An Old Fashioned Secret For Injecting Some Life Back Into Your Writing
Last week my friend Mark Tapson published a thoughtful contribution over at Emily Esfahani Smith’s Acculturated Symposium on Language: “How Technology Democratizes and Degrades Writing. Here’s his conclusion:
Once we lose the ability and desire to convey an emotion in our own words, not with a one-size-fits-all lol or plug-in emoticon, then we no longer express ourselves truly and clearly and beautifully. My middle school students didn’t see the value in the demanding mental exercise of meditation, organization, and precision of language that good writing requires. In the long run, their apathy and fascination with the rapid-fire ephemera of the digital realm will surely erode their ability to express themselves fully as individuals, even to think deeply.
The late John Updike claimed to write his nonfiction on a typewriter but his fiction with a pencil because it provided the intimacy necessary to bring his characters to life. Surely this must seem inexplicable and comically quaint to today’s youth. But they’d be better off unplugging occasionally and connecting with those “slow conventions of narrative” of the pre-digital era.
Read the whole thing for more of Mark’s insights on his time teaching a less literate generation and the power of technology to transform how we use language.
Updike typing nonfiction vs writing fiction in longhand reminds me of a tip I passed on to one of PJ Lifestyle’s contributors when he lamented his writer’s block to me a few months ago: take a step backwards, buy a journal, and pick up a pen again.
I’ve kept a hand-written journal off-and-on for the last 18 years — since I was in fifth grade. After experimenting with a variety of shapes and sizes I’ve settled on the extra large Moleskine plain notebook, a gift from my wife this year. Some of the neat benefits of the Moleskine: very sturdy binding, elastic snap that wraps around to keep it sealed shut, large pocket for loose papers in the back, and the classy black cover.
For journaling I’ve come to appreciate the larger size journals — the extra space gives more room for doing the kinds of writing tasks where the non-virtual page still triumphs. You have plenty of space for sketching and diagramming or pasting in notes.
And it’s that kind of experimenting that we need sometimes to push ourselves to think outside of the box and come up with new ideas that we’re excited to write out and share with the world.
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More on writing at PJ Lifestyle:
So, write in pencil and publish electronically, really?
Unfortunately, my handwriting is so atrocious I often can’t read it. Writing by hand just doesn’t work for me.
Well that means that writing by hand would do two things. First it would force you to work on your penmanship, a lost art,these days. AND it would ask you to slow down.
Though it is difficult and is slower than typing. There are some good benefits to hand writing. I know it has helped my writing. I encourage you to at least try and take your time. Who knows it could grow on you.
I wrote a novel this Spring. Started on a computer but as thing’s became more complex I would go lay down and daydream (meditate?) and then write a section by hand and then enter it in the computer and do it all again. I didn’t have an outline or even an ending. Wrote 2 more novels with no outline as sequels. The odd thing is they all came out to 55,000 words – by coincidence. Total time: 2 months. Was fun. I never took a break of even one day.
Why is there so much bad writing on this web site, then?
We write badly because our desire to communicate quickly trumps the need to write well. But we still recognize and celebrate those who write well.