Re-Thinking (Again) About Writing by Hand

In a 13 May post, I wrote about how I’d begun to find the act of writing by hand useless in the draft stage and shifted my working method towards the accumulation of raw footage / material / etc in the computer and using of pen and / or pencil only to develop it into something resembling quality afterwards.

This remained true until 14 May, when my first fountain pen, a Pilot Metropolitan, arrived and I quickly discovered the joy in using it to draft – both raw material and endless revision – by hand and resolved to never – at least until I have to re-think about the process again out of a lack of anything meaningful to contribute to this daily challenge – look back.

The biggest change, now that I’ve worked with it all week, is one of the utmost import: in writing by hand, slowly and methodically, I can break with the patterns to which I automatically revert when I type, a nigh-illegible freedom from the tyranny of the rote and staid unearthed in a newfound rhythmic work pattern of Scrawl / Type / Revise (by type and by scrawl) / Repeat on my way towards something resembling progress.

(Given that I’ve got a fountain pen tattooed on my arm, it only makes sense that I’ve fallen in love with the real thing, the symbolic / iconic becoming the reality.)

P.S. The 50th edition of my bi-weekly (for now – it may go weekly – newsletter drops on Sunday. You can sign up here, if so inclined.

P.P.S. Quite a day in music: new releases by Brad Mehldau (FINDING GABRIEL), The National (I AM EASY TO FIND), and Kelly Moran (ORIGIN EP).