(Re)Thinking About Writing by Hand

Whereas I used to convince myself that I could only write drafts by hand and transfer them to the computer for keyboard-revision in a form of first-rewrite, I’m finding that to no longer be the case (nevermind that I cannot read my own handwriting with more than a few hours between draft and typing): It’s more the other way ’round, now, as I type faster than I think (evidenced here, perhaps), and use this development – for want of a better word – as a means of generating the raw – and legible – footage to edit, to tear apart, by hand, a mechanical pencil my scalpel and the printed-out page my operating theatre, before returning that eviscerated block of now-unrecognizable text to the computer for final sewing up and polishing.

(All of the above is, of course, subject to change and to whim…)

Worth noting here that I’m an edit-as-I-go type of writer, incapable of moving on to the next paragraph without the current being ship-shape: as Zadie Smith says,

“Micro Managers build a house floor by floor, discretely and in its entirety. Each floor needs to be sturdy and fully decorated with all the furniture in place before the next is built on top of it. There’s wallpaper in the hall even if the stairs lead nowhere at all. Because Micro Managers have no grand plan, their novels exist only in their present moment, in a sensibility, in the novel’s tonal frequency line by line.”

Zadie Smith

Journals are different; they must be written by hand – in glorious, smeary pencil – but I don’t write in journals to remember – I write in them to forget (must remember that).