Typed By Hand

Typed By Hand: The Influence of Technological Media on Modern-Day Fiction Writing

December 2017 – This piece was written for a Literature, Media, and Communication course taught by Dr. Hugh Crawford at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Works cited can be found at the end of the piece.

The pen races across the lined paper, the letters formed barely legibly. The writer dashes
off a period at the end of the thought, and places the pen down beside the lined notebook paper.
On the inside of his middle fingers remains a red groove from the friction of the chase to get the
ideas to paper before they escaped.

Or, alternatively, a high-pitched muffled clatter sounds, while soft music streams into the
writer’s ears through earbuds. A flow of words pushes the vertical space bar further and further
down the glowing screen, appearing smoothly. Typing pauses and the clatter and dance of
fingers across the keyboard stops as the writer clicks over into another tab of notes.
The modern-day world is one of endless media forms when it comes to writing. There not
only exists pens and word processors, but also everything in between, from mechanical pencils
on notebook paper, to nostalgic electric typewriters, to innovative software marketed solely to
authors. In an era of options, is there one medium of writing that is most effective? Or is it
subjective?

Journalists taking interview notes and scientists drafting a lab report are equally subject
to the question of medium, but focusing on fiction writing is particularly illustrative because of
its creative nature. Fiction writing goes beyond synthesis of pre-existing ideas. It involves
creating and translating an entirely made-up world. Getting inventive thoughts onto paper is an
especially intense type of writing process, and looking at it will most clearly demonstrate the
variety in media forms.

The system of getting thoughts transcribed into written, encoded language is so closely
tied to human thought processes that some scholars describe them as one and the same. Professor
Kerry Rockquemore in an article on the nature of writing explains, “When I ask people to
describe their writing process, what often surfaces is the idea that writing is what happens
AFTER they have read everything there is to read, clearly and thoroughly worked out an idea in
their heads, and have large blocks of time to empty the fully-developed idea onto the page (or
into the computer).” Writing may be merely the physical act of thought transcription, but
sometimes getting words on paper isn’t as simple as it seems, hence the term writers block. In
order to combat the disconnect between brain and paper, Rockquemore advises a change in the
tool used to mediate writing.

“I’m not sure how to explain it, but there’s something that shifts in your brain when you move from writing on the computer to good old-fashioned pencil and paper. Many people find it helpful to change the mode of writing when they get stuck. It’s really quite simple,just push your keyboard off to the side, grab a pencil and paper, and start writing longhand through the problem. The changed format and tactile stimulation will help you to think differently.”

Professor Kerry Rockquemore

Personally, Rockquemore sometimes will try an eccentric medium to help get the ideas flowing
again, writing with magic markers on a giant easel pad of paper while writing on the floor.
The concept that writing is an equivalent of thought is not a new idea. Martin Heidegger,
a 19th century German philosopher, is known for his treatise that thinking occurs in the hand
when discussing the writing process. He followed the philosopher Daesin’s beliefs on what
constitutes meaning, but differentiated that being occurs not through physical existence but
through action. “A person is in any case given as a performer of intentional acts which are bound
together by the unity of a meaning” (Heidegger 48). Heidegger doesn’t think of being as merely
an abstract concept, but very grounded and in the world. One manifestation of in-the-world-ness
is portrayed through the physical act of writing.

The typewriter increased in popularity during Heidegger’s lifetime, and he was
adamantly against its use as a means of effective communication because it disrupted the handlanguage relationship, which in turn affected a fundamental aspect of being. He placed a great
importance on the hand as the distinction of man, and ties the word (abstract) to this hand
(physical). “Man himself acts through the hand; for the hand is, together with the word, the
essential distinction of man,” he wrote (Kittler 198). Derrida explains the importance Heidegger
places on the hand instead of, say, the voice or brain, in his collection of essays on
deconstructionism. The human hand fundamentally differs from the claws, talons, and paws of
the animal kingdom. To be human is to have hands. Another interesting concept is the idea that
both the brain and hand operate similarly in that they can grasp, whether object of phenomenon
(Derrida 173).

The problem occurs when we no longer use the hand to transcribe our thoughts according
to Heidegger. “The typewriter tears writing from the essential real of the hand, i.e., the realm of
the word” (Kittler 199). This removal of word from hand according to Heidegger is so unnatural
that it disrupts a man’s Being. Deciding to forego the pencil for Microsoft Word maybe seem
like an inconsequential choice, but if writing does affect basic thought processes, one can
concede that Heidegger’s views may not be so extremist.


“[Heidegger] seems to think that, when we write by hand, we are in closer, if not immediate contact with the event of meaning,for that which is written in this way preserves—maintains—the bodily felt dimensions of meaning carried by the gesture. The typewriter is a mediation that obliterates virtually all traces of this contact.”

KleinburgLevin

Most people would probably disregard Heidegger’s teaching and use a computer for
many reasons: efficiency of typing, ease of editing, and even rejection of the idea that there is a
tangible difference between typed and handwritten words. However, Steven Connor argues in a
paper given at the Modernism and the Technology of Writing Conference that typing is even
more embodied than handwriting. Hands are used to type, just as they are in holding a pencil.
“First of all, typing involves a move from the hand, tapered to a single operative point to the
participation of the whole hand, and the use of the fingers, which spray out letters in complex
chords and arpeggios, rather than playing the single line melody that writing involves Typing
inherits the phenomenology of activities like music and sewing, both of which are characterized
by the suppleness of the fingers rather than the strength of the hand,” he wrote in his essay. “The
other important factor in typing is that it involves two hands. This is the most striking inattention
involved in Heidegger’s view of the amputation of the hand. Typing does not remove the hand: it
multiplies it” (Connor). Other analysts disagree, saying that clearly there is a difference in
hitting a key and forming strokes with a pen. Angelo Beyerlen, engineer and founder of first
German typewriter business, offered the following explanation:

“In writing by hand, the eye must constantly watch the written line and only that. It must attend to the creation of each written line,must measure, direct, and, in short,guide the hand through each movement. For this, the written line, particularly the line being written, must be visible. By contrast, after one presses down briefly on a key, the typewriter creates in the proper position on the paper a complete letter,which not only isuntouched by the writer’s hand,but is also located in a space entirely apart from where the hands work.”

Angelo Beyerlen, quote pulled from kittler

Modern psychologists agree with typewriter-era philosophers on the notable differences
between handwriting and typing. The Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in Marseille, France
conducted a study in 2006 to try to pinpoint the neural activity that causes the difference in
thought. Researchers created a fake alphabet with complicated characters, and then asked
subjects practice learning the “the language” either by typing the characters or writing them by
hand. Unsurprisingly, hand-writers retained their knowledge of the alphabet more accurately up
to three weeks later when tested. This was because when typing, the movement to create a
character, i.e. press a key, varied based on the key the finger typed before it. For handwriting, the
movement of forming characters is always the same, reinforcing itself.

“In brief, handwriting provides on-line signals from several sources including vision, motor commands and kinaesthetic feedback, which are closely linked and simultaneously distributed in time. No such spatio-temporal pattern occurs in typewriting.”

Longcamp, Marieke, et al

A few years later, another study sought to measure handwriting’s effectiveness based on
how writing verses typing works when it comes to encapsulating meaning. They measured the
synthesis of meaning in text through college students taking notes on a lecture. Researchers
found that the students who handwrote notes had a significantly better understanding of the
material. “Ironically, the very feature that makes laptop note-taking so appealing – the ability to
take notes more quickly – was what undermined learning. When using a laptop, note-takers tend
to transcribe lecture content verbatim,” stated Princeton’s famous study. “However, because
handwriting is slower, pen and paper note-takers are not able to transcribe the content verbatim
and are forced to selectively rephrase the material; doing so helps them process and understand
the material more deeply and gain better conceptual mastery” (Meuller and Oppenheimer). The
efficiency of typing is what hindered the replication of meaning in written text. The results are
shocking, considering the prevalence of computer-based writing in current academic culture.
Princeton researchers found that 41% of college students use laptops for taking notes according
to (which is currently being shown to be a very conservative estimate), and according to another
survey conducted in Britain, 1 and 3 people hadn’t hand written anything, grocery lists included,
in the past 3 months (Chemin).

Neuroscientists are reaching the same conclusion Heidegger did eighty years earlier in
Being and Time, about divining meaning through the physical process of writing, even though
both approach the topic from vastly different angles. The thought processes that go on in our
brains and the physical process of writing are clearly influencing each other, and the medium
with which you write can clearly affect how the processes work. In the words of Nietzsche, “Our
writing tools are also working on our thoughts” (Kittler 200).

However, no amount of philosopher’s proof or psychological evidence matters as much
as the practice of simply writing. If the purpose of writing is to express thoughts and produce
text, then average readers are not interested in how the writing is produced; they want to know if
the finished product is enjoyable, educational, and excellent. As for how to produce this type of
writing, in the words of writer John Luzum, “Um, of course it’s subjective!”
Luzum, an International Affairs student at Georgia Tech, has been writing fiction since
middle school, anything from poetry to short stories to full-length novels centering around
themes of loss of childhood and innocence. In previous years some of his poetry has been
published, but he keeps most of his work secret, preferring the process of writing to editing and
showcasing. He claims that in an ideal world, he would write everything by hand, but for
anything longer than a poem, he uses Microsoft Word. He writes around 3000 words in one day,
and describes the physicality of holding a pen for that long, “painful.” “Writing is pain,” he said
when asked about his preference for pen and paper. “It’s something that needs to get out, and it’s
more personal with just you and a physical blank page.” Most of Luzum’s poetry centers around
themes of coming-of-age and loss of innocence, and which he described as a search for meaning
in his own memories. Perhaps the draw to embodied methods of writing to process meaning and
existence is what Heidegger refers to as the “transformation occurred in relation from being to
Man” when one types instead of hand-writes.

“Writing is pain. It’s something that needs to get out, and it’s more personal with just you and a physical blank page.”

John luzum, personal interview

Other prominent published authors would agree as well. Quentin Tarintino, a screenplay
writer known for Pulp Fiction and other cult classics prefers to handwrite the entire first draft of
his screenplays. “It’s a ceremony. I go to a stationary store and buy a notebook – and I don’t buy
like ten. I just buy one and then fill it up. Then I buy a bunch of red felt pens and a bunch of
black ones, and I’m like, ‘These are the pens I’m going to write ‘Grindhouse’ with,’” he said in
an interview with Reuters (Blair). Novelist Amy Tan also prefers non-digital writing for its
painstaking slowness as she works through the story and her characters. Her approach to the
writing process is to write “microscopically” according to an interview with The Atlantic. The
process of writing out words by hand helps her to slow down enough to think through minute
details of characters.

“For me, the best way to do this is writing longhand, the way I write the early drafts of a novel. Writing by hand helps me remain open to all those particular circumstances, all those little details that add up to the truth.”

Amy tan, quoted by fassler

Reviewers noticed this too, calling her characters in A Valley of Amazement “memorably
idiosyncratic…given further depth by Tan’s affecting depictions of mothers and daughters”
(Downer). The medium the first draft can influence a finished work.

While the physical hand-writing process works for some, most modern-day fiction
writers do use laptops to draft their novels, whether in a word processor or other software. For
Casey Millette, emerging author of a fantasy trilogy soon to be published by Parliament Press,
typing is the only practical way to amass the amount of words necessary for the story in a short
amount of time. “For all my outlines, notes, and character quotes that randomly come to my
head, I keep in a big, leather notebook,” said Millette in an email interview. “Otherwise, I
typically like to type, because it gets the job done. I don`t have to worry about annoying things
like my pencil/eraser wearing out or my hand cramping up!” Millette agrees that the writing
process is important to be “self-aware” of, but that handwriting isn’t the only means to process
thoughts.

Marissa Meyer, author of the Lunar chronicles also lets her ideas flow into a laptop
directly as she drafts her fantasy young adult novels, but she uses a paid software called
Scrivener that allows for added dimensions and flexibility within the manuscript. Meyer also
prefers very visual overview of the in-beta novel within Scrivener, with color coded chapters and
keywords. The non-linear fashion makes it easy to write subplots separately and then weave
them together in the proper order at the end of the writing process.

Works Cited

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