Freehand
In the earliest days of my writing, I remember the giddy excitement of a new journal- the crisp, lined paper; stiff binding; the pleasant heft and solidity of a book I could call my own. It’s been years since I carried a notebook with me; and while I’ve tried time and time again, with marbles and moleskins, legal pads and leather-bound diaries, I can never will myself to use such books as they deserve.
My fingers itch for the decisive click of the computer keyboard. Each time I set myself to a task, the steady clatter of the plastic eggs me on, assuring me that my pace is swift and fluid. When I begin writing a poem with pen and pencil, my hands go stiff and my palm cramps up within minutes. The words appear childish, smudgy and cramped and overly loopy as I scrawl them across the bald, judgemental surface of the paper. What has my writing come to, that I shy away from its most natural form?
In an age where technology advances by the day, it would seem my generation made the last great stand for freehand writing. I graduated from an elementary school system that still treated cursive as a serious and necessary skill. I practiced penmanship for whole class periods so that I could do proper service to the English language. Now, I couldn’t write a full sentence in script if you paid me. The people ten, even five years younger than me, have never even encountered a teacher who demanded an assignment in such an archaic structure. Yet, sadly, this desertion of elaborate penmanship is an American phenomenon. While we churn through a growing vocabulary of lol and brb, Asia and Europe still appear to be producing students with a respect for the art of handwriting and the skills to match.
What is the harm in the loss of freehand? To the everyday person, perhaps nothing. Typing is faster, more efficient, more permanent. With spell check, email, and texting, the human hands have become adept at commiting thoughts to tiny, perfect font that can be sent anywhere at anytime. However, the writing community still mounts a brave defense on behalf of the printed word. My most recent creative writing professor insisted that first drafts always be attempted on hard paper. She told the class that typing allowed for too much detachment from the physical and emotional investment of poetry, and for far too much self editing.
And it’s true; there’s something fundamentally inorganic and cold about watching words fall out in seamless, characterless computer fonts, spreading out in flat, regimented lines in which every word is open to flourescent-back-lit scrutiny. I often find I can get no farther than a paragraph while typing before I jump backwards and begin tweaking, tugging, picking and mending. This is no way to write any draft, save the final one, because it renders our own words a foreign and expressionless entity. Handwriting, dexterity and use of the page, attention to grammer and structure- these are things that are unique to each writer and make each line of poetry an extension of the pen, the hand, the person. We betray our own instincts and our own creative nature when we sucumb to the spell check, the blaring underline of an improper grammatical phrase, the automatic reformating of the paragraph, the capitalization of the first letter of every sentence. The process of poetry is one of release, of letting the mind slip slowly, tentatively into the sea of language where you let your hands guide you to the word you know is true. Freehand allows you to fumble through, make mistakes, space the words as you see fit, and let them come into being in the way that no one else can duplicate. So recently I have forced myself to write my poetry on real paper, feeling the weight of the pen in my hand, its humble, limitless potential, a real tool for a real task. I let my handwriting become part of the art itself- a visceral experience rather than a disengaged electronic one.
-Sarah LeWarn
