Longhand Writing in a Digital World

My writing tools.
The Pencil kept sliding down the iPad;
I had to position it high and shoot fast.

Longhand or keyboard? I won’t call this the eternal writers’ debate, since even into the early twentieth century, writers sent handwritten manuscripts to their publishers.[1] Don’t try that now. Even tin the era when publishers would still read a manuscript in yours or someone else’s handwriting,[2] some still sent their manuscripts to be typed (Oscar Wilde, for one). It doesn’t matter how beautiful your handwriting is, no publishers wants to see 5,000 or especially 80,000 words of it. I, for one, doubt my ability to turn out 5,000 words in fair hand, while I know I can type my handwritten draft quickly and easily. I like to draft my fiction longhand.

I need to issue a series of caveats here: I am not a professionally published writer; if everyone who has my stories were to show up at my house for an impromptu cocktail party, I could cope.[3] When I’m writing for my blog, I do not typically draft things out in longhand, but instead compose while typing in a word processing application. For this blog post, I took the atypical step of writing a draft out by hand at first. It would have been faster to just do my typical thing, but it would miss the point.[4]

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