Writing stuff by hand

Writing stuff by hand

I seem to be back in a place recently where I find writing in my journal every morning to be an unappealing struggle. It’s funny, because I have been writing more regularly online and now have three different places where I am doing that.

I have been writing some longer posts on my main blog. A number of them lately have been adapted or directly transcribed from stuff that started in my journal, a workflow I kind of like. For me, there is still something different about writing an initial draft by hand. Maybe it is the absence of distraction when all that I have in front of me is pen and paper, but I don’t think that is it.

Some of it is the inherently linear nature of handwriting. Sure—I can write this section and then write that section and then jump back to write a section prior to the first, but that is not how my brain seems to work when I have a pen in my hand. I mostly start at the beginning and keep writing through until the end, wherever that ends up being.

I suspect a big part of it may be that handwritten first drafts were how I first learned to write. When I had to start writing essays and term papers in middle school, personal computers were neither ubiquitous nor particularly useful. My school had two Commodore PETs and a single Apple IIe and none of the did any word processing. We did not have a PC at home. My dad—a former college instructor—made me write out my essays by hand and I typically went through at least two drafts before writing the final version (also by hand). It was something of a revelation to me when I got to high school and there was a computer lab filled with IBM PCs and PS/2s that had PC Write and Wordstar 2000. Being able to edit drafts and easily move things around kind of blew me away and it was only decades later—now, basically—that I really looked back.

What works for me about writing by hand is that I find the basic structure of whatever I am writing tends to form itself as I am writing. I generally don’t have to consciously think about it much the way I do when I am writing natively with a keyboard in an app. That is probably only the case with stuff in the 500- to 2000-word range… longer than that and I imagine it might all start becoming too unwieldy to hold in my head. Luckily for me, that’s about how long most of my writing tends to be these days, although I’m not sure what is the cause and what is the effect there.

I do not want to find myself in a place where my journal writing is entirely (or even partially) about generating first drafts for pieces I intend to publish. For me, the whole point of keeping a journal is that it is pointless, that I am not planning to do anything else with it other than writing it and that it is not going anywhere other than onto the paper in a book that stays on shelf in my office.

Maybe my kids will find it when they are cleaning out all of my junk thirty years from now, but I feel a little weird even about that.