Hand Writing Wednesday Update

My somewhat quixotic goal of teaching myself to hand write again has now filled 50 pages in my notebook. These pages were filled over just a little over 100 days and represent 40 discrete entries in the notebook. These occurred about one every 2.7 days and were each a little over 1 page in length. Mostly they were written with a LAMY Safari fountain pen or a Preppy Platinum. 

This feels like a good place to assess what I’ve learned and what’s next for this odd little undertaking.

First, I’ve learned that handwriting is HARD. After about a page (or around 20 minutes of writing) my hand gets tired and sore and as I start to strain my shoulder and arm fatigue as well. More than that, I’ve struggled to figure out how to hold my hand and the notebook page (particularly the “verso”) to keep it flat so that I don’t inadvertently hit the nib against the page as it curls up from the notebook and create stray marks. If I hold the page flat, I leave just enough oil on the page to keep the pen from marking it smoothly. In other words, there are both physical and technical skills associated with hand writing that I’ve not quite mastered.

There’s also the intellectual aspect. I find that when I write on screen, it’s so easy to delete and rewrite that I often start a sentence two or three times before I get it right. In a notebook this is a messy way of doing things. I am still learning to slow down enough to think through the sentence before I commit it to the page or retain enough flexibility in my thinking and my writing to wrangle an open ended sentence into some kind of order before bringing it to a close. It is increasingly clear that writing in a notebook will become a distinct process for me.

Second, I still struggle to know what the genre of notebook writing is. Maybe it’ll settle into the space between “writing for myself” and “writing for someone else” or between my writing in my inner voice or writing for my blog. Right now, it’s kind of all over the place and that’s not great.

In some ways, I’m not comfortable using the notebook for notes or anything shorter than  one-page writing. These limits have sort of shaped the genres open to it. As I think more about “slow archaeology” and using the notebook as platform for slow ideas (and perhaps as the form for a “slow archaeology” project), I’m wondering whether the short (1-2 notebook page) essay can be the vessel for it. So far, I’ve been a bit too undisciplined to commit to anything beyond periodic musings.

I suppose, as I get more comfortable with it as part of my routine — or habit — I’ll find a better way to write in it, but for now, it feels like a place of uncertainty.

Finally, as my effort to write in the notebook graduates from being a goal to a habit. I feel increasingly like I should impose some structure on it. I’d like to get closer to writing an entry every 2 days, and one way to do this is imposing some kind of structure on what it is that I’m doing. This would resolve some of the issues in my first and second point as well.

But maybe it would also sort of defeat the purpose of my notebook writing. I suspect the best way to figure this out is writing another 50 pages.