It’s a romantic thought isn’t it? The image of great writers like William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, the Bronte Sisters and all the rest, working by candle light on their great masterpieces with only the sound of the scratch of a pen (or some equivalent) across the page as the only sound.
I myself used to write everything by hand, as a child growing up in the early nineties all school writing was done by hand. There was no computer, I didn’t like using the typewriter and thus, I wrote things down. Once the computer came along however I made the switch. How convenient it was, spell check and everything and ready to print.
There was the odd occasion, when I was at university where I would scribble in a notebook on the way home from school on the train / bus and lots of my stories were written that way. In fact, the last third of my first completed novel was written by hand, and an 80k long fan-fiction rendition was written mostly by hand too.
Handwriting is a great way to break writer’s block (which will be another post all together) and I still hold to the romantic notion of writing by hand. And so, I decided that as a dry run for November I would try and handwrite a story of around 50k. I even bought a quite nice (if not really expensive) moleskine notebook but we’re five days in and I haven’t written anything for the last two.
So what does this mean? Handwriting and me don’t work.I mean, it’s fun for a bit, and it can get the ideas flowing, but in the long term, it just doesn’t work. Shame.
The Writer's Journey 