface to Vodka Politics. Schrad, an American scholar of Russian studies, felt the need to provide a disclaimer regarding his “biases and motivations as a foreigner writing about a taboo subject like alcohol in Russia.” Whether one can understand an entire nation while observing it from the distanced position of an ex-patriot is well-trodden ground. In a now-infamous letter to Nikolai Gogol from 1847, the Russian literary critic Vissarion Belinsky reproached Gogol for writing home from his exilic perch in Italy with unsolicited counsel for Mother Russia. “You have been accustomed for so many years to look at Russia from your beautiful far-away; and [do] not know that there is nothing easier than seeing things from a distance the way we want to see them,” Belinsky wrote, enraged and heartbroken that Gogol, who by that point had been living in Italy for the better part of a decade, had proposed that religion alone could save the spirit of the country. “In that beautiful far-away you live a life that is entirely alien…Therefore you failed to realize that Russia sees her salvation not in mysticism or asceticism or pietism, but in the successes of civilization, enlightenment, and humanity,” Belinsky surmised. His disdain for his friend’s abandonment and resulting mischaracterization of Russia — their shared rodina — is a familiar critique of emigrant literature. Living in the “mythical zagranitsa” — the mythical abroad, as Von Bremzen calls it, can sentimentalize one’s understanding of Mother Russia. For the sake of making Russia legible to foreign eyes, one might be lulled into lazily attributing the country’s systemic idiosyncrasies, abuses, and dysfunction to the tremors of a universal, mystical “Russian Soul.” But does such a thing really exist? Did it ever? Is it the only explanation for what makes Russians Russian?  For this crop of authors, the answer is nyet.

“I do not believe in a Russian soul,” Shteyngart writes. “You are not what you want. You are what wants you back.” Shteyngart has capitalized on the seemingly endless well of comedy that is the immigrant experience in America, a comedy that my own family became intimately familiar when they left the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic during Perestroika. His life story is not at all unique among Soviet emigrés, but what makes Little Failure worthwhile is what it has to say about how Russianness registers to American eyes and ears. Shteyngart’s statement of purpose comes as he recalls sitting amidst a gathering of his American classmates, and writes, “this is a community. These people know each other, understand one another, came of age with one another. They were tied by kin and outlook, as were their parents…What happened here, this was nobody’s fault. We Soviet Jews were simply invited to the wrong party. And then we were too frightened to leave. Because we didn’t know who we were. In this book, I’m trying to say who we were.” Who they were was a group of people bonded by religion, origin, and culture — bonded by a willful failure to live up to the cosmonaut ideal of the “New Soviet Man” infamously satirized by the “eternal dissident” Alexander Zinoviev in his 1985 Homo Sovieticus.“We were all connected by failure back then,” Shteyngart writes.

It has been a big year for H. Sovieticus, who makes quite the comeback in these works. In Shteyngart’s depiction, this species of man never makes it past adolescence: “Often at a dinner table, a male Homo soveticus will say something uncouth, hurtful, disgusting, because this is his teenager’s right and prerogative.” For Von Bremzen, he becomes the “Long-suffering Homo sovieticus” who “gobbled down deception,” raised as he was on socialist realism. Socialist realist art and literature defined the Soviet ideal for almost the entirety of the 20th century; since then, it has been almost entirely discounted as blatant propaganda, despite the fact that some Soviet artists successfully critiqued its utopian premise even while working on official state commissions. “In socialist realist visions, kolkhoz maidens danced around cornucopic sheaves of wheat, mindless of famines,” Von Bremzen explains. “Socialist realism encircled like an enchanted mirror: the exhausted and hunger-gnawed in real life peered in and saw only their rosy future-transformed reflections.” It was more or less the inverse of how wishful Soviet emigrants fantasized about the abundance of the capitalist West before actually setting foot there.

Feifer provides the historical background: “Socialist realist literature, a term coined in 1932 to describe what had emerged as the single genre acceptable to the state, extolled privation in private life,” he writes. “Its protagonists — ‘positive heroes’ — epitomized the ideal ‘new Soviet man,’ who recapitulated the official version of history, which invariably led to the triumph of Marxism-Leninism.” Feifer’s mother grew up in the USSR and his family photos of life in Soviet Moscow are scattered throughout the book, just as Shteyngart’s are in Little Failure. Like Shteyngart and Bremzen, Feifer meticulously explains the various episodes of uprooting in the nation’s history that displaced the authors’ grandparents and great-grandparents, but he has an almost unbearably scientific approach to discerning “the fundamental Russian character,” which derives from the unfailingly objective reportage that makes up the bulk of the book. But because he is unabashedly determined to deliver “a definitive explanation of what makes Russia Russian,” Feifer misses the point. In Vodka Politics, Schrad explains why: “simply assuming that intoxication and self-destruction are somehow inherent cultural traits — unalienable parts of what it is to be Russian, almost down to the genetic level — is akin to blaming the victim.” And indeed, it’s especially in Feifer’s explanation of the Russian predilection to drink that this comes through; “I believe Russia’s attitudes to drinking reflect something deeper in the country’s culture: a sense of pessimism about the ability to better oneself,” inoculated over centuries of systemic dysfunction and political upheaval. But if that pessimism was actually an endemic trait, it’s possible that none of these authors would have been able to write of the Soviet Union from their homes in the West; their parents might not have got them out.

Rather, what makes Russians Russian, these works suggest, has at least something to do with a shared familiarity and disillusionment with socialist realism’s communist kitsch. Sarcasm is the active ingredient that transforms nostalghia into what you could call post-Soviet capitalist realism, making for an altogether more multivalent, contemporary notion of “Russianness.” “What [Russia] needs is not sermons (she has heard enough of them!) or prayers (she has repeated them too often!), but the awakening in the people of a sense of their human dignity lost for so many ages in mud and filth,” Belinsky wrote so many decades ago, when he himself was abroad in Salzbrunn. In Little Failure, Shteyngart sounds like he is channeling Belinsky’s ghost — looking at his parents, he writes, “behind those accents, behind the fearful, angry, conservative views, there is a culture…of a superpower that was tossed on history’s ash heap, yes, but the culture of Pushkin and Eisenstein and Shostakovich and Eskimo ice cream…” Communist kitsch is also connected to that pre-Soviet culture, if by very thin strings. And while Shteyngart, Von Bremzen, and Feifer may traffic in “self-consciously ironic appropriations of Soviet-ese” they also draw heavily upon Russia’s literary giants, reverentially citing Anna Akhmatova, Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Gogol. What results is a blend of patriotism and nostalgia that Bremzen so presciently articulates: “It’s patriotism for that nineteenth-century Russian idea of Culture with a capital C — an idea, and an ideal, that we ex-Soviets from Ukraine and Moscow and Latvia have never abandoned.”

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Essays
| 7 min read
● ●

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.

  8. Pingback: Barnstorm | Wednesday Linkstorm

  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.

  17. Pingback: Sunday Link Encyclopedia and Self-Promotion « Clarissa's Blog

  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.

  24. Pingback: Flavorwire » What’s On at Flavorpill: The Links That Made the Rounds In Our Office
  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).

Add Your Comment:

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

● ● ●
Essays

The Little Room of Danger and Depth

Essays
November 28, 2011 | 12 7 min read

Oh how horrendous it was. Last year I did that thing: I bought and sold a house. As everyone warned, it was a dreadful double-whammy – I’d rather stand up in front of 500 people and share the secrets of my life. When preparing my humble home for sale, a place in which I’d lived for over a decade so it was starting to come undone at the edges, my real-estate agent told me that the two most important rooms in a house are the kitchen and the bathroom. Where I live now, an 1890s worker’s cottage in a regional town in the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales, it’s not the kitchen and bathroom that means the most to me, no, it’s a small room immediately inside from the front door.

It really is a small room. You could fit a double bed but there wouldn’t be much room to walk around. And there’s only one window, a timber-sash ensemble, which looks into what’s officially the tiniest front garden in the district. And the walls are painted a color that’s a cross between clay and mud, so it feels cave-like, as more than one visitor has commented.

Why is this room my favorite? Because it’s where – at last – I have a library.

On each side of the old Hordern and Son coal-burning fire (I burn wood in it, and despite its age it’s surprisingly efficient, pumping out a sharp, dry heat) are floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. The bookshelves aren’t old, though they look as if they’d like to be. Also in the room is an upright piano, one from my teenage years. Sometimes, when I’m having a break from working words I sit there and make up simple minor-key tunes that only I and passers-by hear, except I’m sure the passers-by wish they hadn’t. Against the window is a dark green tartan-esque couch that I bought from Vinnies in town for $60. It’s in a surprisingly good condition, although the dog has designs on it.

What’s missing is technology. When I moved in a year ago I decided that the little room at the front of the house would be gadget-free: no PC, no laptop, no phone, no stereo, although the modem does live in the library, because it’s the only option. It wouldn’t be a place to check emails or scroll through Facebook updates, that soulless activity that’s somehow entrapped even a good person like me. There’s no technology in this room because I want it to be about the books on the shelves.

In this day and age it seems almost prehistoric to want to establish a library. It’s as though I’m admitting that I’ve become a fan of riding a donkey down to the shops, or that I’ve discovered how and why things fall to the ground. But I don’t care. How good the books look on their shelves: all those people I’ve met, all those adventures I’ve had. What dangerous situations I’ve been in: birth, hard living, love, loss, betrayal, and, yes, even death.

I like order – to be honest, I’m obsessed with it – so I’ve divided up the library as if expecting the public to visit. To the left of the fire is fiction, and by fiction I mean primarily novels. To the right of the fire is my collection of literary journals I’ve built up over the last two decades, though I did have to do a cull when I moved house, which seemed sacrilegious, but it was simply something I had to do because they’d gotten out of hand, they’d proliferated. Also on this side of the fire is poetry, short-story collections, and writing “how to” books. Amongst this is a handful of my own publications; I’m not sure what I make of those two inches of book spines. Is that really all I’ve produced? Yes, that’s really all I’ve produced.

Back on the left-hand side I’ve divided things up even further. On the top shelf, almost out of reach, are the books I must risk life and limb for if the house is burning down. There’s Eminence by Morris West, Be Near Me by Andrew O’Hagan, the first volume in Manning Clark’s memoir, The Quest for Grace, Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay, How Fiction Works by James Wood (recently I concluded this book was so good that it didn’t deserve to wallow on the right-hand side), Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Flann O’Brian’s The Third Policeman, The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea by Randolph Stow, which was the first grown-up novel I’d loved, and, of course, Madam Bovary. These books have moved me; the lives between the covers are as real as those of my family and friends. Like the coal-burner fire they radiate with intensity. They will be read again and again.

Beneath the top-shelf stories are books I’ve enjoyed, sometimes very much, but they don’t seem to possess the profundity – life’s sheer heartbreak – of those up high; if there’s a fire and I have a spare arm I’ll grab some of these, but I won’t fret. Further down again are books that haven’t meant much to me, or perhaps I’ve hated them, or I’ve simply not understood, or I’ve understood them but they haven’t stayed with me, they’ve neither lingered nor haunted. Even so I can’t stand to chuck them away; in terms of novels I get rid of next to nothing, it seems inhumane. On the bottom shelves are books that are waiting to be picked up and loved, I hope I’ll love them, and I’m sure they do, too.

What started this library? How did it come into being? In 1994, when against my better judgement I decided to have a crack at writing fiction, a well-read friend came over to my place; he and I had committed to doing a night course in creative writing and he’d offered to give me a lift. He looked around my flat and said, “Where are your books?” I pointed to the one and only shelf in the place, the one above the television. “There,” I said, “I’ve got Cloudstreet.” As if this single Winton tome could offer absolution! I did have some books on biology and ecology and place and landscape, because I’d started my professional life as a landscape architect, but in terms of novels I was up shit-creek.

“Really?” said my friend. “Is that it?”

Yes, that was it. He shook his head. He was incredulous.

And he was right: I wanted to write but I’d not read much, at least not as a young adult – I was too busy navigating the minefield of late-surging hormones and the appalling mess of sexuality that goes along with that. Back in primary and high school I’d read, though I was slow at it, but I had enjoyed the task very much. These days, courtesy of my mother, I’ve re-collected most of the books I’d loved as a kid, such as My Side of the Mountain by Jean George, Barry Hines’ A Kestrel for a Knave, and The Dingo Summer by Australia’s Ivy Baker (which, according to the inscription, I was awarded for the neatest book in Science, Term Two, 1982; these days my handwriting is so appalling it looks like I’ve had a stroke). I loved The Dingo Summer for its exploration of landscape and loneliness, which are two themes I’ll take to the grave, whether I keep writing about them or not.

There’s no doubt in my mind that the morning after my friend made his painful, embarrassing judgement I resolved to read as much as I wrote, to slowly but surely fill my shelves with books. Novels, short-story collections, poetry even. I’m not a good reader of poetry, but sometimes I do like to try unpicking a few lines before I turn out the light at night, a kind of surreptitious literary dessert. It’s probably taken me longer than most readers and writers to build up a library. I remain frustratingly slow at getting through a book, and these days I’m regularly exhausted – trying to get words in the right order really is an exacting job – so I’m forever falling asleep with pages face down on my chest.

But now I have it, my library, at least a library in the making.

I’m also an avid – read: fanatical – collector of music, so I have shelves and shelves of CDs and vinyl records, even some tapes, but I keep all this in a different room to the library, the one the previous owners used as a nursery, which, I think, is rather fitting for a childless man like me. However, even though a day doesn’t go by when I don’t listen to music, listen intensely, more than often I’m moved (I’m not immune to doing air guitar to Sonic Youth or lying in the bath imagining my demise to the miserable strains of The Smiths), it’s my collection of books that means the most to me.

All that ink and paper and cardboard has enriched me in ways that I don’t really understand, not yet, and perhaps I never will – I almost failed the High School Certificate, English was my only reliable subject, and thank Christ for that. All I know is reading has challenged me, it’s changed me, sometimes it’s angered me; sometimes I’ve been so caught up in the text that years later I can still remember the events, minute details. For example, that unexpectedly sensual moment in the water-tank between the boy and the older man in The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea. Or in The Quest for Grace when Manning Clark as a child visits a cemetery, feels the terrible weight of his existence, his meaninglessness, so he runs home where he is thankful for the warmth and comfort of a roast dinner.

Part of the allure of reading is finding fictional worlds more interesting than the predictable day-to-day of real life. But books haven’t simply offered escape. They have given me depth, they have given me perspective, the sense that my days and nights have expanded, opened out. The aimless meanderings of my white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, middle-class life have more pulse because I’ve read, because I’ve given Tolstoy a go (The Death of Ivan Ilych is on the top shelf), and Chekhov too (he’s also up there with the best of them, obviously). For the completeness of this record, I should declare that there’s no Shakespeare on my shelves. I could lie and say that I love the guy, but I don’t, I’m with Tolstoy on that front – it just seems so, well, much ado about nothing.

But that’s all by-the-by, isn’t it.

The fact is that at the age of forty-three years and twenty-eight days I have a room that can rightly, justifiably be called a library. It’s a physical thing as much as a brain and heart thing; it’s a space, a place, a room all of my own, in every possible way. It is without question my favorite room in the house, the most important room, as archaic as that sounds, as archaic as it probably is, but I really don’t care. My library is my anchor, it’s my look-out, it’s my lighthouse. And I’m eternally grateful that if ever I’m burgled my books will be safe, because these days no one in their right mind would bother stealing the things. Everything will be alright. As long as there’s no fire.

 

Image credit: Kelly Schott/Flickr

Essays
| 12 7 min read