Forget the sword... it's pen vs. keyboard

It's a fairly safe bet at this point that most people hanging around this blog, both the readers and the contributors, are writers. Or... are we typers? Ah, there's the rub...

Names withheld to protect the guilty, but I'm not the only one in this crowd who goes longhand regularly - in fact, someone 'round here once said that a particular story not only had to be hand-written, it had to be written in red ink. Fair enough. Now, when I sit down to have a crack at my latest WiP, these days it's almost always the scritch of a pencil, not the clickety-clack of keys, that becomes my soundtrack. But does one's mode of writing influence what actually gets written?

I'll start off by saying that I'm a bit of an anomaly (no, really?!) in that I'm almost totally ambidextrous. For most tasks, they'll get done with whichever hand happens to be closest, whether it's eating, brushing my teeth, or writing. However, certain kinds of writing I do tend to favour one hand over the other - my "official" signatures, for instance, I keep to my right hand so at least there's some chance they'll match up. When it comes to how it works for lengthy writing, however, I usually write my first draft right-handed, and then swap the pencil to my left hand to do my editing. Perhaps this activates different regions of my brain, though if it does, they're backwards to how such activities are usually perceived (i.e. the right brain is creative {=left hand} and the left brain is analytical {=right hand}). (Digression: My junior year of college, I was called in to explain why my music history final was in two different handwritings. Well, duh... because I have two hands, of course, and since I'd filled a blue book and a half, the one I'd started with got tired and I switched to the other one. Very convenient skill, really... It also came in handy in Latin class in high school, when I took class notes with one hand while composing music with the other. Did a whole string octet that way when I was 15...)

There are times, however, when the old-fashioned way just won't cut it. I'm speaking, of course, of those mad marathons known as WriMos, when you are in a headlong race against the clock (or calendar, really) and your own creativity to spew out 50,000 words in 30 days. Unless you're a maddeningly slow typist, typing is simply so much faster than hand-writing that it's practically a must, at least if you're doing anything other than writing that entire month. I've had two successful WriMos and one dismal failure - no prizes for guessing which were typed and which was written out longhand. The thing is though, the slower pace of the handwritten manuscript (which is totally redundant, if I'm going to get all etymological about it) means that I have more time to think about each sentence, to plan ahead a bit for better word choice, to repeat it in my head several times as I scrawl across the page, tweak a bit here, there, cross out, overwrite... In fact, many times I have rather a lot of detail worked out before ever setting graphite to paper, making it akin to a second or even third draft even though it's the first time I've written it down.

Of the four novels I've started, two are "finished" (as in, the story's all there, they just need editing), one is abandoned, possibly forever, and one is a WiP. The finished ones, well, they're the products of those WriMos, and it's not surprising to me that they're for younger readers and have similar plots. Are there some good bits in there? Yes. Is there some absolute tripe? Oh hell yes. As for the WiP, which has been stubbornly handwritten from the start (stubborn on its part, not mine - it refuses to be corralled if I type), there are still some stinkers but, I'll venture to say, no actual total rubbish. The extra time taken over the physical act of writing seems to knock the really awful stuff out before it ever makes it to the page.

And then there's the editing process... Oh good grief, I hate it. But I almost can't do it at all if I only have pixels on a screen to work with. Whenever one of my fellow Burrowers fires off a novel draft, I trot straight down to the local Staples, flash drive in hand, to print it out (whether it's 200 or 800 pages {*cough*Tami*cough*}), so I can scribble away on it, cross things out, draw arrows, highlight, make notes, draw faces... Maybe it's because writing papers on a computer didn't become the norm for me until I was already in high school, maybe it's just something about that physical connection to the page, but for anything longer than, errrm... well, this blog post, basically, I need a pen and some paper to make headway (make that a pen in each hand - it's faster). But there's also the finality of the typeface - if it's sitting there all neat and tidy and legible, it's much harder for me to even find the things that need fixing, while when it's scribbled down in a notebook with all sorts of notes-to-self in the margins, the mutability, no wait, pliability, of the text is much simpler to mess about with and tidy up and just generally improve.

Don't get me wrong, there are some things that I love the computer for - cut and paste is one of the best inventions ever, if you ask me - and as noted above, when you're churning out massive quantities of verbiage on a deadline, give me QWERTY every time. In fact, just the act of typing up something that I've first written by hand is a useful extra editing round, where I can make minor changes on the fly as the story flows from page to screen. But I wonder, sometimes, if we're losing something vital with each technological leap forward. When you read Austen or Dickens or Shakespeare, knowing that each word was scratched out, pen in hand - I don't know, it seems to set a greater stamp of personality on the text, somehow, than the generic pounding of keys. Is it because each of us has a unique handwriting (or two *cough*), while, fonts notwithstanding, a typeface is set and unalterable? I can tell, even years later, how the writing was going at a particular point just by looking at my handwriting - if it's messy and big and words are all connected up that shouldn't be, I was flying along, while neater bits with more space and reasonable margins indicate a slower, more methodical pace. If I typed it - well, who knows? What about music? I can arrange directly to the screen and merrily sling notes about, pointing and clicking and printing when I'm done, but if I'm actually composing (which, truth be told, I'm not all that good at), forget it. Pencil and staff paper, every time.

So, am I a complete oddball? Step up, everyone, and let's have a good ol' debate in the comments - are you a devotee of the pen or the keyboard, or a combination? And why?

Images: Quill pen
Old typewriter
Computer