Keyboard? Or pen & paper?

During the “live, timed writing” sessions in Almost Writers Club, we stay on zoom, set our timers, mute ourselves and write, distraction-free, for 40 minutes. I do look up to peek while we’re writing, curious to see who’s typing, and who’s writing, longhand we used to call it, with pen & paper.

I’m also curious to know… if one way is better than the other.

I’m a typer. I mean, I put words down for a living and I gotta say, it’s been a long time since I used a pen for much other than a grocery list. I now type faster than I write, I love knowing I can easily fix & move things around later, and sometimes I’ll even gaze out the window while I’m laying text down. (Who’s car is that? Is someone getting flowers? Birthday? Anniversary perhaps?)

A friend of mine, Susan, insists writing it out works better for her. When I asked her why, she emailed me that “writing by hand (as opposed to typing) actually engages your brain in a whole different way. Am not sure of the details but the physical act of writing by hand activates a different part of our brain - and maybe makes us more creative?”

What?! More creative? Am I missing something super important? Am I cheating myself, and my clients, of the fully-engaged awesomeness of my own creativity?!? Could there <gasp> be a better way for me to get ideas out of my head and in front of others’ eyes?

So yes, I had to google that.

Susan is right… writing longhand does light up the brain differently. It takes more neurons to control the fine motor skills we need to join letters into words and words into lines of writing. All the research I saw, however, evaluated the effect of writing longhand on learning, not creativity.

“After analyzing the brain activity taken from the experiment, researchers found that areas of the brain correlated with working memory and encoding new information were more active during handwriting. This echoes previous studies … which have shown that writing notes by hand allowed participants to retain information better than those who typed on a laptop, even if they wrote less (< ahem> fewer) words overall,” says this grammatically incorrect CTV web story.

A Frontiers in Psychology abstract backs this up: “We concluded that because of the benefits for sensory-motor integration and learning, traditional handwritten notes are preferably combined with visualizations (e.g., small drawings, shapes, arrows, symbols) to facilitate and optimize learning.”

I can totally see how the extra effort in writing out your lecture notes, adding diagrams, and developing a complex system of colour-coding with fancy pens (amiright?) would make a lesson ‘stickier’.

But learning is not the same as creating.

There are prolific, hold-out authors who swear by pen and paper, like J. K. Rowling, Stephen King and Quentin Tarantino (sayeth the internet). I expect there are even more authors who will tell you it’s way faster and more practical to build a manuscript with word processing software. Although I can’t give you any names because apparently “Authors who, get this, TYPE! straight into Word!” isn’t sexy enough for anyone to create a list about. 

In my profession, I often need to be “creative on cue.” And many of the supposed benefits of writing by hand, lauded in blogs and opinion pieces, actually have nothing to do with pen vs computer, and everything to do with determination, intention and good habits.

“You don’t get distracted by tabs and notifications when you write longhand.” 

Trust me, you can be distracted by anything if you don’t want to write: uncomfortable socks, dishes, the folks across the street getting flowers delivered. Pen or keyboard, best practice is to close down tabs, clean up your desktop, and silence the pings when it’s time to write. 

“There’s something inviting about a new journal, a clean page.”

Yes, or there’s something terrifying about a whole book of blank pages. It kinda depends on your mental state that day. If you’re in the throes of writer’s block, both the blank page AND the blinking cursor are your enemies. Perhaps you haven’t met the writer’s best friend, the Template. I started this post with my go-to blog template which has question prompts, headings and thought starters built-in. Sometimes when I’m stuck I’ll start with a past-client email, jump to the middle, and start writing from there.  

That’s when I’m having trouble getting started. When I have a project I’m looking forward to and  some ideas I’m ready to explore, I get a small thrill opening up Microsoft Word, filling in headers and footers, choosing a filename and picking the right font for the job. I mean, that, to me, feels pretty creative… hopelessly nerdy, but still creative.

“At the pace of handwriting, you don’t have to worry about your hands outpacing your brain.”

That right there feels like a drawback to me. What if you can’t keep up to your brain? What if you can’t write fast enough? What about all those ideas that perish while you rifle through notes for a source? What about the great turn of phrase or intrusive word you’ll want to use later. With my beloved Shitty First Draft system, I get to slam out a true free-flow of ideas until I’m spent. They don’t have to fit, they don’t have to follow, there’s no need for order or sequence. You can “just put that over there” for later. The original version of this post had a bunch of weblinks as margin comments, outline subheads in blue, numbered lists, underlined questions, italics, terrible bits formatted to red… I don’t delete or scratch anything out, I just put it aside, move it further down. And keep writing. This helps me stay writing in flow.

But then there’s this.

“You may doodle as you speak on the telephone and find it soothing. You may write a personal journal and find that as you write, your feelings and ideas change. Perhaps you write down your dreams and look for patterns and symbols. You may paint or sculpt as a hobby and realize the intensity of the experience transports you out of your everyday problems. Or perhaps you sing while you drive or go for long walks. These exemplify self-expression through movement, sound, writing, and art to alter your state of being. They are ways to release your feelings, clear your mind, raise your spirits, and bring yourself into higher states of consciousness. The process is therapeutic.”  from The Path to Wholeness: Person-Centered Expressive Arts Therapy, by Natalie Rogers.

Capturing thoughts and feelings in words, whatever tools you choose, is “self-expression through writing” and, yes, it absolutely can “alter your state of being.” Sitting in a comfortable chair, lighting a scented candle, playing background music, pouring another cup of coffee, and letting words flow onto the screen or a moleskine notebook is a multi-sensory experience.

Here’s what I will concede to Susan: what typing lacks is therapeutic motion. I don’t think key-tapping can count as “self-expression through movement.” And maybe writing longhand can.

I *think* that’s what Susan was pointing me to … the rhythmic movement of the arm, the increased flow of blood, the smooth, repetitive, calming motion. Typing doesn’t offer that. Maybe that’s a Creativity Double-Whammy.

In terms of therapeutic movement, writing longhand can’t compare to, say, dancing, paddling or a sunset hike. Which undoubtedly are great for any author’s creativity, before they sit down to write.

Susan has convinced me that writing a first draft by hand is worth trying again. To see how it feels, to notice how it’s different, to shake things up. That in itself may fire up some new creative neurons in me. 

And I’m also convinced that I’m not doing it wrong. That my creativity is complicated, fueled more by mood, setting, intention, time of day, and habits than by which tool I choose.

Which means YOU can’t be wrong either. Pen & paper. Fancy pen and fancy paper. High tech writing software. Laptop. Keyboard. Speech-to-text. Please. Express yourself.

Write it down. Get it out. Go be creative.

I’m going to turn on the comments for this one because I’m dying to know, now that I feel we’ve established no way is better (sexier, smarter, more romantic, more effective, more widely preferred…) than any other…  

What are your most favourite writing tools? And what do you think it is about them that make you feel more creative?

(Oh! And do you think my ultimate writing device might be the Smart Pen? The best of both word processing-fine motor movement worlds? Maybe it’s time I give that a try….)