Seven quick takes in defense of longhand: 7QT X, seriatim.

omput­er crash­es helped me to regain my nor­mal and native san­i­ty about how to write. A time there was, and ever a good time, when I wrote every­thing by hand and raged, raged against the dying of the light. I wrote every term paper in grad­u­ate school by hand, and by hand revised. It felt nat­ur­al thus; and I retained a record of all my corrections.(Which I would prompt­ly show to my stu­dents as an exam­ple of what revi­sion is.) The visu­al does mat­ter; and the star­tling impact of it is lost when com­par­ing an ear­ly, clean draft with a lat­er, clean draft. I still mar­vel at how the print­er ever deci­phered the hand­writ­ing, with all the elab­o­rate cor­rec­tions, of Charles Dick­ens. (Dick­ens nev­er wrote a clean copy for the print­er. Imag­ine that!)

I.

As for me, I did stop imag­in­ing that. I stopped not long after I switched to writing—and revising—entirely on the com­put­er. I want­ed the ease of revi­sion that a word proces­sor could achieve. I could shuf­fle para­graphs here and there with­out the need to draw—and lat­er follow—elaborate box­es and arrows. I actu­al­ly con­grat­u­lat­ed myself for such inex­cus­able slop­pi­ness. It looked neater; it felt quick­er: Thus I delud­ed myself.

But it is not, in fact, quick­er or eas­i­er when you lose two hours’ work to a com­put­er crash, or a freeze, or a pow­er surge, and have to recon­struct those beau­ti­ful sen­tences (for they are beau­ti­ful, in the ide­al­is­tic mem­o­ry of for­got­ten words) cold. No mat­ter how many times one jus­ti­fies the risk by appeal­ing to back­ups, and back­ups of back­ups, hav­ing a hand­writ­ten copy is the only real sure­ty against e‑Alexandria.

But what about fire? you say. Or theft? These nev­er have hap­pened. But a crash, a freeze, a pow­er surge? I should have a pen­ny.

II.

Com­put­ers, in my expe­ri­ence, dis­tract from the writ­ing more often than they aid. Even with the ease of revi­sion and the speed of get­ting the words down, my atten­tion wan­ders with an aban­don that should be sedat­ed.

Some­one IMs me on Face­book.

The dash­board in Word­Press does some crazy thing; or else I hit an erro­neous key and my for­mat­ting is ruined beyond sane repair.

The com­put­er dings and whis­tles. Or, it harass­es me with the breath­less mes­sage that an update is now avail­able. Do I want to update now or be remind­ed again in five sec­onds?

What was I try­ing to write?

Thus these things dis­tract my train from think­ing and me from the task at hand: seek­ing the pith of an idea. No such dis­trac­tions exist when writ­ing long­hand. I turn the com­put­er off; I aban­don Face­book to the four winds, I save my fights with Word­Press for when the post is writ and the think­ing thought.

III.

The vile Dell off, and pen in hand, I can focus on words to the exclu­sion of all else.

And it feels more like writ­ing, to me, when I can have this tac­tile con­nec­tion to a phys­i­cal object. I can hold a pen. I can shake it, tap it onto the page or my head to dredge a thought, or bite it to mull. It feels more like I am writ­ing when I can look at a page and scratch out a line and try a dif­fer­ent set of words; and if that does not work, scratch out and try again. Or, I can write sev­er­al options in the mar­gin. I am, this way, phys­i­cal­ly con­nect­ed to words; they are not out in the cyber-ether, but rather my hand gave them shape. I cre­ate with a lit­tle pres­sure of the whole hand, clasped.

IV.

In my print, or cur­sive, is per­son­al­i­ty. Look at any man­u­script—George Mac­Don­ald or Charles Dick­ens, or Jane Austen, or Lewis Car­roll—and you will see the phys­i­cal­i­ty of the writer. How much would be lost to us if we no longer had those? How much, if Dick­ens looked like Austen looked like Car­roll?

V.

Paper does not per­ish with any­thing like the speed of an e‑file. If I did not have my orig­i­nal hand­writ­ten copies of all the term papers I wrote in grad­u­ate school, I would not be able to retrieve them from the flop­py disks I stored them on. Blogs are ephemer­al, as are back­up files on a serv­er, but my print and my page last. (As do real books.)

E‑space is not supe­ri­or to real space. We still have the orig­i­nal Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence. And the Magna Car­ta. And Greek man­u­scripts of the Bible.

VI.

I do not claim that elec­tron­ic tech­nol­o­gy does not serve a pur­pose. Sure­ly it makes peo­ple’s writ­ing avail­able to a larg­er amount of peo­ple, at speed and at con­ve­nience.

But it can­not replace the process of writ­ing sim­ply because it is a con­ve­nient and ben­e­fi­cial form (in this age) for a fin­ished prod­uct.

VII.

If you write, you may have a dif­fer­ent view than I do, but I have found that my writ­ing is in fact bet­ter when I write long­hand. My style is more flu­id, my sen­tences less abrupt, less chop­py. Per­haps that is because my abil­i­ty to exper­i­ment with sen­tence struc­ture in the mar­gins, and my phys­i­cal con­nec­tion to the words I write, and the few­er dis­trac­tions, all increase my atten­tive­ness to the rhythm of sen­tences and para­graphs. Per­haps I get lost more in the flow of words than I do when trenched in the divid­ed mul­ti­tasks of a com­put­er.

Give me paper until my fin­gers fall off and my blood stops and all the world turns dark.

 

Read more of this week’s quick takes at Con­ver­sion Diary here.