There’s something about writing with your hands.
When I was little and starting out with writing, I noticed immediately how much I preferred the soft, smooth flow of writing with pencil as it compared to writing with a pen. I loved that you could erase what you didn’t like. I loved the nice, deep gray that pencil-writing manifested on the page.
As I got older, I fell pretty hard for Flair pens. (I know I am not alone in this. It feels like anyone who has a favorite pen prefers a Flair.) I bought them at Staples and wrote in my diaries with them. When I look back at my old diaries, I’m struck by how much I write about the pen with which I was writing. “Diary, what do you think about this pen? I love that it is pink,” I would write.
Now I’m grown up and everyone carries tiny computers in their pockets everywhere they go. But there is still something sacred and important about writing with your hands when you can.
Lynda Barry learned, when she was trying to write her novel, that writing things with her hands removed a layer of distance that was omnipresent (and prohibitive) with the computer. As soon as she decided to give hand writing the novel a try, it flowed right out of her fingers. (Here’s Lynda Barry on NPR talking about the gift of doodling for solving problems.)
Julia Cameron, mastermind behind “The Artist’s Way,” recommends everyone write three full pages by hand every day. In this blog post she explains:
When we write by hand, we connect to ourselves. We may get speed and distance when we type, but we get a truer connection — to ourselves and our deepest thoughts — when we actually put pen to page.
I try to write with my hands at least 20 minutes a day. It’s true: your writing is different when you can slow down and watch it curve beneath your palm. You learn things about yourself when you do this. That is worthwhile for all people, not just writers.
There is also a word-by-word-ness that flowers when your hand is doing the work. This doesn’t mean the writing is good. It doesn’t mean that it’s ready to be published. The writing is, simply, its own creature, connected to its animal creator. (That’s you!)
These days I hop on the website JetPens.com once every few months to re-stock my pen supply. I have hundreds and hundreds of pens, each of which I’ve selected based on how it feels in my hand. My favorite is the EnerGel Clena in a non-black, non-blue color (such as camel).
If you’re not a person who writes with their hands, I suggest finding a utensil you love, and a paper you love, and thinking of the writing more like play than work. You might be surprised about what the child inside you will only tell you if you move slowly, with the simplest tools.
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