I’m very frustrated about lots of things in my life, and I just decided to take a few minutes to pull out the spiral notebook that I’ve had in my bag for weeks now and write in it.
And you know what? Writing in longhand sucks. It’s too slow and my penmanship has really deteriorated. How did I ever do it? It’s so much faster and cleaner to use a keyboard.
But I can’t help but feel like I’m losing some primal connection with art, with the words. I think I read somewhere a long time ago that it’s better to write by hand than to type, because it keeps you in closer touch with those words and the feelings behind them. But maybe that was just crap. If writing by hand is going to slow me down, I should type.
There is something lost, though. I can go back to my old diaries and see words that I literally wrote down 15 or more years ago. It seems more human. I can see where I was angrier — I wrote faster and more sloppily. I can see what my handwriting looked like at 15, 20, 25 years old. It’s like a photograph. I actually wrote on this particular page! Years ago! It’s physical, tangible — not virtual.
Years ago, just out of college, I tried out for the Foreign Service. I passed the written exam and then had to go to D.C. to participate in an all-day follow-up session: oral interview, group exercise, written essay exam. I was one of the youngest people in the room, and at the beginning of the day, when they told us about the written exam, many of the older people joked that they couldn’t remember the last time they had actually written something in longhand. I felt superior to them – I wasn’t a jaded office worker who typed up work reports all day; I was an independent-minded recent college student who regularly wrote in a handwritten diary.
Well, you know what? Writing by hand takes too long. It’s not fast enough for my unruly brain.
Or maybe I just need a better pen.
(I didn’t get into the Foreign Service, by the way.)
I have also heard that long hand writing is better for journaling than typing. It allows you to touch and connect with the page is the theory always told to me. I hate long hand writing and have been scolded when I do that for my journaling, just one more thing to feel guilty about :-).
Jay
I know what you mean. I remember there being a turning point for me some time in high school: I’d gotten used to composing my essays longhand, writing notes and extra fragments in the margins, drawing arrows to rearrange, etc., but before long it was straight to the computer instead.
Indeed something is being lost. Take correspondence, for example. I’m more likely to save mailed cards or notes than e-mails, which I do save sometimes, but the bar is higher. That’s just me. How is my biographer possibly going to compile and publish my collected correspondence a hundred years from now? ;-)
I took the Foreign Service exam too! (Ah, my faded dreams of becoming a jet-setting diplomat.) I passed the written, but decided not to continue to the oral, just because of circumstances. At the time I was just starting a new job, new life in D.C., etc.