Reclaim Your Focus Through Handwriting
How to combat procrastination and distractions induced by digital writing
This post is written partially to put to words some thoughts I’ve had in the past few months to “paper,” and to jump off a post written by
on this exact topic. In the new year, people are inclined to make changes in order to strive towards being better. One of my resolutions is to reconnect myself with a more organic process of writing and literature by exposing myself to more analog mediums of the craft (e.g., physical books and handwriting). I believe this would not only make me a better writer, but help me find more joy in ideas and creations that exist beyond the confines of the screen.I would also thoroughly recommend reading Hall’s piece as well:
It is no wonder that handwriting, save for extremely specialized professions, is not a skill that is emphasized in the current professional world or even education. With how convenient and often times necessary writing is on devices for business and leisure, and how little physical space they can take up, it’s the easy choice to type out notes on your phone or laptop and keep them tucked away in the handy-dandy cloud storage run by corporations that are definitely not scraping your files to train their AI models. The issue with writing on screens is the convenience aspect. What’s also convenient about these devices is that they can fulfill almost every possible desire or need humans might have concerning the cyberspace. Looking for a definition on something? Just Google it! Looks like your friends just messaged you and shared a meme! Time to scroll for more! Now there’s a calendar alert, then an email, then a new game update… Next thing you know, your attention and time has been sucked into the blackhole of a smartphone screen, and the notes for your story are still waiting in that untitled document, tucked away on your OneDrive.
I, like many others, have been swept up in the hustle and dopamine-scraping activities of digital media and convenience over the past few years. I found myself surrounded by loads of books and empty journals remaining unread and unfilled, yet the glow of the screen kept pulling me back to it. In recent months, I have been striving to move back towards the lower-tech lifestyle I had prior to college. The one thing that has proven successful in clearing away the distractions induced by my devices, more so than even forcing myself to read a physical book or taking a walk outside—handwriting.
Above, I lamented how the convenience of digital writing has seemingly made handwriting unnecessary for really anything involving business, creativity, or communication. The results are instant and any errors can be easily amended through spellcheckers built into word processors or phone keyboards. It is during discourses like this that I am reminded of the final six lines in the Code of Ethics1 published by the Northmen Guild, a guild of master craftsmen based in Latvia:
More time, less convenience
Craft, not business
Value, not price
Quality, not quantity
To create, not to produce
Hands, not machines
Handwriting my stories or articles in earnest, not for the sake of simply taking notes reminded me of the simple fact that writing as a whole is a craft. When a carpenter or a blacksmith learns his trade, his master doesn’t immediately set him in front of a machine that manufactures whatever it is he is commissioned to make. The craftsman starts from the beginning, working with his hands, following the words and actions of his elders. He familiarizes himself with the tools and the process of how to craft things one step at a time. This education enables him to imagine and construct chairs, tables, beds, and even entire buildings that have been shaped by the human hand and mind working simultaneously.
The craft of writing should be considered no different.
Whenever I write in a simple notebook, the only thing I’m really thinking of is getting the words onto the paper. I don’t care about the formatting, I’m not distracted by a digital interface telling me how many words I’ve written, and I know for certain I’m the only one who will be reading it for the time being. Instead of laying my hands flat on a keyboard, I constantly move them as I write and adjust the pages I’m working on. My eyes are fixed, unfettered by the glow of a screen, on the lines and curves flowing out of my pen, forming the words that represent whatever I’m dreaming up in my head. The process is, taking a word used by Hall in his article, “mystical.” If the draft I write on paper is only something that I’m going to read before sharing, it doesn’t matter if it makes sense to onlookers or if they could even read my scrawl in the first place. The handwritten draft is a sort of “secret” that I can keep to myself. It is not the finished product, but it is a piece that I have nonetheless spent hours working on from my own imagination and materializing it with my own hand. In doing so, I sometimes find myself returning to a state of mind I had when I was younger and still working with paper and pen since computer access was blocked out for specific times. I couldn’t look anything up for inspiration but I also couldn’t get distracted by whatever Google was putting out there to ensnare my attention. It was a simpler time when I only had my thoughts to keep me company and something to write them down on.
That time in my life is something I would seek to replicate with my own writing this year. The wonder and simplicity of writing with only the most basic set of tools is a powerful thing any writer can employ when sitting down to draft out a story or poem or essay. The absence of the screen forces you to live in the moment, grappling with your own thoughts in your own mind without some artificial assistance. By removing the digital editor, it makes the internal editor even less powerful, ironic as it may sound. This is because, on piece of paper, unless you are deliberately looking for mistakes, you won’t notice any. A word document is built to recognize errors and give suggestions whether the writer wants them or not, which signals the writer into thinking it’s not perfect. Without the screen, you can tune out the notable errors or annoying suggestions that attempt to fundamentally change how you write. When you are able to write, uninterrupted and unadulterated, it’s easier to slip into a “flow state” where your only goal is to put words on the page, releasing the idea in your head. Stephen King, in an interview with CNN, describes this as “self-hypnosis,” which is what the deepest trance of a flow state can feel like:
As a writer, you have to trick yourself into engaging with the hands-on craft of it. Whether it is your livelihood, a hobby, or a craft that may become your livelihood the story will only stay in your head until you get it onto paper. The keyword there is “paper,” not on a screen that is formatted to resemble a blank sheet of paper. The very word “screen” even has connotations of something going through a sieve or being blocked entirely. While the digital draft is necessary for fine tuning and publishing a written piece, it is wise to “feel” it with your own hands in an actual, physical draft riddled with errors and symbols that seem esoteric to onlookers but make perfect sense in your own eye. In a journal or on a piece of paper, there is no screen; there is no barrier for you to write, sketch, jot, scrawl, shape, or craft anything you feel like you must or want to free from your skull.
Handwriting is a return to the elementary form of the craft. For writers in this day and age, it shouldn’t be a novelty but the first step in the process of any sort of writing. The screen is laden with distractions, no matter how dumbed down or disconnected someone might make it—its manufacturers made it with the intention of it being an all-in-one tool to capture your attention and energy. A journal, paired with a pen, has a very simple purpose: to be filled with words.
Thanks for reading this week’s post! How do you normally write when it comes to creative pieces? How long has it been since you’ve handwritten a draft?
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This code is also beautifully narrated in this video:
Thanks to TK Hall for me leading me here! Nothing speaks louder to me than pen on paper!
There is undeniably a pen (hand) to brain connection that is lost when using a keyboard and screen. Just thinking back to my elementary school homework of writing our spelling words 10x each, and realizing how the learning is cemented in your mind, is evidence of that connection. When writing for creative purposes, I also believe that the connection from the hand goes beyond the brain and incorporates that intangible essence that a writer pours into the craft.
Those Northmen seem like some cool dudes. We should all spend some time In Latvia.