Write longhand to surprise yourself
Hello, friends!
Felicia and I have just finished watching Station Eleven on HBO Max. Her first viewing, my second. The show rewards the attentive viewer, I think, and Felicia's a more attentive viewer than I am. Things I discovered for the first time, she'd already acknowledged, understood, and catalogued.
I'm writing this on Sunday, March 6. Yesterday I finished the final touches of the first draft of my ghostwriting project. (If you subscribe to the Dark Age letters, I wrote about this project in last week's letter: 🚀The Dark Age: TK CLEVER TITLE).
Finishing a first draft is always a strange thing. You're excited, yes, naturally, but you're also a little queasy about this thing you've made. Is it good? If it isn't, can it become good? When you write The End (if you write The End; I don't), you're the worst person in the world to evaluate the draft. It's too soon. You're too close.
You've done a lot of work and you need a period of time (how much or how little depends on the individual writer) to rest. Your mind and imagination—two things which are related, but not really the same—have to recycle themselves, at least in regard to this one particular work.
That's Stephen King, from his 2000 book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.
How long you let your book rest—sort of like bread dough between kneadings—is entirely up to you, but I think it should be a minimum of six weeks.
This isn't unique advice; King's drawing from years of collective writing experience. Many writers advise sticking a first draft in a drawer, or letting it breathe, or letting it age, before evaluating it, and deciding whether to write a second draft. (Many novels never get past this first-draft stage. I've got a few myself; I barely remember them.)
A rest period is more or less my plan, except for the six weeks duration. I need to hand a draft in by May, and I'll need some time to put the book through a few revisions, so I'm going to give myself a minimum of two weeks, possibly three, before I get back to work.
King's suggestion for the downtime:
My advice is that you take a couple of days off—go fishing, go kayaking, do a jigsaw puzzle—and then go to work on something else. Something shorter, preferably, and something that's a complete change of direction and pace from your newly finished book.
Last night, while everyone else in the house was winding down, I sat in the kitchen with a notebook and a messy pen—readers of the Dark Age letters remember this pen from 🚀The Dark Age: Beautiful, blobby rewrites—and started working on a short story. Something small, with low stakes; a 180° turn from the project I've been working on.
Why a messy pen? Why a pen at all? Why not a fresh document, a new font? (Speaking of new fonts: Writers, you might like Pigeonette, a typeface by Ro Hernández, which I discovered recently, and with which I'm composing this newsletter. I love this font.)
Austin Kleon writes in his newsletter:
One of the biggest things I learned from Lynda (Barry) was that writing extremely slowly with a brush is a way to give your “monkey mind” something to do, freeing up your subconscious to send stuff to your hand that you didn’t even know was there.
Barry herself said:
My goal was to not think about things at all. To dream it out instead, trying very hard not to edit at all as I went. The first draft really took shape when I found that I needed to slow way down and distract myself at the same time so I used a paintbrush and Tuscan red watercolor and painted the manuscript on legal paper, trying to concentrate on the calligraphic aspect of writing rather than trying to craft beautiful sentences. I figured as long as the sentences looked beautiful, the rest would take care of itself.
Alexander Chee, author of The Queen of the Night talks about writing by hand while waiting for proofs of another project:
I wrote in a notebook for an hour each day, and at the end of the month I began typing the handwritten pages up. It was one of the most satisfying writing experiences I’ve ever had — to just write for an hour, by hand, and then to type it up and revise it later. ... I wasn’t ever distracted by font when writing by hand. I wasn’t distracted at all. A paper notebook communicates only with your ideas. And after the pages were handwritten, the pages I was typing up had all my attention. It was easy to ignore social media and email, and the printed pages have no notifications on them. Long ago, I had switched to typing drafts directly into my computer to ‘save time’ but no time is saved if you can’t settle on a decision, or if your screen is constantly flickering with the horrible possibility of connection.
Dame Muriel Spark's process was orderly and direct:
I begin at the beginning. I write my name on the first page. I write my name, and then I write— I write the title, and then I write my name. I turn it over, and I write the title of the book, and I write 'chapter one', and then I write on. And when it's— I leave a space so I can make alterations as I go along, but I don't revise it afterwards. Then it goes to the typist, and she types it, and I revise that, and that's the book. That's finished.
Gregory Maguire, who wrote Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, has lots to say about writing longhand:
The act of writing by hand does several things for a writer. For one thing, for a child to be able to write a single word at all requires first to be able to draw the letters. Drawing is at the core of language, no less so than breathing is at the core of singing. To write a beautiful and captivating word—let’s say, oh, why not, “Oz”—is first to master the art of drawing a circle.
He adds:
Writing by hand, among other things, is onerous and painful. One has to go slowly, to hesitate. The wrist aches. The mind freezes. Pausing to shake the crimps out of the muscles buys the writer a few extra moments to consider the best way to sidle into the next sentence, lasso the next image.
The fluidity available to the expert typist on a keyboard comes at a cost. When words arrive in too much of a rush, they can be ill-considered. They can sound commercial. They can trade product (the precious daily word count) for precision (but have I said what I truly need to say at this point in my narrative?).
The poet Mary Ruefle is annoyed by questions about writing longhand:
I don’t understand why someone would think writing by hand would make correction difficult — you just cross things out! And remember, pencils come equipped with erasers on their ends. I wonder if it has ever occurred to your generation that MIDDLEMARCH was written entirely by hand!
In another interview, she adds:
I write by hand on paper, and then I type the poem on a typewriter and then I pay someone to put it into their computer. If you asked me to email you a poem, I couldn’t, because I’m not hooked up.
Earlier this year, the New York Times ran a story on writing longhand, and two of its own journalists discussed the practice.
Sam Anderson:
“I can’t see the structure; I can’t see the big picture, but I can feel my way through the little parts,” he said. “Then, when I have enough little pieces, I can think about the larger shape.”
The unorthodox, yet clever, beginning of his profile of Kevin Durant in the magazine in June, which spent the first five paragraphs chronicling an asteroid crashing into the Earth 35 million years ago, started that way.
“I don’t surprise myself typing,” he said. “But I do all the time writing by hand.”
And critic A.O. Scott:
“You can’t go hunt around online for things when you don’t have your laptop,” Mr. Scott said. “So there’s something very clean about it, and the prose has more clarity.”
Journalist Clive Thompson, in a video about how your method of writing changes your thinking, discussed the importance of writing by hand. Austin Kleon summarized the lecture:
Handwriting is great for note taking and big picture thinking. So, when you’re at lectures, in meetings, or you’re brainstorming ideas, scribble or doodle in your notebook. (Always carry a pencil.)
Typing is great for producing knowledge for other people, say, writing an article. The faster you type, the better your ideas will be. There’s a thing called transcription fluency, which boils down to: “when your fingers can’t move as fast as your thoughts, your ideas suffer.” If you help people increase their typing speed, their thoughts improve. (Learn to type faster.)
Then Kleon added his own observation:
[S]ometimes, particularly when writing fiction, a writer’s goal is to NOT think faster than the pen.
This morning, before beginning this newsletter, I wrote several more pages in a notebook, continuing the story I began yesterday. I switched between a very saturated brush pen, a temperamental fountain pen, and a penmanship pencil, all of them blunt, fat writing tools that make it hard to write prettily. The brush pen changes how I write; too hard and its synthetic tip will be damaged, too light, and I'll get a cramp from floating too high above the page. The fountain pen often chokes on its own ink, requiring me to stop and clean it, or tap it on the page. The pencil just works, though its barrel of graphite is thick and soft and easily dulled, requiring frequent pauses to resharpen.
I'm writing this short story without an outline, too, but that's a topic for another newsletter.
Thank you, as always, for spending a little time with me at the beginning of the week. I wish you rest and creativity!
✏️Until next time,
Jg
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