Do you enjoy writing with a pen? I keep journals and notebooks around, but find that over the years I’ve taken to storing notes in “the cloud”, which means typing. The great part about digital text is the ease with which you can move it around without re-writing the letters down one at a time. That said, there’s something to be said for labouring and lingering over a word and its constituent letters and sounds. In the end, as a Gen Xer stuck between the analog and digital worlds, I like the IDEA that I like writing by pen, but often find the digital world more convenient. So I will continue employing a mixture of both worlds (the romance of the pen and the function of the screen) so long as my fingers stay limber enough to move. (Also, I’d probably use paper more if I could read my own handwriting, which oscillates between cursive, print, and ALL CAPS, for some reason.)
Read a creative essay on the above at LitHub.
One
To write a poignant sentence or a precise description is a joy, but the pleasure of writing is not content-dependent. Making marks is the thing. I have distinctive penmanship—small letters, precisely assembled, compact but not cramped, legible. But sloppier, dashed-off notes come with their own satisfaction, a race between head and hand, stretching out letterforms from small blocks of ink to interconnected shapes that approach the undulating waves of my mother’s cursive.
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