I'm thinking that the title of this post might get a lot of hits from people that don't want to know anything about writing . . . Yes, I pulled the old "bait and switch," so sue me. Or, read on, and you might learn something about writing, or at least, why I write the way I write.
You might wonder, from my writer's hideaway post, why I have a composition book and pen resting there on my writing desk, but no computer. In fact, I have no computer down in my writing area at all. And though I will take my tablet with me to stream music, I can't really write on the tablet. Nor would I want to. Truth is, I like to write my short stories and novels by hand, then type them into the computer. In fact, I can't make myself write any other way. Why is that?
First and foremost, I am a kinesthetic and visual learner. I learn with my eyes and my hands. I leer and grope to understand and create. Good thing my writing area is in the basement, away from other humans, huh? Seriously, though, I have to manipulate things with my hands to really get into them. Not that I'm mechanically inclined - I can hardly change the oil on the car. In fact, I don't. But when it comes to understanding something thoroughly, I am at my best when I can get my sight and movement involved. Typing is too mechanical for me. I fidget when I type, and my mind does not readily flow with ideas when I'm stuck at a keyboard. The varied movement of writing with a pen, the feel of the ink flowing from the pen, and the immediacy of seeing handwriting, my handwriting, brings me more fully into the setting and my character's head. Maybe it's the electrical fields in a computer that screw with my mojo, I don't know, but I am much more "intimate," I think is the right word, with my fiction when I write by hand.
This also has something to do with pacing. I can write much faster than I type. And it's easier to move a pen across paper to fix a mistake then it is to hit the backspace key twenty times (as I just did while typing this sentence). And, if I wish, I can write more slowly while still moving. Typing slowly feels stilted and un-natural. Writing slowly feels very natural, especially when I am trying to tease the right words out of my brain on the first draft. Of course, this saves me some editorial pain down the road. Maybe handwriting appeals to my lazy side.
I should probably note here that my handwriting is absolutely terrible. You can see some representative, and reprehensible, examples right here. And, really, that's an improvement over how poorly I used to write. As a child, I was constantly given bad marks for my penmanship (or lack thereof). Obviously, I didn't care much about the chiding. But a few years ago, I decided to try to write more clearly. After looking around for good resources, I found that using the Operina script was best for me, and I've been practicing it for the last couple of years. My handwriting isn't beautiful, by any means, but at least now it's legible to others besides myself, doctors, and madmen.
I also like the portability of pen and notebook. I carry these wherever I go. Have you ever seen that guy pulled off the side of the highway taking notes in a composition book? That's me. You never know when the muse is going to strike, and I've had some of my best ideas and solved some of my stickiest character and plot problems at the weirdest of times. Rather than trust that I'll remember things, I write them down. And you can't do that quickly with an electronic device. Not as quickly as you can with pen and paper.
Finally, there's the benefit of the space of the page. That is, when you write with pen on paper, you are inevitably going to leave some white space out on the margins, at the head of the page, and, likely, at least one line at the bottom. I've found that these are marvelous places to collect ideas when my thoughts go racing ahead of me, as they often do. For example, I'm working on chapter 3 of the novel and I have a realization about a character or a situation that can't go into chapter 3. So I make notes at the top of the page, away from the main text, then circle and star the notes with a big star that gets my attention later. Then, if I've done an outline of upcoming chapters (which I usually don't do until I am at the point that I guess is about halfway done), I can add those notes to the outline. Or, if the outline doesn't exist yet, this is a prompt that maybe it's time to do that outline I've been putting off for so long.
The more I think about it, the more I see that I write by hand, not to make things more difficult on myself, but to enable my natural laziness. It's worked for me, for years. If you sat me down to a computer and said "start writing," I would likely go into a paralytic shock. The keyboard, for me, is a mere tool: utilitarian, but devoid of any soul.
My pens, though, are magic!
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