Writing by hand, writing by heart

Thoughts on how and why writers write

As I’ve returned to my writing projects now that my son is a few months old, I’ve been drawn to the practice of writing by hand. For most of my life, I’ve composed all of the drafts of everything I write in Microsoft Word, and I’ve done so without giving the habit much reflection. If you don’t give it much thought, this seems like a pretty obvious thing to do. If you’re going to submit something that must be typed or publish something digitally, eventually it will need to take on a digital form, so you might as well save time and begin there.

But I’ve realized lately that this way of thinking about writing treats writing as a product rather than as a creative act. The purpose of writing, in this view, is simply to have manufactured a document for other people to consume, likely for some specific end or set of ends: informing readers, shaping public debate, sharing your thoughts, attracting or interacting with like-minded readers, and so on.

While it is of course fine to have these sorts of goals for one’s writing, this way of thinking obscures the distinction—an important one—between a person who writes and a writer. A writer is someone who lives in and looks at the world in a particular way and who processes his experience of being alive through the act of writing. What he writes may or may not end up being shared with anyone other than his notebook, but that is less important to a writer. The process is the point. The writing itself, not the written document you’re left with, is the point.

---

As I reflected on this, I returned to the notes I’ve been keeping for years on the process of writers I admire. I searched especially for where these writers talk about how they draft their work, how they write. What I discovered didn’t surprise me, and I’m sure I could turn up plenty more examples if I spent more time on it (and I might). A common theme is how valuable these authors found it to be to write by hand, at least in the early stages of writing.

For instance, the under-appreciated fiction writer Andre Dubus (not to be confused with his son Andre Dubus III) had the practice of producing all of his drafts by writing five pages in longhand daily, five days a week.

In a 1993 Art of Fiction interview in The Paris Review, Mark Helprin described his writing habits this way:

I write in either a loose-leaf notebook or on legal pads, both ultra-fine lined. It used to be that I would write a whole novel without a single correction and then be faced with hundreds of pages of smooth text, unmarred, to revise when needed. After the death of my father that changed, and I now have a fairly marred text at the end of the first draft, though nothing compared to what I do when I rewrite. Then the original gets an overlay of tightly scripted corrections, lines, boxes, balloon additions, numbers referred to supplementary paragraphs and sections, proofreader’s marks, punctuations, etcetera. It makes the Rosetta Stone look like a tabula rasa. That, I consider draft two. Draft three comes into being as I type draft two into a computer, making many changes as I go. . . .

Natalie Goldberg advises in her book Writing Down the Bones that a writer must be intentional about the tools he chooses for his craft, and she advocates careful selection of pen and notebook. “Sometimes, instead of writing in a notebook,” she says, “you might want to directly type out your thoughts. Writing is physical and affected by the equipment you use. . . . I have found that when I am writing something emotional, I must write it the first time directly with hand on the paper. Handwriting is more connected to the movement of the heart.”

Recently, over at her Substack “The Inscapist,” Denise Trull observed something similar:

Scientists who conducted brain studies of students who wrote exclusively in cursive for a given period of time discovered that they became more alert to what they were thinking and feeling. “When we use a pen and paper, we are giving the brain more ‘hooks’ to hang our memories on. Writing by hand creates much more activity in the sensorimotor parts of the brain. A lot of senses are activated by pressing the pen on paper, seeing the letters you write, and hearing the sound you make while writing. These sense experiences create contact between different parts of the brain and open the brain up for learning”.

It is a beautiful concept that it takes all the senses to cooperate in writing down our thoughts on a page.

In A Circle of Quiet, the first installment of her four-part autobiography, Madeleine L’Engle relates this anecdote:

Carl Van Vechten wrote, “While dining recently in a public dining room with Christopher Isherwood, we were approached by an eager youth who proceeded to ask us ‘literary’ questions, firing them at us with alarming earnestness. We answered them as well as we could, but when he hit upon that cliché, ‘Why do you write with a pen or on the typewriter? Why don’t you dictate?’ I knew how to answer directly and truthfully. ‘An author doesn’t write with his mind, he writes with his hands.’ Isherwood, immediately struck by the validity of this statement, was also amazed by it. ‘Have you ever said or written that before?’ he demanded. I assured him that the remark was both spontaneous and pristine.

“And true,” L’Engle adds. “I copied it in my journal in January of 1952, and even with all the innovations of simpler tape machines, cassettes, dictaphones, it still holds.” Following L’Engle’s example, I wrote this anecdote in my own journal. I think Goldberg’s point is similar: “Handwriting is more connected to the movement of the heart.”

---

In the midst of a recent sleepless night, I wrote—by hand—a manifesto of sorts. And so I offer below my pledge, “Why I Plan to Write by Hand,” for anyone who wishes to be a writer, not just someone who writes.

1) The greats do it—and they are the greats, after all. Maybe they’re all off their rockers, and wrong, but the burden of proof is probably on me.

2) Writing on a computer isn’t really writing. It’s more like . . . editing your thoughts as you put them down. Writing by hand is primal, visceral. The link between the mind and the hand is better mediated by the pen than by a machine. (Though perhaps the pen is a machine in a manner of speaking.)

3) The computer tempts you to edit as you go, and to self-police. It makes these things not only easy but attractive, even alluring. This can be fatal, for a perfectionist, over-thinker, or self-editor, all of which are modes that plague most writers. The pen is loud enough to drown out the inner critic; the keys are not.

4) The written word looks beautiful on paper. On the computer, it looks accusatory, and starts saying things like, “Who cares?” and “Fix me right now!” Writing on paper looks like something that deserves to exist for its own sake.

5) I like being able to see my own words in front of me on a physical piece of paper when I’m done writing. Printing out type doesn’t have the same effect. It feels too transitory and too laborious.

6) Writing by hand loosens the gears of the mind—and my mind is usually very dry and rusty. It needs all the help it can get.

7) Human life already involves too much time staring at screens.

8) Writing by hand removes the high barrier to entry and second-guessing that comes when you face a Word document. On paper, I feel more free to say whatever I want. Who cares what it becomes? It is something right now. Turning the written word into something more than what I have to offer right now on the page is a problem for the me of another moment to wrestle with. My words don’t have to prove their worth before they’ve even left my mind.

9) I reject the idea that writing is primarily a tool, an instrument to get to you to some other end. Writing by hand reclaims writing as a valuable act in itself. Writing is an act, not a product. Being a writer is a way of looking at and living in the world; it’s not a badge you get for having produced a written document. Lots of people can and do write. Far fewer are writers.

10) Many writers write without writing. The computer can entice you into putting words down on the page without thinking, aiming more for a polished finished product that you have in your mind’s eye rather than experiencing the process of thinking as you write. It’s harder to get away with that sort of thing when you write by hand because it’s more taxing to write around not having anything to say. The mind must be fully present.