I'm afraid that even I could not read what I had written if I wrote longhand. I understand that (even if illegible) such an exercise is good for memorizing.
I am laughing, Charles. I find that I slow down when I'm writing something I want to be able to read. It helps some. And if I'm just blowing off steam, I probably don't want to re-read it anyway lol
I am with you all the way on this one, Charles. Back in the 50's it was drummed into us that writing slowly and clearly was the best way to memorise and learn. I still do....
In elementary school (and drafting class in Junior High), I got As for my penmanship. But, as I needed to write faster and faster, it became worse and worse.
My history says that I CAN do better but I'd rather type. My psychology professor in college, when handing back a test, sent me to a back room to type my paper. It also weighed against me during Foreign Service interviews.
I love to write longhand with a flourish for pleasure, like on a birthday card to a loved one, but my handwriting is usually notes on material I need to remember (when editing books, or in a study course) and then it is all small lower case and scrawled! When taking board meeting minutes I hand wrote, the younger girls touch typed on tablets! I am glad to know there is light on the inside of my skull! :)
Right? Now when I run chicken scratch across paper, at least I know it's lighting up my brain. It's legible if I slow down but then my thoughts race ahead of my hand
I have a ton of half-filled notebooks, but lately I've been doing it all on my laptop or phone. It makes it easier to store and to search through, but you've convinced me that I need to go back to writing by hand, at least sometimes.
I've done small amounts of copywork, but I've never made the time to do it seriously. Perhaps I will now.
If I buy myself a really nice notebook, I feel I have to write only deep, worthwhile thoughts in it. It's less intimidating if I take a deep breath and scribble all over the first page, though. There. It's no longer pristine. I can write my half-formed, groping-towards-something sorta-kinda ideas now.
I read that study. I heard that some schools are bringing back cursive writing. I had penmanship in my early school years. I write in my commonplace book in longhand. Many of my stories are handwritten and then typed out afterward. I love the feeling of the looping of my letters and that my handwriting is distinctive to me. Yes, bring back cursive writing if only to light up the brains of our children. Thank you.
Omg, Martha, I read a story once about one of those guys who does professional handwriting analysis and gets called into court to determine if writing is forgery or not. He told a story of a waitress he knew that struggled a lot. He told her to pay attention when she writes and always cross the t close to the top, not down at the bottom like she does. He said that small change affected her. She became more self confident. Whether it's a true story or not, it's a fascinating topic, isn't it?
I have changed my (cursive) handwriting multiple times through out the years, often consciously. When looking back at old journals, I sometimes think I might return to an old flourish. For the most part, I like my currently handwriting style, so it'll stay for the time being. I bet handwriting experts'd have fun with that.
An artist can change their style. So do you in your handwriting. Never thought about it. Looking at my mother’s and my sister closest to me, there are distinct differences and similarities in our handwriting. Analysts might have a field day here.
I wrote my first novels by hand. I felt so inside the story, as if I was actually touching it. But the transferring it to a document got tiresome. Now I will write by hand if there's a scene that requires a jolt of emotion. I will note that when I switched to typing, it took a while before I could just float my words onto the page without thinking about the typing.
Omg, Terri, how amazing to write a novel by hand. A friend of mine does that, too. You could always look at the speech to text converters and see if there's one that doesn't feed what you read into AI
I just read this little post about a linotypist: "Before my father sat at the linotype’s clacking keyboard casting whole lines in molten metal, he composed by hand. The process didn’t change much after Gutenberg’s invention of the movable type press in the 1400s. I saw how small a single “sort” of type was, and couldn’t imagine my dad’s big hands reaching into wooden cases, but the edges of the tiny compartments were worn dark by fingers pulling each letter and symbol, and space, quad, or lead out one at a time. He would have been transcribing mentally from handwritten copy or typewritten pages, setting type backwards and upside down, building lines into a composing stick until he judged it would justify. The transposing eye of a compositor or linotype operator made margins flush, decided on hyphenation, and corrected orphan words before software did. (The whole article is here: https://opensecretsmagazine.com/p/inherited-love-of-books-printer-father-daughter?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=4geq3&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email)
❤️Deer Linda a bit like Alice I so wish the world would understand how removed we get to… experiencing reality whe 1. The stale deathness of text isn’t moving the reader into the inner realm of thinking on all sensorial motors and 2. The minimalisation of engagement into operating the body while telling a story the loss of connection to the groundedness of having to attach every single phonetic rhythmicality what it is doing to our ability to empathise with ”the other”. It is society stuck in a deceitful subjective landscape of meager grounds and bound to aim for the collapse of thirsting humans.
Greetings the Idiot✨❤️
PS the MICE sends their love: ”we’re the army of encaged joy that set our minds on the quest of reclaiming thinking.”❤️🐭🐭🐭
❤️Help needed as artistic practice is being crushed under the monolith of inscribed falsehood and we were always there to provide the meadows to the hearts lost seeking the paths back into life.❤️🐭🐭🐭
Thinking I was slow and old-fashioned, I tried to shift from writing to typing when creating. While it had its advantages, I still vastly prefer to initially write a piece with paper and pen. Some pages end up looking like a war zone of marked out corrections and competing ideas, but I can use those later to help me reunderstand what I was thinking and why. Besides, I feel complete a pen in my hand.
̶I̶ ̶d̶o̶ ̶l̶i̶k̶e̶ ̷e̷r̷,̷ ̷I̷ ̷e̷n̷j̷o̷y̷ I love when the author lifts me with the emotion they're imparting like a bird of prey takes a clam and drops it from on high onto rocks to open it up. When I end up with a feeling that I've been body slammed with that prosaic idea, then that writer has truly written directly to my emotions.
PS I guess strikethrough text really depends on the font on a webpage. It changes from one to the next.
I used to be a primary school teacher and in the early days of my career when British schools still allowed children to self express, I had a display wall in the classroom filled with examples of the writing process. Postcards I found of famous writers' notebooks filled with crossings out, notes in the margin & teeny weeny re-written sentences squeezed over the orginial, now crossed out, sentences. I hoped that by showing my classes of 9-11 year old that writing is a messy process it would free them from the need to do it neatly. Your comment made me think of my display!
Sadly the education system has turned a complete 180, neatness is now a requirement in Literacy exercise books 😔. What does that do to the brain?
How discouraging it must be for children to believe that their first tries must be perfectly neat. That seems like a setup for failure. In my experience, the creative process can get rather messy. How inspiring your writing process display must have been! I wish I could have seen it.
I am the same in a way but more often I type because I can do the revision and changes quicker. I really really want to hand write more but I stress about how I'll fit in all the changes, maybe I just need to accept the mess
I still do some writing longhand. I make lists of books I want to check out from the library and deadline dates for writing projects I want to contribute to.
I have also written many of the first drafts of my stories in longhand, in order to hopefully reduce the amount of typing time I would have to do by getting the story "right" first. And I used to do a lot of worldbuilding for my projects that way as well- I haven't done that as much lately, but I want to get back to it.
I write everyday by hand with a fountain pen. I journal you see. For me it is not only the words I record but the ritual of it. Not only do I normally use a fountain pen rather than a ball point, pencil, or one of the many new varieties of ink pens, but I set my words down on the heavy pages of a large A4 suede bound journal.
I clear my desk, push back my laptop and create space. Space for my thoughts to breath and come to life. The journal is placed in the centre of my brown leather covered desk, squared up parallel to the edge. I open it to an empty page and press my fingers firmly along the spine to make the pages sit down better. With my pen poised, I take a deep breath. This inspiration is important. It is the key in the lock. Insert, turn unlock. Breath in, hold, breath out, and with that I can begin.
The beginning, as just described, is always the same. Though it may appear to your eye as habit, it is more. Every part of every action is deliberate and carried out calmly. Haste has no place here. The journals, for I now have completed many, are full of words no-one will ever see and yet I still craft them as carefully as I can. I’m not sure why I do that.
I read your description of a brain lit up when writing manually and it resonated with me and how it feels to do so. I am writing this on a phone. It is not the same experience. The tip of my finger is sore. I am mildly irritated by having to correct continually as I constantly make typing mistakes. When I journal, curiously, I make none or very few at any rate.
So thank you for your thoughtful article. It was interesting to read and relate to my own experience.
Thank you Linda. Interesting. I’ve tried copying by hand but it takes so long. So maybe set a timer for half hour and just copy.? And do morning pages. And do my Duolingo. And cook and clean. So many excuses I am making. Yet I know there is time for everything of I stop the grumbles and Just do it Baby. Thank you for putting it out there
This is a super hellpful tip, but unfortunately I need to type here. Thank you. I will share your article with Anne Lamott's A Writing Room, a bunch of writers. Linda, I participate in creative movement classes and have been exploring for decades doing movement while speaking, which appears to short-circuit the more logical mind and bring out a more essential expression. I'm not sure how many studies have been done about this, but I think tapping the body's wisdom and integration with such movement and speaking is also an excellent way to light up - though I'm not sure what parts of the brain and body enliven.
Very interesting. I have written a series of children's books and I promote them by speaking to schools, clubs, etc. about them. I'm usually invited to sit, but I always stand and move about the room (and audience) while I speak. I never thought about it helping me speak, but it makes a lot of sense. I think the body movement helps trigger the words I want to say.
Thanks for this fascinating information which can transform into helpful practices for those of us who write. I will share it with Anne Lamott's A Writing Room writers. I also suspect a wonderful light experience in the brain can happen when doing movement and speaking at the same time. I think it can bring out essential integration that "short-circuits" the logical mind. I've been exploring using this body speech process for decades. I am working currently with transcribing the more "primal" expression that comes from this process to instill it into my writing.
Another worthy topic, Linda! I'd always felt that hand-to-pen-to-paper was the closest thing to writing in blood, which was my goal. I've binders with sets of five or so composition books that comprised my first drafts. Now I write on the computer, with a structural spreadsheet open for reference, but in seminars, readings and lectures I only take notes by hand. That way it registers.
I'm afraid that even I could not read what I had written if I wrote longhand. I understand that (even if illegible) such an exercise is good for memorizing.
I am laughing, Charles. I find that I slow down when I'm writing something I want to be able to read. It helps some. And if I'm just blowing off steam, I probably don't want to re-read it anyway lol
Apart from notes, Linda, Everything I create, I write by hand before I type it up. I figure it's worth the time....
I am with you all the way on this one, Charles. Back in the 50's it was drummed into us that writing slowly and clearly was the best way to memorise and learn. I still do....
I love that, Maurice. I still do, too
When I haven't written by hand for a while, my handwriting is terrible. but if I keep writing, it improves quite quickly.
In elementary school (and drafting class in Junior High), I got As for my penmanship. But, as I needed to write faster and faster, it became worse and worse.
My history says that I CAN do better but I'd rather type. My psychology professor in college, when handing back a test, sent me to a back room to type my paper. It also weighed against me during Foreign Service interviews.
Same! Take a break and it's right back to chicken scratch, as my teachers called it
That’s really encouraging! I’m going to write more by hand, and practice. It’s now a scrawl whereas it used to be attractively legible
Yup--like the great insights I dream in the middle of the night, post in my bedside notebook, and can't decipher in the morning...
This is inspiring me to post my handwritten work. Really enjoyed reading this with my morning coffee.
Oh Maddie, I'd so love to see those!
I love to write longhand with a flourish for pleasure, like on a birthday card to a loved one, but my handwriting is usually notes on material I need to remember (when editing books, or in a study course) and then it is all small lower case and scrawled! When taking board meeting minutes I hand wrote, the younger girls touch typed on tablets! I am glad to know there is light on the inside of my skull! :)
Right? Now when I run chicken scratch across paper, at least I know it's lighting up my brain. It's legible if I slow down but then my thoughts race ahead of my hand
Yes, the "old hand can´t catch up" trick!!
I have a ton of half-filled notebooks, but lately I've been doing it all on my laptop or phone. It makes it easier to store and to search through, but you've convinced me that I need to go back to writing by hand, at least sometimes.
I've done small amounts of copywork, but I've never made the time to do it seriously. Perhaps I will now.
I was thinking the same, Sheila. Might get myself a pretty notebook for copywork like I used to when I was a kid
If I buy myself a really nice notebook, I feel I have to write only deep, worthwhile thoughts in it. It's less intimidating if I take a deep breath and scribble all over the first page, though. There. It's no longer pristine. I can write my half-formed, groping-towards-something sorta-kinda ideas now.
I think a shopping list would also work.
Love it! Lots of writers use yellow legal pads. Nothing fancy about those!
I read that study. I heard that some schools are bringing back cursive writing. I had penmanship in my early school years. I write in my commonplace book in longhand. Many of my stories are handwritten and then typed out afterward. I love the feeling of the looping of my letters and that my handwriting is distinctive to me. Yes, bring back cursive writing if only to light up the brains of our children. Thank you.
My sister has beautiful looping handwriting and I so wish I did. Mine is more like chicken scratching but I do it all the same
I wonder. Can we change our cursive writing? I wonder what that would do? Hmmm.
Omg, Martha, I read a story once about one of those guys who does professional handwriting analysis and gets called into court to determine if writing is forgery or not. He told a story of a waitress he knew that struggled a lot. He told her to pay attention when she writes and always cross the t close to the top, not down at the bottom like she does. He said that small change affected her. She became more self confident. Whether it's a true story or not, it's a fascinating topic, isn't it?
Another form of self care? Paying attention to the details even in your handwriting.
I have changed my (cursive) handwriting multiple times through out the years, often consciously. When looking back at old journals, I sometimes think I might return to an old flourish. For the most part, I like my currently handwriting style, so it'll stay for the time being. I bet handwriting experts'd have fun with that.
An artist can change their style. So do you in your handwriting. Never thought about it. Looking at my mother’s and my sister closest to me, there are distinct differences and similarities in our handwriting. Analysts might have a field day here.
I wrote my first novels by hand. I felt so inside the story, as if I was actually touching it. But the transferring it to a document got tiresome. Now I will write by hand if there's a scene that requires a jolt of emotion. I will note that when I switched to typing, it took a while before I could just float my words onto the page without thinking about the typing.
Omg, Terri, how amazing to write a novel by hand. A friend of mine does that, too. You could always look at the speech to text converters and see if there's one that doesn't feed what you read into AI
Great idea. (AI - boo, hiss although I'll admit I've used it to look answers to technical problems around the house.)
I just read this little post about a linotypist: "Before my father sat at the linotype’s clacking keyboard casting whole lines in molten metal, he composed by hand. The process didn’t change much after Gutenberg’s invention of the movable type press in the 1400s. I saw how small a single “sort” of type was, and couldn’t imagine my dad’s big hands reaching into wooden cases, but the edges of the tiny compartments were worn dark by fingers pulling each letter and symbol, and space, quad, or lead out one at a time. He would have been transcribing mentally from handwritten copy or typewritten pages, setting type backwards and upside down, building lines into a composing stick until he judged it would justify. The transposing eye of a compositor or linotype operator made margins flush, decided on hyphenation, and corrected orphan words before software did. (The whole article is here: https://opensecretsmagazine.com/p/inherited-love-of-books-printer-father-daughter?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=4geq3&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email)
❤️Deer Linda a bit like Alice I so wish the world would understand how removed we get to… experiencing reality whe 1. The stale deathness of text isn’t moving the reader into the inner realm of thinking on all sensorial motors and 2. The minimalisation of engagement into operating the body while telling a story the loss of connection to the groundedness of having to attach every single phonetic rhythmicality what it is doing to our ability to empathise with ”the other”. It is society stuck in a deceitful subjective landscape of meager grounds and bound to aim for the collapse of thirsting humans.
Greetings the Idiot✨❤️
PS the MICE sends their love: ”we’re the army of encaged joy that set our minds on the quest of reclaiming thinking.”❤️🐭🐭🐭
❤️Help needed as artistic practice is being crushed under the monolith of inscribed falsehood and we were always there to provide the meadows to the hearts lost seeking the paths back into life.❤️🐭🐭🐭
Thinking I was slow and old-fashioned, I tried to shift from writing to typing when creating. While it had its advantages, I still vastly prefer to initially write a piece with paper and pen. Some pages end up looking like a war zone of marked out corrections and competing ideas, but I can use those later to help me reunderstand what I was thinking and why. Besides, I feel complete a pen in my hand.
Donna I love that. I also feel complete with a pen in my hand. And it's a mess, but it still has a feeling that typing doesn't
̶I̶ ̶d̶o̶ ̶l̶i̶k̶e̶ ̷e̷r̷,̷ ̷I̷ ̷e̷n̷j̷o̷y̷ I love when the author lifts me with the emotion they're imparting like a bird of prey takes a clam and drops it from on high onto rocks to open it up. When I end up with a feeling that I've been body slammed with that prosaic idea, then that writer has truly written directly to my emotions.
PS I guess strikethrough text really depends on the font on a webpage. It changes from one to the next.
I used to be a primary school teacher and in the early days of my career when British schools still allowed children to self express, I had a display wall in the classroom filled with examples of the writing process. Postcards I found of famous writers' notebooks filled with crossings out, notes in the margin & teeny weeny re-written sentences squeezed over the orginial, now crossed out, sentences. I hoped that by showing my classes of 9-11 year old that writing is a messy process it would free them from the need to do it neatly. Your comment made me think of my display!
Sadly the education system has turned a complete 180, neatness is now a requirement in Literacy exercise books 😔. What does that do to the brain?
How discouraging it must be for children to believe that their first tries must be perfectly neat. That seems like a setup for failure. In my experience, the creative process can get rather messy. How inspiring your writing process display must have been! I wish I could have seen it.
I am the same in a way but more often I type because I can do the revision and changes quicker. I really really want to hand write more but I stress about how I'll fit in all the changes, maybe I just need to accept the mess
How aften? I write by hand when 'ALL' the devices are being recharged.
That's actually kind of funny. The world we live in, lol
I still do some writing longhand. I make lists of books I want to check out from the library and deadline dates for writing projects I want to contribute to.
I have also written many of the first drafts of my stories in longhand, in order to hopefully reduce the amount of typing time I would have to do by getting the story "right" first. And I used to do a lot of worldbuilding for my projects that way as well- I haven't done that as much lately, but I want to get back to it.
I write everyday by hand with a fountain pen. I journal you see. For me it is not only the words I record but the ritual of it. Not only do I normally use a fountain pen rather than a ball point, pencil, or one of the many new varieties of ink pens, but I set my words down on the heavy pages of a large A4 suede bound journal.
I clear my desk, push back my laptop and create space. Space for my thoughts to breath and come to life. The journal is placed in the centre of my brown leather covered desk, squared up parallel to the edge. I open it to an empty page and press my fingers firmly along the spine to make the pages sit down better. With my pen poised, I take a deep breath. This inspiration is important. It is the key in the lock. Insert, turn unlock. Breath in, hold, breath out, and with that I can begin.
The beginning, as just described, is always the same. Though it may appear to your eye as habit, it is more. Every part of every action is deliberate and carried out calmly. Haste has no place here. The journals, for I now have completed many, are full of words no-one will ever see and yet I still craft them as carefully as I can. I’m not sure why I do that.
I read your description of a brain lit up when writing manually and it resonated with me and how it feels to do so. I am writing this on a phone. It is not the same experience. The tip of my finger is sore. I am mildly irritated by having to correct continually as I constantly make typing mistakes. When I journal, curiously, I make none or very few at any rate.
So thank you for your thoughtful article. It was interesting to read and relate to my own experience.
Thank you Linda. Interesting. I’ve tried copying by hand but it takes so long. So maybe set a timer for half hour and just copy.? And do morning pages. And do my Duolingo. And cook and clean. So many excuses I am making. Yet I know there is time for everything of I stop the grumbles and Just do it Baby. Thank you for putting it out there
I have never tried this, but I will and will report back.
This is a super hellpful tip, but unfortunately I need to type here. Thank you. I will share your article with Anne Lamott's A Writing Room, a bunch of writers. Linda, I participate in creative movement classes and have been exploring for decades doing movement while speaking, which appears to short-circuit the more logical mind and bring out a more essential expression. I'm not sure how many studies have been done about this, but I think tapping the body's wisdom and integration with such movement and speaking is also an excellent way to light up - though I'm not sure what parts of the brain and body enliven.
Very interesting. I have written a series of children's books and I promote them by speaking to schools, clubs, etc. about them. I'm usually invited to sit, but I always stand and move about the room (and audience) while I speak. I never thought about it helping me speak, but it makes a lot of sense. I think the body movement helps trigger the words I want to say.
Thanks for this fascinating information which can transform into helpful practices for those of us who write. I will share it with Anne Lamott's A Writing Room writers. I also suspect a wonderful light experience in the brain can happen when doing movement and speaking at the same time. I think it can bring out essential integration that "short-circuits" the logical mind. I've been exploring using this body speech process for decades. I am working currently with transcribing the more "primal" expression that comes from this process to instill it into my writing.
Another worthy topic, Linda! I'd always felt that hand-to-pen-to-paper was the closest thing to writing in blood, which was my goal. I've binders with sets of five or so composition books that comprised my first drafts. Now I write on the computer, with a structural spreadsheet open for reference, but in seminars, readings and lectures I only take notes by hand. That way it registers.