The Longhand Rant
Writing longhand does not make you a better writer. You may feel as though you can think things through more thoroughly, or that the feeling of scribbling your crayon across the page helps you better tap into the muse, but that is the difference between opinion and universal law.
Last week I attended a reading where the two featured authors slipped into a sidetrack exposition on the virtues of writing longhand. They told us how applying pen to paper and writing slowly gives the work a depth that pecking away at a keyboard just can’t provide. The two technophobic old farts also explained how the new generation is in too much of a rush to write these days. I was told that we don’t like to write bridge scenes anymore, and that our work is always rushing towards action and conclusion, never taking the time to slow down and smell the flowers.
One of the authors put it like this:
“It seems that people don’t want to write long anymore, but strangely enough a lot of people still want to read long.”
I think the author is confusing what writers want to do with what the general reading public is looking for. Looking at books on my shelf published in the last five years I see short poppy contemporary literature, sitting next to long and intricately woven narratives. Shorter books are indeed popular, but is this more because a certain demographic chooses to be distracted by myriad other activities instead of reading, or is because writers are just getting lazy with their keyboards? I’ll let you chew on that one for a bit.
While I’m on the rant, I’d also like to mention that Mrs. Longhand’s book barely tipped 200 pages of wide margin and large fonts. Not having read the book, I can’t comment on the writing, but the snippets she read to us gave the impression of a fast moving book that didn’t sound nearly as interesting as the research that went into it. Maybe if she’d used a computer she might have been able to put a few more words on the page before finishing each writing day, and ultimately put a little more flesh on the bones of her story.
This whole writing long hand is The One True Way argument would be a lot more powerful if it wasn’t always pushed on my by people who look like they still own a VCR continuously blinking 12:00.
Write however you damn well want, it’s all just words when it’s rolling off the press.
I would never have written a book if I had to write by hand. It physically hurts my hand to write for long periods of time, even when I was in school and there was no other way to write. (I’m an old fart…okay, not too old, I date to BC…before computers). My daughter is the same way, I can tell. At nine, she can type about 400 words in a half hour–I know this because she did it once in a one hour writing challenge I let her do with me and a friend. She kicked our butts! She has terrible handwriting though, unless she works really hard at it, but she can’t do that for long periods of time. The second most useful class I ever took in highschool was typing. (the first was advanced biology because it allowed me to skip general biology in college. Woo-hoo! Saved me some money.)
Typing still wasn’t useful for me because typewriters were a PIA. Make a mistake, and you have to white out. I made lots of mistakes. It wasn’t until we got our first PC that I began to think about writing a book.
June 3rd, 2010 at 3:20 pmI once read a Tom Robbins interview in which he said he writes everything in longhand because he “likes to watch the ink soak into the woodpulp”. I love that. It was a long time ago so I’m going to butcher this paraphrase, but he went on to say he felt there was something really organic about formulating concepts in his mind and having these pass down through his arm, out the tip of the pen that made him feel more connected to the story.
June 29th, 2010 at 12:07 pmNice blog Mark. I hope you stay just distracted enough from your writing to keep that struggling angst going.
Marty, that’s a fantastic sentiment, and I do agree with Robbins. There are things I enjoy about writing in my notebook and sometimes need to just sit with a pad of paper to scratch my way through a problem in my story.
July 14th, 2010 at 11:04 am