Writing Longhand
While responding to a post written by
mia_in_chains in one of my communities, I started thinking about why I write longhand.
For years I've struggled with finishing things on the computer. With the internet right there and my lovely ADD, finishing more than a few paragraphs becomes damn near impossible.
In high school I wrote voluminously, but I only used the computer for school-related projects. We didn't even have the Internet until I turned 17 (I'm almost 30 - when I was in high school, we used the library for research) and I didn't consider the computer much of an entertainment source.
I started writing fiction when I was 12, and I wrote everything longhand. I especially loved those little spiral-bound notebooks, although I used full-sized ones as well. If I wrote in my room, I listened to music. I also wrote in front of the television set and while taking notes in class. Somehow, an auditory distraction kept me focused. I know this is a false analogy, but it seemed like the outer part of my brain listened to the teacher talking or the soundtrack, while the core of my brain stayed locked on the story. If I tried to write in a silent environment, I got distracted by too many little things: making my handwriting look perfect, thinking about other stories to write, wondering about dinner - anything but the work at hand.
When I really got into the Internet, my writing tapered way off. It picked back up again once I discovered fanfiction. I wrote a lot and even finished a few things, but the desire to stay canon limited me. I listened to music while I typed, but it didn't feel them same or flow the same as when I worked in a notebook.
I started to get bored with my writing. I reworked the same passages over and over again. Really the only thing that kept my nose to the grindstone was fan feedback. I loved it when I was in high school, and I loved it as a fanfic writer. I've always over-identified with my writing; if people hated my work, it felt like they were criticizing me. Awesome writing meant an awesome me. I realize now that this is a stupid attitude to have. A few of my friends can't write to save their lives, but that doesn't mean that I hate them as people just because they don't know how to use the words there, their, and they're.
I don't think I realized until recently what those little notebooks meant to me. They meant escape. They meant carrying a world in my pocket, one that belonged to me where I had some semblance of control. By letting "out" the things in my head, they felt less frightening and more manageable. All throughout boot camp, I carried a little notebook with me. I wasn't supposed to have it - not part of the uniform regulations. I carried it in my sock nearly every day of the nine weeks I trained there. At night, I arranged my blankets so that no one could see me writing by the faint light that came in through the door of the compartment. When I got too tired to continue, I hid the notebook in my underwear (we weren't allowed to wear socks to bed) and transferred it back to my socks in the bathroom the next morning. That dumb little notebook, full of fanfiction, saved my sanity in basic. It lowered my stress level and gave me control over a tiny aspect of my world. I probably wouldn't have gotten so weird in A school if I'd kept writing, but I let myself get distracted by obsessive studying punctuated by partying way too much.
I went back to writing once I got to my first duty station, but for the five years I was in the military, I did almost all of my work on the computer and I finished very little. I tended to work and rework sentences and phrases for hours at a time, never seeing a piece through to the end. I never thought it was the format I was using to write, as opposed to me or my love of creating worlds. It seems absurd that with the pages and pages I wrote longhand and the sheer amount of fanfiction I pumped out that I was so proud of a 37 page novella. But it was almost the only thing I completed over the course of those five years.
I finally got to the point about a year ago where I could hardly be bothered to write at all. It just seemed like too much work to open a document and work beyond a paragraph or two. I'm not sure if this attitude arose from depression or if I was depressed because I wasn't writing. I still had ideas all the time, but my mind was like a clogged drain. I couldn't get the stories out so they just sat there, stinking and growing mold.
Back in college, I started carrying a little notebook with me again, not for writing fiction but so I could write down homework assignments and take general notes to guide me through life. This is around the time that I really recognized that something was wrong with me. I never paid enough attention to myself before, I suppose, and over the course of my life I was far too proud to even think that something might be "off." I just knew that I struggled with a lot of things that other people took for granted. I always felt like there was some vast school of knowledge about how to live that was imparted to other people, but somehow I missed the class. There were a lot of other weird, crazy things I thought, but if I start thinking about it now, I'll get distracted and never finish this entry.
At any rate, bored out of my mind in one class or another, I opened that little notebook and started writing. I don't remember what I wrote, if it was a chapter for a half-remembered novel or a short story, but I wrote the entire class period when I wasn't taking notes. I got so interested in what I was writing that I wrote in the class after that one, and the class after that. I never worked outside class - not on breaks or at home - but scrawling away kept me sane sometimes. I've always been bored in school, but college just kills me. It's all the boring crap I learned in high school, and now I have to relearn it. That may change once I start taking classes related to my major, but I don't even want to do that. I love learning, but not on their terms. Next semester should be my last semester of general education, and I'm so sick of it that I could scream.
At any rate, the pattern of writing between classes became set. I started transferring from my notebook to a computer document, although I didn't notice the implications of the transition.
But again, the world got in the way of me writing. I got distracted by a pair of truly awful "friends" and all their drama. Just like I get lazy with exercise, I got lazy with writing. I stopped dragging around that notebook, stopped editing my documents on the computer. Every now and then I pulled up a short story or a half-finished book and read it (often surprised by how good it was), but not much more than that.
All the while, I got more and more depressed and the world seemed more hostile. I was also involved in a scene that included a lot of magical thinking and personal myth-making, and that got me into hot water. I wanted to write, but I felt like I had to write about what I "knew." The parameters of the pseudo-reality we created as a group became the skeleton on which to hang my new "fanfiction." I didn't write for the group, per se, but I tried to mutate all my plots and characters to reflect their agenda so that what I wrote was "true." It wasn't real creativity; it was using something that wasn't organic to my brain and trying to implant it there.
Luckily, that scene and I went our separate ways. At the time though, it seemed really tragic and once again, depression sucked out my desire to write. Later, even worse, I had the desire but not the motivation.
I'm retaking intermediate algebra right now, and I hate it with a burning passion. It's not so much the "never going to use this" whine as it is that I simply don't enjoy doing math. Quadratic equations and radical expression will in no way impact my future career, and being forced to do them is kind of outrageous. If college actually prepared us for reality, the required math class would include financial planning, budgeting, investing, that kind of thing. It's as much bullshit as some of the English classes I've taken. Instead of a constructive class on learning to write for the sake of expressing oneself clearly, it's shit like "write a poem then analyze the poetry process." I know that all practice is good practice, but it's so impractical. I wish there was a major called "reality."
Anyway, while screwing around with multiplying fractions or some other nonsense, I pulled a spare notebook out of my backpack and started writing. My brain felt ready to melt from all the numbers, and I needed to do something creative. In the past, I'd wanted to beg my teachers to let me knit or crochet while they lectured - I don't think I could possibly explain to anyone without ADD how goddamn hard it is to sit and listen to a lecture. I'm not hyperactive, but I can't focus to save my life if I'm not fascinated by the subject. 16 - 18 weeks is too long for me to be fascinated by almost anything. In order to pay attention, I have to split my attention. I know it's not as much as I'd get from staying locked on to the lecture exclusively, but if I try to do that, I'll miss at least half the lecture because my mind will just go away. We'll be talking about Hume, and when I tune in again, we're talking about Kant. I missed everything in between, and now I'll have to read it to catch up.
So writing, which looks so handily like taking notes, is the perfect way to soft focus enough to get through the lectures.
Once again, my output is slightly boggling, especially now that my stories are interesting again. I wrote 13 pages longhand the other day. I'm working completely unfettered, not worrying about any agenda, letting my characters take the lead and find their own way to the conclusion. The joy's come back to writing, something I missed for a long time, and with it, the creativity.
I'm also not depressed. Yes, I have my sad and enraged days, but I can pinpoint the reason for my moods now. It's not just a gray fog surrounding me for no reason for weeks on end. Channeling my dark parts into my writing is the best therapy in the world, especially when my fiancé says it's good work.
As I started responding to the post from the community member above, I realized though that I had a lot to say about why writing longhand works better for me, but her post wasn't a good place to say that. I think writing longhand works for me because it's like a direct conduit from my brain to my hand. The computer, as much as I love it, feels to artificial to me - too much like a machine. Because a machine implies industry and practicality, I get too caught up in the technique of writing rather than the writing itself. It becomes more about mechanics and less about art. The computer is a machine for professionals, and that makes me feel like I must perform as a professional. I think too much about the reader when I write on the computer, and not enough about my characters. I want to please people I don't even know before I want to please myself. It's absurd. When I write fiction, I'm transcribing the world that I created onto paper - if I lie to please someone else, I'm displeasing myself and the world becomes less authentic.
I know I'm getting into some hoity-toity writer-speak with all this. I hate pretentious writers who refer to their stories as their babies. I used to do that; I'd fall so in love with my characters that I would lie - tell the story false - in order to keep them alive. This really is cheating. It cheats me of the exorcism of writing the story as it should be, and it cheats my readers out of the truth of the story. Was it Stephen King who said, "Kill your darlings"? I love that phrase.
Writing, like I'm writing now in my notebook, is my antidepressant. The simple act of putting the pen on the paper and going is more therapeutic than a million analysts. When I write, I can work out every kink and fulfill every fantasy. I can transcend my own inner darkness and make it something beautiful. I can take all my frustration, all my outrage and all my feelings of inadequacy and work them out, word by word. It's a wonderful thing, and the alchemy only works when it's a pen in hand with paper beneath it. Between the paper and the computer I do my heavy editing: polishing and finessing and changing the words around. It's fun in its own way, but it's not the same as the sheer release of writing. It's a good way to wipe the snot off the kid's nose before sending him to school, but it's no way to make a baby. To continue with the metaphor, making the baby should be sweaty and sticky and hot and not all that pretty to outsiders (who the hell has sex like they do in the movies anyway?). It's when people are going to judge the little monster that you actually worry about how he looks. If he looks like shit, they're going to be judging you too. If he looks adorable, they're going to be so busy with him that they won't see you at all.
Maybe that's another part of it, for me. Writing feels like a cushion of minor invisibility, like a secret identity or something. I can go out to the grocery store and I just look ordinary, but I really killed an entire race and unleashed a horde or demons that morning. It's goofy, but it's powerful. In my life, I don't get that power anywhere else. I don't get it from good grades or fast cars or painting. I get it from throwing down on a piece of paper, from playing games with the creatures in my head.
It's awesome. There's no trade off for it - no job, no class, no nothing (I will be vulgar and say that sex with my fiancé is awesome too, but in an utterly different way.) Now if I can get it to pay the bills, I'm in hog heaven eating bacon.
mia_in_chains in one of my communities, I started thinking about why I write longhand.
For years I've struggled with finishing things on the computer. With the internet right there and my lovely ADD, finishing more than a few paragraphs becomes damn near impossible.
In high school I wrote voluminously, but I only used the computer for school-related projects. We didn't even have the Internet until I turned 17 (I'm almost 30 - when I was in high school, we used the library for research) and I didn't consider the computer much of an entertainment source.
I started writing fiction when I was 12, and I wrote everything longhand. I especially loved those little spiral-bound notebooks, although I used full-sized ones as well. If I wrote in my room, I listened to music. I also wrote in front of the television set and while taking notes in class. Somehow, an auditory distraction kept me focused. I know this is a false analogy, but it seemed like the outer part of my brain listened to the teacher talking or the soundtrack, while the core of my brain stayed locked on the story. If I tried to write in a silent environment, I got distracted by too many little things: making my handwriting look perfect, thinking about other stories to write, wondering about dinner - anything but the work at hand.
When I really got into the Internet, my writing tapered way off. It picked back up again once I discovered fanfiction. I wrote a lot and even finished a few things, but the desire to stay canon limited me. I listened to music while I typed, but it didn't feel them same or flow the same as when I worked in a notebook.
I started to get bored with my writing. I reworked the same passages over and over again. Really the only thing that kept my nose to the grindstone was fan feedback. I loved it when I was in high school, and I loved it as a fanfic writer. I've always over-identified with my writing; if people hated my work, it felt like they were criticizing me. Awesome writing meant an awesome me. I realize now that this is a stupid attitude to have. A few of my friends can't write to save their lives, but that doesn't mean that I hate them as people just because they don't know how to use the words there, their, and they're.
I don't think I realized until recently what those little notebooks meant to me. They meant escape. They meant carrying a world in my pocket, one that belonged to me where I had some semblance of control. By letting "out" the things in my head, they felt less frightening and more manageable. All throughout boot camp, I carried a little notebook with me. I wasn't supposed to have it - not part of the uniform regulations. I carried it in my sock nearly every day of the nine weeks I trained there. At night, I arranged my blankets so that no one could see me writing by the faint light that came in through the door of the compartment. When I got too tired to continue, I hid the notebook in my underwear (we weren't allowed to wear socks to bed) and transferred it back to my socks in the bathroom the next morning. That dumb little notebook, full of fanfiction, saved my sanity in basic. It lowered my stress level and gave me control over a tiny aspect of my world. I probably wouldn't have gotten so weird in A school if I'd kept writing, but I let myself get distracted by obsessive studying punctuated by partying way too much.
I went back to writing once I got to my first duty station, but for the five years I was in the military, I did almost all of my work on the computer and I finished very little. I tended to work and rework sentences and phrases for hours at a time, never seeing a piece through to the end. I never thought it was the format I was using to write, as opposed to me or my love of creating worlds. It seems absurd that with the pages and pages I wrote longhand and the sheer amount of fanfiction I pumped out that I was so proud of a 37 page novella. But it was almost the only thing I completed over the course of those five years.
I finally got to the point about a year ago where I could hardly be bothered to write at all. It just seemed like too much work to open a document and work beyond a paragraph or two. I'm not sure if this attitude arose from depression or if I was depressed because I wasn't writing. I still had ideas all the time, but my mind was like a clogged drain. I couldn't get the stories out so they just sat there, stinking and growing mold.
Back in college, I started carrying a little notebook with me again, not for writing fiction but so I could write down homework assignments and take general notes to guide me through life. This is around the time that I really recognized that something was wrong with me. I never paid enough attention to myself before, I suppose, and over the course of my life I was far too proud to even think that something might be "off." I just knew that I struggled with a lot of things that other people took for granted. I always felt like there was some vast school of knowledge about how to live that was imparted to other people, but somehow I missed the class. There were a lot of other weird, crazy things I thought, but if I start thinking about it now, I'll get distracted and never finish this entry.
At any rate, bored out of my mind in one class or another, I opened that little notebook and started writing. I don't remember what I wrote, if it was a chapter for a half-remembered novel or a short story, but I wrote the entire class period when I wasn't taking notes. I got so interested in what I was writing that I wrote in the class after that one, and the class after that. I never worked outside class - not on breaks or at home - but scrawling away kept me sane sometimes. I've always been bored in school, but college just kills me. It's all the boring crap I learned in high school, and now I have to relearn it. That may change once I start taking classes related to my major, but I don't even want to do that. I love learning, but not on their terms. Next semester should be my last semester of general education, and I'm so sick of it that I could scream.
At any rate, the pattern of writing between classes became set. I started transferring from my notebook to a computer document, although I didn't notice the implications of the transition.
But again, the world got in the way of me writing. I got distracted by a pair of truly awful "friends" and all their drama. Just like I get lazy with exercise, I got lazy with writing. I stopped dragging around that notebook, stopped editing my documents on the computer. Every now and then I pulled up a short story or a half-finished book and read it (often surprised by how good it was), but not much more than that.
All the while, I got more and more depressed and the world seemed more hostile. I was also involved in a scene that included a lot of magical thinking and personal myth-making, and that got me into hot water. I wanted to write, but I felt like I had to write about what I "knew." The parameters of the pseudo-reality we created as a group became the skeleton on which to hang my new "fanfiction." I didn't write for the group, per se, but I tried to mutate all my plots and characters to reflect their agenda so that what I wrote was "true." It wasn't real creativity; it was using something that wasn't organic to my brain and trying to implant it there.
Luckily, that scene and I went our separate ways. At the time though, it seemed really tragic and once again, depression sucked out my desire to write. Later, even worse, I had the desire but not the motivation.
I'm retaking intermediate algebra right now, and I hate it with a burning passion. It's not so much the "never going to use this" whine as it is that I simply don't enjoy doing math. Quadratic equations and radical expression will in no way impact my future career, and being forced to do them is kind of outrageous. If college actually prepared us for reality, the required math class would include financial planning, budgeting, investing, that kind of thing. It's as much bullshit as some of the English classes I've taken. Instead of a constructive class on learning to write for the sake of expressing oneself clearly, it's shit like "write a poem then analyze the poetry process." I know that all practice is good practice, but it's so impractical. I wish there was a major called "reality."
Anyway, while screwing around with multiplying fractions or some other nonsense, I pulled a spare notebook out of my backpack and started writing. My brain felt ready to melt from all the numbers, and I needed to do something creative. In the past, I'd wanted to beg my teachers to let me knit or crochet while they lectured - I don't think I could possibly explain to anyone without ADD how goddamn hard it is to sit and listen to a lecture. I'm not hyperactive, but I can't focus to save my life if I'm not fascinated by the subject. 16 - 18 weeks is too long for me to be fascinated by almost anything. In order to pay attention, I have to split my attention. I know it's not as much as I'd get from staying locked on to the lecture exclusively, but if I try to do that, I'll miss at least half the lecture because my mind will just go away. We'll be talking about Hume, and when I tune in again, we're talking about Kant. I missed everything in between, and now I'll have to read it to catch up.
So writing, which looks so handily like taking notes, is the perfect way to soft focus enough to get through the lectures.
Once again, my output is slightly boggling, especially now that my stories are interesting again. I wrote 13 pages longhand the other day. I'm working completely unfettered, not worrying about any agenda, letting my characters take the lead and find their own way to the conclusion. The joy's come back to writing, something I missed for a long time, and with it, the creativity.
I'm also not depressed. Yes, I have my sad and enraged days, but I can pinpoint the reason for my moods now. It's not just a gray fog surrounding me for no reason for weeks on end. Channeling my dark parts into my writing is the best therapy in the world, especially when my fiancé says it's good work.
As I started responding to the post from the community member above, I realized though that I had a lot to say about why writing longhand works better for me, but her post wasn't a good place to say that. I think writing longhand works for me because it's like a direct conduit from my brain to my hand. The computer, as much as I love it, feels to artificial to me - too much like a machine. Because a machine implies industry and practicality, I get too caught up in the technique of writing rather than the writing itself. It becomes more about mechanics and less about art. The computer is a machine for professionals, and that makes me feel like I must perform as a professional. I think too much about the reader when I write on the computer, and not enough about my characters. I want to please people I don't even know before I want to please myself. It's absurd. When I write fiction, I'm transcribing the world that I created onto paper - if I lie to please someone else, I'm displeasing myself and the world becomes less authentic.
I know I'm getting into some hoity-toity writer-speak with all this. I hate pretentious writers who refer to their stories as their babies. I used to do that; I'd fall so in love with my characters that I would lie - tell the story false - in order to keep them alive. This really is cheating. It cheats me of the exorcism of writing the story as it should be, and it cheats my readers out of the truth of the story. Was it Stephen King who said, "Kill your darlings"? I love that phrase.
Writing, like I'm writing now in my notebook, is my antidepressant. The simple act of putting the pen on the paper and going is more therapeutic than a million analysts. When I write, I can work out every kink and fulfill every fantasy. I can transcend my own inner darkness and make it something beautiful. I can take all my frustration, all my outrage and all my feelings of inadequacy and work them out, word by word. It's a wonderful thing, and the alchemy only works when it's a pen in hand with paper beneath it. Between the paper and the computer I do my heavy editing: polishing and finessing and changing the words around. It's fun in its own way, but it's not the same as the sheer release of writing. It's a good way to wipe the snot off the kid's nose before sending him to school, but it's no way to make a baby. To continue with the metaphor, making the baby should be sweaty and sticky and hot and not all that pretty to outsiders (who the hell has sex like they do in the movies anyway?). It's when people are going to judge the little monster that you actually worry about how he looks. If he looks like shit, they're going to be judging you too. If he looks adorable, they're going to be so busy with him that they won't see you at all.
Maybe that's another part of it, for me. Writing feels like a cushion of minor invisibility, like a secret identity or something. I can go out to the grocery store and I just look ordinary, but I really killed an entire race and unleashed a horde or demons that morning. It's goofy, but it's powerful. In my life, I don't get that power anywhere else. I don't get it from good grades or fast cars or painting. I get it from throwing down on a piece of paper, from playing games with the creatures in my head.
It's awesome. There's no trade off for it - no job, no class, no nothing (I will be vulgar and say that sex with my fiancé is awesome too, but in an utterly different way.) Now if I can get it to pay the bills, I'm in hog heaven eating bacon.