This is the Write Now podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 150: Why Do I Write By Hand?

Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps all writers, aspiring professional, and otherwise, to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write.

I’m your host, Sarah Werner. And today I wanna talk about an aspect of my writing process that is very, very visible, <laugh>. So as of about July, maybe even June of 2022, which is the year that we are presently in, which does not matter in the general context of this podcast because you can listen to it whenever and wherever you want to… Train of thought steering back toward the station…

So a few months ago, we’ll say, I had to move out of the little room that I had been using as my writing studio where my desk is, and I sort of transplanted myself out to the dining room table. I don’t wanna make it sound like I live in a mansion or anything — it is a small room. The main point of that room is that it has a large table that could seat up to six people, hence the draw of that room. So I moved because I ran out of space on my desk, and admittedly, I have a really big desk. I got it from the Habitat for Humanity Restore about 15 years ago, maybe — at this point, a long time ago. And it is one of those old teacher’s desks where it’s like the top is wood veneer, but the rest of it is like steel <laugh>. It is steel that has been either painted, spray, painted, whatever you do with steel, it’s black and it has two filing cabinet drawers. So it’s essentially filing cabinets, sturdy, and it’s big and it is plenty of room for teachers to grade papers and store their teacherly items and all of that stuff.

But I ran outta room and I ran out of room because I made a shift in how I create. I moved out to the dining room table because my desk could no longer physically hold the project that I am working on. And I’m not saying that to brag like, “Oh, I am working on a giant project.” No, I’m talking about sprawl. <laugh>. I tends to be a very messy creator, and I don’t mean I’m throwing spaghetti sauce at the walls. I mean, I sit down to write and I need to scribble something on some index cards, and I need to bring out a second clipboard that has notebook paper on it so I can put some ideas there. I need to spread out the index cards and put them in order again. And I have these stickers that I’m using to mark important passages.

So the project I’m working on right now is Girl In Space season two. And so I’ve got episodes one through seven of Girl In Space season two in one giant three-inch binder, and the other giant three-inch binder currently has episodes eight through 11. And I actually just wrapped up episode 11 this morning. So very excited about that. But again, I don’t want to derail our conversation.

So what I’m gonna focus on now is when you have two giant binders open, and I’m constantly flipping back and forth through handwritten pages within those binders, and I’ve, it ends up being a lot. I’ve got pens everywhere, post-it notes, and then I drink anywhere between two to five beverages going at any one time. So I’ve got my coffee, which is slowly cooling down. I’ve got my tea, which is slightly more hot because I just made it. I’ve got my water, I’ve got probably some other stuff. All right, we’ll say three beverages, which, okay, maybe that’s pretty normal.

And then I maybe have a little pile of snacks because <laugh>, I have to reward myself somehow. That’s what snacks are for. Let’s just say my writing area looks like, as my parents would say, a tornado went through it. And that tornado’s name is Sarah.

My writing process did not look like this before in the aforementioned month when I moved out into the dining room, because at that point I was still writing on my laptop and I was still making a mess. Like sure, I had my laptop open, but I had 47,000 tabs open. I had multiple documents open with multiple drafts of the same episode. My desk still had multiple beverages on it and scribbled notes everywhere, post-it notes, all of that stuff, But it fit on the desk in my office.

Some of you may know that every once in a while I like to change things up and go out to write at a coffee shop… I was gonna say, “Or,” and then trail off, but it’s really just coffee shops at this point. Sometimes it’s the public library, but mostly coffee shops. And now, instead of bringing just my laptop within my bag looking very neat and tidy, I bring these two giant three-inch binders. And when I’m talking about three-inch, I’m talking about the spine. So it’s like there’s a lot of paper that we’re dealing with here, and I carry these giant binders and my bag and whatever else I need to write — a big scarf or something because it’s always cold in coffee shops. And I plunk it down on the biggest table I can find, and people just look at me like I’m a crazy person, which they may not be entirely incorrect about. (I wanna point out just real quick that I do know grammatically that it should be about, which they may not be totally incorrect, but I didn’t say it that way because I don’t speak that way. And language is fluid and organic. And if you’re here to critique my grammar, you’re gonna be real busy <laugh>.)

So I’m out at the coffee shop, and inevitably, because I live in a small town in the Midwest, someone will come up to me, usually someone older, and they’ll look at my giant sprawl, my binders, my clipboard with looseleaf notebook paper on it, my supply of pens (I have to take multiple pens with me in case one runs out), and they’ll say something like, “Oh, working on something big there?” And I’ll sort of smile and say, “Yep, I’m writing a big project.” And then a surprising number of people will comment on the fact that I am handwriting. And they’ll say something like, “Oh, you don’t see that much anymore. Usually people are typing things into computers,” and… I don’t really know what to say to them, or at least I don’t know what to tell them that would not take me the next two hours to explain.

And so mostly I just say, “Yep, I love to handwrite!…” And then I trail off awkwardly like I did just there. And we make a little bit more small talk, and then they go away <laugh>. And I am left to sit there writing by hand, turning page after page until the next person inevitably comes up to me and says, “Oh, you’re working on a big project there.”

So why do I write by hand? That’s the name of this episode, and I wanted to talk about it, not because I want to convince you that it is good or better or necessarily what you “should” be doing. I wanna be really clear about that. I’m talking about this because it’s something that I have found works for me. I’m not here to say this is the one and only way to create. Because as you know, if you’ve listened to any episodes of this podcast in the past, there are countless ways to create, and the one that is best is the one that works for YOU. It’s the one that lets you tell the story that you need to tell.

But I started writing by hand several months ago, slightly before I moved to the dining room table, because I had been stuck for so long that I was desperate to try anything. I was in the midst of my, oh, I don’t know, eighth or ninth rewrite of episode seven of season two of Girl in Space. It was going in a million different directions. Every time I went back to change directions because the current path I was taking was not working out, I would start a new document on my laptop so that I wouldn’t lose anything in case I wanted to save those words for later. So I was on episode 207, so season two, episode seven, version… oh, maybe it was even 10, nine or 10 at that point. And I would comb through the eight or nine previous drafts of the episode and say, “Oh, I said something somewhere… There was a phrase that I liked that I’d like to use in this new iteration of this episode,” and I was so overwhelmed.

And at that point, the tabs on my laptop in the browser, because I use a browser-based writing program called, I think it’s Celtics or Celtics, C E L T X. That’s what I was using to write the Girl In Space Scripts. And I was desperate. I was near tears because I had created this massive tangled fishing line of a disaster, of a soggy middle of a season, and maybe you’ve been here. So I started trying different things to get unraveled, to get unstuck, to get untangled. I tried dictating into my phone, into a recording what I wanted the episode to be. I tried using note cards, I tried outlining, and it was all so frustrating. Something hadn’t changed. I felt like I needed something to change, and I wasn’t quite sure what that was.

So finally, I was like, “You know what? I need to see this tangibly. I can’t have words hiding in different tabs that I then accidentally closed, and then I don’t know which one I closed, and then I need to reopen, or I close all of them, or my computer crashes, or et cetera, et cetera. I just want one version of this in front of me.” So I got my clipboard because yes, I own a clipboard. I used it for taking notes in college, and I got out a ream of notebook paper college ruled three hole punch notebook paper that I must have had from college still. And I stuck it underneath the clip of the clipboard. And I said, I’m gonna start writing, and if I don’t like something, I’m gonna draw a single line through it so I can still see it, so I can still reference it later.

And I’m just going to tell the story of episode seven. And as I wrote episode seven out by hand, I realized a couple things. I was able to slow down and exist alongside the story as I created it. This is not a humble brag, but I type really quickly. (Maybe it is a humble brag. I don’t know. I’ll leave that to you to judge.) But I type really quickly, and often what happens is I’m typing so fast that my hands get ahead of my brain and I just shoot forward with the story without actually sitting there and thinking about what is most logical, what would happen next? What would this character say? What are they motivated to do or not do? I would just buzz right ahead because I would be like, “Oh, man, I have typed out seven pages today. Let’s make it 12, wheeeee!”

And then that would be the point at which I would realize I missed a turn or I screwed up, or I wrote something that didn’t make sense seven pages ago. I did something thoughtless and thus created another dead end to the story that I would then have to go back and course correct in a new document. I realized this when I was writing by hand, because as I was writing, my hand was forming each word tangibly, the tip of the pen scraping ink across the paper, each word getting sealed onto that paper with thoughtful intention. I couldn’t get ahead of my brain because when I hand write — this is embarrassing, but I’m gonna admit it to you — when I hand write, I have to spell out each word as I’m writing it to make sure I’m spelling everything correctly. And so all I can focus on is that word. All I can focus on is the present moment in that story.

And I realized as I wrote more and more by hand, as I realized I enjoyed writing by hand, and that’s why I kept doing it. I realized that I wasn’t creating all of those tangles, all of those dead ends. I wasn’t writing ahead of myself. I was simply telling the story right here, right now, as it needed to be told.

I also really enjoyed the fact that I could sort of retain a full documentation of my process as I was writing it. There are a lot of asterisks and arrows and little insertions and crossed out things and things written sideways in the margins, and it allows me a sense of possibility and expansion on the page. Whereas when I was typing, the only thing I could really do was type forward. I couldn’t really make little notes in the margins or place a sticky note six pages back that says, Hey, remember that X happened or Y happened or Z happened. Remember to add this in later. Now, I know this is possible with many types of writing software. You can add comments, you can bold things, you can highlight things, you can insert paragraphs, all of that. But for me, I really enjoyed the handwriting process because it preserved what I had done in the way that I had done it.

This isn’t making a lot of sense, but basically I was creating a scrapbook. I was preserving the experience. There are stickers and post-it notes and arrows and all sorts of things all over every single page of this manuscript. And there’s just something really aesthetically pleasing to me in that putting ink all over the page, drawing little arrows, adding pages between the pages for inserts. There’s just something, again, personally to me, very appealing about that. I feel like I’m creating a scrapbook. I feel like I’m creating something more than just a script, something deeply personalized, something that includes the history of its own creation.

It’s in my handwriting with my scribbles, with my coffee stains, <laugh>, so many coffee stains. There’s even some lunch stains on there, too. So I like it. It makes me feel like I am creating something, and that feels good to me. So handwriting allows me to slow down, not get ahead of myself, produce something tangible that feels good and looks kind of cool and is physically satisfying to produce and create. But, and now we’re maybe going to get a little bit metaphysical here. I feel like I exist more fully when I am handwriting. I don’t know if it’s because I am used to journaling by hand, and so I’m used to putting the pen against the page in an act of, Hey, I’m here. I exist. Here’s proof of my existence. I don’t know if that’s part of it. I don’t know if part of it is, and there’s a wonderful quote by someone who I am not going to remember Write Now, but it goes to the tune of, I don’t know what I think until I write it on the page.

And this was something that was really important to me that I didn’t realize until I was doing it — that for me, writing is an act of processing. Handwriting is an act of understanding what’s going on in my brain, and the fact that I’m handwriting, the fact that it’s slow and tangible, keeps me present in it, in a way that typing keeps me distracted, keeps me rooted in the future instead of the present. And again, this may be a hundred percent because of my associating handwriting with journaling and journaling being a very personal sort of record of my own thoughts. But I realized that as I was handwriting, I was existing along with the story. I was there, present. I was pressing my pen onto the page documenting what was going on in my brain, except what was going on in my brain was a fictional story instead of my thoughts on the day or the response to a prompt.

I hope I am explaining this, I don’t know, with some degree of clarity. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, that is absolutely fine. I might not have any idea what I’m talking about, either. And this might also be something that is possible for you when typing on a laptop or wherever it is that you type or write your story. All I know is that for me, slowing down and producing something tangible and physical was exactly what I needed to get me out of the pit I had sunk into without realizing it.

So yeah, there are a ton of downsides to handwriting. I just wanna be upfront about that. There’s the material costs of paper, pens, binders, note cards, stickers, post-it notes, whatever it is that you need in your giant sprawling mess of a creative process to handwrite. It’s also really slow and it can feel tedious. For me, slowing down was something that I needed to do in order to reclaim a more thoughtful storytelling process. But for you, it may be the opposite of what you need, and I would really love for you to do whatever it is that works best for you when telling your story. There’s also the small notion that a handwritten document can’t be backed up to the cloud or can’t be saved to a hard drive or something else every five minutes. And if your cat comes along and knocks over your entire mason jar full of water onto your binder, which has happened to me not once, but twice, there is the very real risk that all of your work will be destroyed.

I always think of that scene in Little Women where Jo throws her novel into the fire and just how devastating <laugh>, Oh, my heart just, I can’t even think about it without my heart breaking. I mean, I guess I could take a picture of every page as after I finish it, but I still go back and make notes and changes and add sticky notes and all of that stuff. So I just have to be very careful with the one existing copy of my manuscript. There’s also the whole notion that eventually at some point, this thing is gonna have to be typed up, especially if you want anyone else to be able to read it or if you wanna publish it. And that adds a possibly very unattractive step to your writing process. For me, I’m actually grateful for that part of it because writing by hand, I realize this is not the final way in which this story will exist.

Like, I will need to type it up at some point, and at that point, I can do all of the editing I want and need to. And so I am allowed to be messy and free and experimental with this first rough, handwritten draft of the story. And for me, there’s a little bit of safety in that, a little bit of security, a little bit of a relief that I have space and time for corrections and rewrites. So the handwritten draft is my rough draft, and then the next draft will be typed. And I’m the kind of person where a lot of my perfection came from originally when I was typing out my episodes, I thought they had to be perfect because I didn’t wanna have to go back and rewrite-slash-retype it all. I wanted it to be just good so I could move on.

But handwriting my first draft has really forced me to take the extra time to be honest with myself and say, “Hey, this is just the first draft, and it can’t be anything other than that. So just make an ugly first draft. You can type it up all pretty later.”

So all of this is the answer to the question of why I write by hand. Since I started writing by hand, I have moved from being stuck on episode seven for over six months to not only finishing episode seven, but also finishing episodes 8, 9, 10, and as of this morning, 11. It’s not the simple act of handwriting though, that gave me this boost. I wanna be very clear about that. Handwriting is not a magic bullet that will solve all of your problems. There is no magic bullet in writing. There is just sitting down and figuring out what works for you.

But I think it was the habit. I think it was sitting down and writing, sitting down and not having a laptop to open up that also had social media and texts and email and all of the other things on it. When I sit down and handwrite, it’s just me, my pen and the page and several thousand sticky notes and all of that other stuff, <laugh>. But I don’t even check my email now until lunch. I can’t check my email because I don’t let myself check my email. I even use an app that I’ve talked about here before on the podcast called Forest, which essentially bricks your phone until a certain amount of time has passed. I’m at the point again now where I get up every day and I get excited to sit down and focus on one page, one word, one letter at a time.

So I wanted to share this with you along with all of its pros and coms, because I’m curious, what does work best for you? Is handwriting something that you’ve tried in the past? Is it something that you are thinking of trying? Is it something that is just simply not even a question for you? All of these are extremely valid, but I would love to know what works for you in the comments for today’s episode. So the show notes for today’s episode are out at my website at sarahwerner.com. That’s S A R A H W E R N E R.com, and you can just navigate to the Write Now podcast, episode 150. Yeah, we’re at 150. Whew, that’s weird. Over on my website, scroll down to the bottom of the show notes, and there is underneath the transcript a comment box, where I would love to hear your thoughts.

I would also like to thank my Patreon patrons for their generous and beautiful support for this show. Without their financial support, I would not be able to make this show. And so thank you to each and every one of you. Today, I’d like to especially thank Tamara K Sellman, Amanda King, Laurie, Regina Calabrese, Amber Fra Tessi, Charmaine Ferrara, Dennis Martin, Michael Beckwith, Mike Tefft, Sarah Banham, Summer, That Guy, Tiffany Joyner, and Whitney MacGruder. Thank you all so incredibly much for your financial support. If you, Yes, you Dear Listener, would like to become a patron of the Write Now podcast, you can do so by going to the show notes for today’s episode out at sarahwerner.com and clicking “support the podcast”. Alternately, you can just go out to patreon.com. That’s P A T R E O N.com/ Sarah Rhea Werner. That’s S A R A H R H E A W E R N E R.

You can choose to donate a dollar per episode, $5 per episode, $3 per episode, whatever works for you and your budget. If this does not work for you and your budget, if you are cash strapped like so many of us are right now, that is absolutely fine. You can still support the show for free by telling someone else about it. If there’s someone in your life who is a struggling writer, someone who is struggling to understand that they are a writer, someone who is struggling in any way, I guess, with their art, with their creative process, with understanding who they are as a creator, let them know about the Write Now podcast with Sarah Werner and maybe show them how to find it, how to download it, highlight your favorite episode for them to start with, or they can just go back and start from the beginning.

But telling people about the show is just a great way to show your love and support. So whether you’re able to contribute financially or just by telling someone else about the show, I deeply appreciate it and I’m so grateful you’re here to listen and to participate in this show with so many other listeners around the world.

I think I’m losing my voice, <laugh>, but I do wanna say thank you so much for listening today. This has been episode 150 of the Write Now podcast. The podcast that helps all writers, aspiring, professional, and otherwise, to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m Sarah Werner, and I need to go and stock up on paper and pens for the next episode of Girl In Space.