Photo by Evan J
By Evan J
Begin with conflict and your reader will be hooked. I believe in this writing concept and therefore, to begin my blogging residency for Cloud Lake Literary, I begin with a fight. It’s a battle as old as the keyboard. It’s the question of a writer’s preference: handwriting or typing?
This debate contains some science. The act of handwriting, of using a pen to place text on a page, requires multiple brain functions. The brain must manage grip, align your body, and respond to the texture of pen and paper. It must remember how to create letters and then, as with typing, it must translate ideas into lines of readable language. While these layers of mental multi-tasking might feel like unneeded extra stress and you might be already be shuffling towards Team Keyboard just wait a sec. It’s not stress. It’s brain exercise. And like the body, exercise makes the brain stronger. It makes the brain more nimble and therefore more fit to access memories, facts, and skills.
In fact, science goes a step further. Many studies have shown how any exercise (of the body or brain) improves the brain’s creative capacity. The brain’s creative functioning peaks during and immediately after physical exercise. So take your hand for a walk across the page whenever possible. Better yet, take your legs for a walk and then put pen to paper. I promise that your sacrifice of time will be rewarded with better writing quality. Ondaatje still handwrites his novels three times before they ever meet a keyboard (I’ve regrettably never asked him how often he takes a stroll).
However, as much as science backs the connection between creativity and the pen, many of us just don’t have enough time in a day to be adding any extra steps. If your work is for public readership, you will always (eventually) have to type it up. There is not a publisher, a magazine, or a journal alive today that will accept your handwritten submission (unless you are a calligraphy poet like H. Masud Taj, in which case the keyboard is replaced by nib and ink). So when you already have a nine-to-five job, a family to care for, and/or more looming writing deadlines than you can shake a stick at it’s understandable to place handwritten first drafts on the chopping block.
Furthermore, computers offer editing abilities that handwriting just can’t mimic. As a poet, my creations are always evolving. Like a de Kooning painting, my poems are often reworked until they no longer resemble the original poem in any way - and I love this process. I love how quickly I can make a monstrous change and then dislike the change and revert back. In every version, the poem on the screen looks finished and I can assess it without the editing marks of past versions. It’s a process only possible with a keyboard and computer.
So which is it for you? Handwriting or typing?