The Mechanics of Longhand
November 6, 2020

Mechanics? What mechanics? You simply take writing implement in hand and begin
making marks on paper. The only question involved is pen or pencil? Cursive or
printing? Notebook or loose-leaf sheets?

As I mentioned in a previous post[1], reading interviews with other authors 
is a good way to pick up writing tips. I'm currently towards the end of 
Volume III of The Paris Review Interviews and many of the writers in it mention 
that they write their first drafts longhand. (I'm not surprised, though. The 
bulk of the interviews were done before computers became common.)

Several spoke about how writing longhand was better for them than the
alternatives. The poet Ted Hughes claimed that his prose became three times
longer when he began writing on a typewriter. Jan Morris, who used a word
processor, said that she didn't use it for early drafts of her work because of
the "temptation to simply fiddle with the text."

It was an interview with Martin Amis, though, that really made me think about
the mechanics of putting words on the page in longhand:

          If I showed you a notebook of mine, it would have lots of squiggles
  and transpositions and lots of light crossings-out so that you can see what the
  original was....By the way, it's all nonsense about how wonderful computers are
  because you can shift things around. Nothing compares with the fluidity of
  longhand. You shift things around without shifting them around--in that you
  merely indicate a possibility while your original thought is still there. The
  trouble with a computer is that what you come out with has no memory, no
  provenance, no history.

This passage made me reexamine the techniques I use when I write longhand.
Should I write on every line or every other line? Should I change the way I
cross out the text I delete?

Fortunately, the Paris Review Interviews often include an image of a manuscript
page from each author, so I looked at the longhand examples. Most of the other
writers left ample space above and below each line for inserts and word changes.
Most used a mixture of complete, unreadable corrections (generally a single
word) and light line-throughs that could still be read (generally phrases or
sentences).

 Based off Amis' words and what I saw in the Paris Review samples, I've made
some modifications in how I write in my notebooks. While I used to write on
every line and was a turn-it-into-an-unreadable-blob corrector, I'm now working
to undo these habits.

Amis' thought that longhand allows a writer to see both where they originally
intended to put a passage, and where they thought it would fit better struck me
as true, as well. My current practices--an arrow to indicate where the
line/paragraph should be moved to, or an asterisk and write the addition at the
bottom of the page--work well, so I'm not going to change them.

Who would have thought that something as simple as longhand writing could be so
complex?

[1] https://www.andrewgudgel.com/blog/reverse-engineering.txt

(c) 2020 by Andrew Gudgel 
email: contact [at] andrewgudgel.com