How do you write? With what medium? Do you type on your laptop or write longhand? I am here to advocate for writing by hand. There are a great many advantages to doing so:
1. It’s good for your brain
When you write by hand, more neurons are firing in your brain than when you type. Just the fact that you need to form twenty-six different shapes gets that brain working. All this brain work is good for you — for your physical and emotional health. Typing won’t do that for you.
2. Creativity
When you write by hand, with all those neurons firing, your creativity is sparked too. Also, if you normally write by typing, writing by hand will provide a different medium to get your words down. This can sometimes be all you need to get your creativity working again if you’re experiencing writer’s block. It’s similar to going for a walk.
3. It forces you to slow down
A lot of people claim that they don’t like writing by hand because it’s so much slower than typing. It’s true, it is — and that’s the point. Writing by hand forces you to slow down and write with more deliberation, it gives your brain time to conjure up images, to hear your character’s voices.
When you type your brain doesn’t have to process what you’re writing. You’re just hitting keys and sometimes faster than your brain can understand them. Writing by hand you have to give more conscious thought to what you’re writing as you form each letter.
4. Critical thinking
And along the same lines, writing by hand enhances your critical thinking. It encourages you to think more thoroughly, to examine what you’re writing more closely.
5. It gives you the opportunity to go over what you’ve just written critically.
When you write by hand, what you write is going to have to be transferred to your computer in some way. You can either type what you’ve written, which gives you the opportunity to edit, change words, and add or subtract from what you’ve written. If you write on an electronic tablet like a Kindle Scribe or a Remarkable, you can get your words in a text file, which you can then copy and paste into Word, Scrivener, or whatever program you use. The catch is that computers don’t always convert handwriting perfectly and a scribe has an odd quirk of always putting a space between an open quotation mark and the dialogue. In other words, you have to read and fix your work, once again giving you the opportunity to edit it.
Writing by hand is an incredible tool in the writer’s tool box and one which is too frequently dismissed. I highly recommend slowing down, finding your favorite pen or electronic tablet and getting to it. I’ve written my last three books this way and loved every minute of it.
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