Tag Archives: handwriting

Non-fiction

writing with your left hand

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I’m always into mental hacks, I guess they’re called, little things that get me ahead. A post on Facebook was about writing longhand and if it’s effective, and people left comments about the benefits, such as how you use your whole body to draw letters on a piece of paper with pen in hand as opposed to the automatic nature of typing. I didn’t know if it went as far as that, but I did know that after writing longhand for many years every morning that it definitely slowed my thoughts because it took drastically longer to write a word than it did to type.

But one person commented that they wrote longhand with their left hand to activate the right brain, which therefore unearthed their repressed memories and their inner child. As someone who always wanted to find some new approach to my craft, I penned a page with my left hand the next morning.

What I found out at first was that my handwriting looked like it was from that of a four-year-old. The letters were very runny, like a busted yolk, almost like the objects in an abstract painting, and for the most part, illegible. And it took so long to craft each word that the sentences were overly simple. I spent a half hour composing a whole page, and the content was similar to the content I’d penned with my right hand. But what I found after that first morning was a sense of calm afterward. My anxieties were at bay. It felt like I’d just stepped away from a therapist, and I could go on with my day more confident.

Maybe it was a placebo. I googled research on left-handed writing and found mixed answers. Some people had blogged about astounding results in that they were able to channel creativity and their inner child with the use of their right brain. Other articles negated the unlocked power and said there was no scientific evidence of left-handed writing activating the right hemisphere and unlocking creativity. What a bummer. I do beg the question. Is someone who’s naturally left-handed fortunately more creative than someone who’s right-handed? Nevertheless, we can train ourselves to be ambidextrous regardless of whether the left-handed phenomenon is bogus. There’s no harm in that.

But I do believe the placebo is real. If a writer feels it works, it works. Writers can be superstitious as such that some of them wear the same hat when they write. Others keep a pet rock at their desk to invite their muse like it’s a plate of cookies for Santa Claus. After all, creativity and the imagination bloom when the writer handcuffs himself.

I once wrote a short story where I never used the letter k, so I had to be mindful to use words that didn’t contain that letter. That restraint allowed me to discover new ideas.

I’m fascinated by the Oulipo movement, which was a sixties movement of French writers who enforced such restraints. One of them, for example, was called N+7, where they took every noun from a poem, grabbed a dictionary, and chose the noun that was seven nouns down and replaced it with that. Some of the outcomes were absurd, but it was all part of the games the Oulipo movement played. One novel was completely written without the letter e. Don’t ask how that was accomplished, but I bet it forced the writer to form new ideas he’d never before imagined.

https://www.languageisavirus.com/creative-writing-techniques/oulipo.php#.X0GpOdNKhb9

Non-fiction

Writing on a Laptop.

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It still feels funny to me, writing on this laptop. I write in longhand every morning, and it’s tiring tiring tiring. But that was how they used to do it back before the typewriter. It’s hard to imagine people used to write letters to each other rather than send text messages or emails.

I don’t know why it feels weird. It must be that it’s artificial. I can produce with a hand and a pen in a different sort of way. My thoughts are copied quicker on this machine than they are with a pen and paper, but that doesn’t make it better. It makes it lazier.

I copy my stories from longhand. The problem is I can’t read my own friggin’ handwriting. It’s as sloppy as spaghetti. My alphabetical letters look like squashed insects. Squashed black insects because of the black ink. I choose not to write with blue ink every morning when I journal.

Some people are opposed to journaling. I don’t understand them. How do they jump right out to writing without warming up? That would be like skipping stretching.

Journaling is hard work. I usually write the same crap every day, but I know better not to show it to anyone. No one would want to read it anyway. They would think, “My god, what is this person doing?” Or “Lock this person up.” Yes, some morbid thoughts intrude in the morning. They’re distracted as the day continues by worries such as my job. I would rather keep those thoughts and bottle them up for later, but they dissipate like dreams. Then I’m stuck with dull thoughts, like what shall I do later?

I’m reading a book. I’m always reading a book, except my ADHD doesn’t allow me to focus. The books I read are long, such as The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. Damn, it’s long and dense. I have no idea what I’m reading.

But anyway, my laptop is a fountain of activity. I use everything for it, it seems, as it pertains to writing. But I can’t just dive into it without my stretches. I have to get loose, and this is one way of doing it. If only I could read my own handwriting, I could write a whole book that I copied by longhand.

But no. I have to do it the hard, unnatural way, and that’s by jamming these keys with these fingers and pressing ENTER every time I finish a thought. That’s right. I space it out like a weirdo and then go back and form these paragraphs to fit the prose together.

What’s the proper way to form a paragraph? Do I even know, or do I just make an attempt? I never diagram sentences. They never taught me how to do it. When I was in high school, they showed me how to outline, which was the worst thing they could’ve done. I’m terrible at outlining. A. Ab. Ab1 Ba1. How much more confusing can it get? I always skipped the process and dove right into the writing.

Of course, my mother would help. She showed me a short story I’d written in elementary school. It was obvious that she’d helped me. I didn’t have such a rich vocabulary when I was eight, but she swore I’d written it on my own. Yeah, right. But I guess I’ll take the credit.

Anyway, this laptop has saved a lot of time and effort. I just wish I was born in the age of the typewriter. It would’ve taught me much more discipline. I would’ve had to toss the page after a typo and start all over, not simply tap DELETE. Oh, well.