How often do you write by hand?

Embracing humanity in an increasingly AI world

Have you ever heard of Audrey van der Meer? She’s a Norwegian neuroscientist who runs a brain research lab in Trondheim. She did a really cool study. She recruited 36 university students and put them in caps with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Then she got them to write by hand, and on a keyboard.

When they wrote by hand, their brains lit up like a Christmas tree. And when they typed? There was significantly less brain activity.

I read about her work in this note by Justin Deschamps. It’s totally worth reading if ten thousand, six hundred hearts are any indication. He goes into more depth regarding the study, but I want to use it as a starting point, okay? I want to go where he didn’t.

A few years ago, I saw the movie The Words. Great cast. Bradley Cooper, Zoe Saldaña, Olivia Wilde, Jeremy Irons, Dennis Quaid. It’s about a guy who’s trying to make it as a writer, but he’s not doing well. There’s a scene where he’s standing in the back alley behind a restaurant after his latest work gets rejected and he tells his girlfriend he’s afraid that he’s not who he thought he was, and he’s afraid he might never be.

Then he finds an unpublished manuscript. It’s good. Really good. But it’s not his. He decides to type it out, just to see how the story feels coming through him. Except his girlfriend finds his copy, and thinks he wrote it so she sends it to a publisher.

It’s a great movie — but the practice? The thing he did in copying it out?

That’s real. It used to be taught to people who want to write.

It’s called copywork.

Hunter S. Thompson copied The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and A Farewell to Arms by Hemingway. Said he wanted to know how it felt to write a great novel. What the words would feel like coming through his own fingers. Just like the movie.

Joan Didion also copied Hemingway’s work by hand and said she learned how good sentence structure felt moving through the body. It kind of gives me chills.

Because it’s so real. You know? Anyone who writes has (or will) felt that chill, when a beautiful sentence appears under your fingers and you think wow. I wrote that.

Ray Bradbury said he wrote out selected passages from books that moved him, to feel them coming through his fingers and when I read that it flashed me right back to young me, maybe thirteen, head bent over a notebook copying words I loved.

I hadn’t even heard the phrase copywork. Just wanted to save words that moved me before I took the book back to the library. Years later, I read Writing Down the Bones, and Natalie Goldberg suggests doing exactly what Bradbury did. Write out things that move you, she says. Passages, paragraphs. Entire books if you want to.

According to a neuroscientist who proved it just two years ago, turns out copywork was a super fast and efficient way to light up the brain like a Christmas tree.

Interesting, no?

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A while back I read some piece about becoming a post-literate society or some such, I don’t recall. What I do recall is that it was shouting about some survey that said only 38% of Americans read a book in the last year and it had twenty thousand hearts and of course because don’t we just love to shout how stupid the world is getting?

One of the things it said is that college students today can’t read the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, a book that used to be read by children.

Well Lordy, can I show you something?

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers.

That’s the opening of Bleak House.

I imagine 13 year olds in 1853 knew what Michaelmas was. And Lincoln’s Inn Hall. And chimney pots and horses wearing blinkers. Reading and understanding aren’t the same thing, right? I could see young people today reading that, saying wtf?

And today? We use shorter sentences. In the Victorian era, it was like they were all madly in love with commas and used them to hook entire sentences together.

Now look at this:

Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass. The moon was not quite full, but bright, and it was behind them, so I could see them plain as day, though it was deep night. Lightning bugs flashed against the black canvas. I waited at Miss Watson’s kitchen door, rocked a loose step board with my foot, knew she was going to tell me to fix it tomorrow. I was waiting there for her to give me a pan of corn bread that she made with my Sadie’s recipe. Waiting is a big part of a slave’s life, waiting and waiting to wait some more.

That’s the opening of James, by Percival Everett. It won the Pulitzer last year.

And look at this:

I got up in the wagon and Papa set me beside mama, all of us on the buckboard seat. Hold her hand there, he said to me, like she likes. Sit tight in. Keep her still.

I saw him lean down and rope her ankle to his. I was warm because he made me wear my bonnet, to keep my skin fine and my eyes from crinkling at the corners. In case someday I turned out after all. Talk to her, he said. Tell her she’ll like it where she’s going. You’ll like it mama, I said. A fine place like a castle, built from stone. Tell her about the palm trees, he said.

That’s from Night Watch, by Jayne Anne Phillips. It won the Pulitzer the year before.

Her papa? Isn’t her papa, he’s a bad man. Raped her mama after her daddy went off to war. And now he’s taking her mama to an asylum so he can steal her land.

Writing changes over the years.

We aren’t stupid because we shake our head at Dickens or Shakespeare. We are not post-literate. And that survey screaming that only 38% of Americans even read books anymore? It was wrong. Terribly, horribly wrong. It all came down to wording. They didn’t ask did you read a book. They asked did you read a literature book.

Like Twain said, the difference between the right word and an almost right word.

Pew Research followed with their own survey on reading in America. Last year, 75% of American adults read at least one book. 64% read a paper book. I wrote about it, but my post didn’t get 20,000 hearts. Guess I didn’t push the shock buttons. My bad.

My point is, you like what you like. Good writing is subjective, bad writing less so. Bad writing always makes the same mistakes. How do you learn good writing? Copywork. By writing out passages that moved you. Plus? It lights up your brain.

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There’s a local restaurant on a ridiculously large chunk of land. It’s a big stone building that used to be a bread bakery. White stone and it looks like an old castle. The building is surrounded by the biggest trees in the city. Sat empty for years after the bakery close their doors and when the restaurant bought it, they brought in cranes to hang twinkle lights in those trees. At night, it’s utterly magic.

When I watch the lights twinkling, it reminds me of us. You and me.

Because that’s pretty much how the human brain works.

Here’s a cool thing you might not know. The neurons in our brain look a lot like a tree. They grow branches and then branches on branches. Our brain cells communicate with each other in lights. You can’t even make it up. If you could watch it magnified a hundred times, you’d see tiny lights, called synapses, jumping from branch to branch and if you google “synapses that look like trees” you’ll find a youtube video by New England Biolabs that shows our neurons branching like trees. Communicating.

And that study in Norway? It’s not a new topic.

Audrey van der Meer just compared writing by hand to typing. But a decade before her, researchers at Princeton did a similar study. Two researchers at Princeton tested 327 students across 3 different experiments. They sent them to listen to a lectures by a college professor. Half the students were allowed to take notes on a laptop. The other half had to use a pen and notebook.

Later, they tested the students on what they’d heard in the lectures. No studying. Just take notes, now we’ll quiz you. The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question, bar none. Van der Meer’s study just built on that. Proved that it doesn’t matter what you’re writing. Doesn’t matter if it’s lecture notes or just writing.

Writing by hand lights up the brain like nothing else.

Fact is, it doesn’t matter what you write. Doesn’t matter if it’s writing out something you loved, or writing a journal. It’s the fastest way to light up a writer’s brain. And when your brain lights up, you make connections you didn’t see coming.

Nothing else even comes close and it’s so easy. You know? Just grab a pen and paper. In a world filled with AI and people who can’t tell what’s AI and what’s human, it feels like a very real and simple way to tap into our humanity. I need to do it more often.

What about you, do you write by hand and what do you write? And have you ever done copywork? I’d love to know what you think.

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