The Pen is Mightier Than the Keyboard

Write by Hand. Your Stories Will Thank You.

When I switched over from writing by keyboard to writing by hand, it was a matter of having randomly read James Baldwin saying he wrote by hand because his sentences were crisper as a result of it. And me, loving every word by that King of American (ok, ok, world) letters, had to give it a try.

Baldwin writes in longhand (“you achieve shorter declarative sentences”)

Now, there were a few other minor factors that played into this: the main one being that by writing I was forced to deal with my own train of thought rather than that of the hivemind. IOW I was disconnected from the internets.

But the internet wasn’t the main thrust of my migration from keyboard to hand.

My friends, I’m telling you that this writing with a pen thing is truly inspiring stuff. Just look at the above picture!

I was simply trying to be a better writer. So my process became: write it out by hand, type it, print it, then edit and work with it. Sometimes, after printing it out, I would look at the story, feel it was weak and rewrite it using that original story as the skeleton. An entirely new style hit me.