- LONGHAND—as though referring to a hand of hands, an entity independent of the writer: sleek and lithe, sly, fit with four lengthy fingers and an elegant thumb. Aloof. Not something you’d find beneath a stone.
- Many of us work with, on, and through computers. We might feel we could go our entire lives without composing or revising by hand, and I don’t think we’d be wrong. A computer’s gift is speed and ease—in making minor adjustments, shifting sentences and paragraphs, and radically restructuring large sections. Unless you hunt and peck, or are a stenographer, you’re probably able to type faster than you can longhand. Two hands versus one. And that sound: the soft clickety-clicking, overlapping itself. Sonic progress.
- In the summer before my last year of graduate school, I needed to make some serious headway on my thesis (a novel). Robert Boswell, who I had the great good fortune to study with, said to me, “If it isn’t coming, change something.” He meant process, not product—if you’re spending hours (or days!) spinning your wheels on the same three sentences, go write in a different room. Write at night instead of in the morning. Have tea instead of coffee. Go to a library instead of a coffeeshop. Write first and check your email second. Identify your variables, then shift them. Is this the most useful practical advice I’ve ever heard? Yes.
- When I’m stuck in the worst way, when I’m working so slowly that I begin to contemplate my mortality, the best way for me to “change something” is to print off pages (the whole thing if it’s a short story, fifty pages for a novel). Then I sit down with a pen and a notebook, and I mark those pages up. I write in the margins, I draw arrows, I slash, I scribble, I spill ink. And, perhaps most usefully, I’ll rewrite entire passages longhand in my notebook. Writing longhand slows me down. As paradoxical as it sounds, sometimes, when I’m working slowly, that’s exactly what I need. There’s a different kind of logic to what comes out in longhand. Or to how it comes out. (Process.) It’s not that the sentences get more winding, or lengthier, or fancier (though for some reason this is the assumption—maybe because of associations with older times when letters were common, when prose was supposedly flowery?), it’s just that I find myself freed by the constraints of a different medium: the lined page, the pen in one hand. I’m reminded that it’s okay to tear a passage open and rebuild it.
- Are there pleasures in writing longhand? Ink-smears on the edge of your hand. The tails of g’s and y’s dangling down into lower lines, whacking the foreheads of other words. The sound skin makes against paper when your hand scoots—almost like the breath taken right before you say something that’s just come to you.
Looking at the messy page of what you’ve written. Your style. Thinking: does the way I wrote this say anything about me, about my state, about the work itself?
Joseph Scapellato writes for the awesome blog F O U R F O L D.
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