Years ago, when I lived in New York and rode the subway a half-hour to and from work every day, I carried a composition notebook with me and wrote in it for much of my commute. As words and pages and chapters piled up, I would transcribe them into Microsoft Word files and change whatever little things didn’t sound right. After a couple of years, those handwritten scrawls became Things Done Changed, which then became Bigger And Better Things, which finally became The Fab 5.

I tried to continue that process in the years since, but fell away from it for several reasons. I changed careers. I don’t live in New York anymore, so my current half-hour commute isn’t filled with idle time like it was before (don’t write and drive, folks). Most importantly, during a NaNoWriMo project, I convinced myself that writing longhand was flawed process.

Strangely – ironically – once I stopped writing in notebooks, I found myself “blocked” more. I got less confident in my fiction, and projects generally took longer. That NaNoWriMo project? I started it in 2011 and I only finished the first draft last year.

I came across some of my old notebooks – holy Jeebus, I’m a packrat – and thumbed through them. I learned two things: one, twenty years of practice will make anyone better at anything, and two, I had a process that worked. The notebooks I looked through were full of writing. The stories they contained may not all have been good – some were simply god-awful – but they were finished. There were no blank pages. I finished them quickly, too; I used to date the beginning and end of my short fiction, and I used to start two, sometimes three stories in a month. That’s significant output.

During a recent “blocked” period, I decided to whip out a blank notebook (I’m convinced every writer has one or three on standby) and try the longhand approach again. To my surprise, I blasted through that short story (it’s up on my site: The Deal. Check the Extras tab). I tried it again and pounded out the first draft of another story (Red Light Confessional, also in the extras section).

I took a moment to see why writing longhand seems to work for me, and here are some of the reasons I came up with:

1. I write more in less time. As I write longhand, I find that every writing session packs progressively more words onto a page, and I get more done in 20-30 minutes than I can simply typing a first draft. The physical act of writing improves my connection to what I’m doing and it shortens the distance between brain and paper. There seems to be anecdotal evidence to this point.

2. Encourages the first draft to be the first draft. I have a terrible habit of self-editing while I write on a screen, especially when it’s blank. It gives me mild anxiety issues, and I feel compelled to make every word perfect. Writing longhand, I don’t feel so compelled to do that. It’s freeing. Yes, I self-edit in a notebook, but there’s something much faster – to me, at least – of a strikeout line as opposed to backspacing over lines of text. The notebook draft ends up raw and unpolished, but it’s done.

3. Improves future edits. That raw, unpolished draft I was just talking about? Well, the first edits I make are in the transfer. It’s natural and doesn’t add any extra time, and one more quality filter couldn’t hurt, right?

4. Makes it easier to pick up the story after a break. The way my mind works, I retain information better when I write it down. When a longhand session ends and I return to my work a day or two later, I still remember what happened and what I was thinking at the time. This improves continuity and keeps me from having to backtrack.

5. Easier to refer to previous events. Having a notebook handy makes it simple to backtrack when I have to. When I write something in a file, especially novels, especially on Word, I save every chapter as an individual file. Writing longhand gives me the reference at my literal fingertips.

6. Reminds me that writing is something I enjoy. I love to do this. It’s as simple as that. Writing is one of my favorite things to do in this life, and writing longhand has reminded me of that lately.

I took this information and ran with it; I started writing my next novel longhand, and soon enough I started doing with a longhand draft. Including this blog post, which took me 30 minutes to write on paper.

To my writer friends out there: do you still write longhand? Does it help? Feel free to leave a comment!

#2017 #fiction #love #writing #newprojects