When I draft a chapter by hand, something magical happens.¹ It doesn’t matter if I am writing a piece of fiction or a blog post, like I am now. It doesn’t matter if I know exactly what I want to say, or if I’m just figuring it out as I go along … like I am now.

What happens is something that I can only describe as letting go. Letting go of the limitations of the computer screen — because isn’t the computer screen a limitation? It limits through its accessibility. Through its flexibility. Through its permissiveness. You can always change things when you type them into a computer, and that almost always means that you have to change things. Fix them. Edit them to perfection.

But a pen and paper removes the limitation of perfection. I don’t have to be perfect here — I can write the words that come to my head without worrying if they make sense or not.

I know that sounds confusing — how is it better to not make sense? Because its only by sticking with the words as they come out of my head that I can get to the place where they were leading me all along.

On the computer, I edit out the nonsense as I go along. And even if it’s — I’m not sure where I was going with that thought.

Going back to edit, to perfect sentences into clearly stated thoughts and conclusions, interrupts the original thoughts. It’s like when the wolf led Little Red Riding Hood astray in the woods — sure the flowers she picked were pretty, but by the time she got to grandma’s house, it was too late to save her.

Ok, maybe that is not the best metaphor in the bouquet, but it is an honest one.

When I don’t know what I want to say, I figure it out better by sitting down to write it by hand.

Later, I’ll transcribe it to the computer (or not — sometimes it turns out what I had to say isn’t that important). The cleaned up version will have some improvements — more examples, maybe, better metaphor. But the heart of the piece — the thing that makes it feel alive — that only comes when I first lay down the words with paper and ink.

That’s when I feel most like a writer, and not just a content marketer or blogger or whatever.

I’m losing my thread now. And I feel like I’m dismissing writing done at the computer — but I’m not! I write a lot of stuff at the computer! Though I did write a whole novel by hand once, I’ve never done anything with it because by and large the thought of transcribing it gives me gut pains.

But see, this would never happen in a typed piece, this figuring out what i want to say, following the path each word is laying out for me to follow. It is messy, a special kind of magic spell that works for me every time, when I know what I want to write about but I don’t know what to actually write.

Does this piece have a point? Could I include things about how writing by hand is proven to be better for memory and all that?

[insert some writing by hand info]

I could. But those things aren’t magic.

The way words just appear on the page as I glide my pen across — that is magic. My mind and my heart seem to slip into a kind of synchronicity, and if I’m lucky my hand will be able to keep up (it helps if the pen doesn’t run out of ink in the middle of it!).

I’ll get to the end eventually and it’s a guarantee that I wont’ like everything I put on the page.

But what is there is something that I never would have found by typing something, more raw, more honest, more true than the words that come out the other way.

And that is how I know it’s magic.