𝔉𝔢𝔲𝔦𝔩𝔩𝔢𝔱𝔬𝔫: Pen, Paper, Keyboard

𝚆𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝚍𝚒𝚍 𝚑𝚎 𝚍𝚘 𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚑 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚝𝚢𝚙𝚎𝚠𝚛𝚒𝚝𝚎𝚛 𝙱𝚞𝚋𝚒𝚜 𝚑𝚊𝚍 𝚐𝚒𝚟𝚎𝚗 𝚑𝚒𝚖? 𝙷𝚎 𝚏𝚕𝚞𝚗𝚐 𝚒𝚝 𝚘𝚏𝚏 𝚊 𝚌𝚕𝚒𝚏𝚏 𝚘𝚗𝚝𝚘 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚛𝚘𝚌𝚔𝚜!

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When I was 15 or 16, I heard a very famous writer—whose event I attended last-minute somewhere within the recesses of the University of New Mexico—say something like:

You have to write your first drafts by hand, because typing on a computer gives everything a falsely finished look and makes you write poorly.

The thinking here seemed to be that a typed first draft (never mind the fact that most people are bad at formatting to say nothing of being their own typesetters) gives the visual impression that the work has already been “published” (finished off!) and is therefore adequate as it stands, which, further, will stop the writer from changing it as it (certainly) needs to be changed.

As happens when you hear an opinion on a subject that you have not first thoroughly considered yourself under the dim lantern-light of personal experience,¹ I took this to be a basic truth, that writing by hand is always somehow more serious than typing on a computer. For years and years, I always wrote by hand first (never pausing to consider that a keyboard, too, is operated precisely by hand), and if I did type, I regarded what appeared on the screen with a measure of distrust.

(I’m not going to say what writer it was that I heard speak at UNM! Too embarrassing! . . . But I listened to him, it was important for me at that age to hear advice—any advice!—no matter what it was, from someone who I believed would know. ⸻At the end of the event, which took place on or around Halloween, the writer threw bags of candy out to the crowd. After he ran out of candy and turned away to leave, he took the marker—seemingly as an afterthought—which he had used to sign books, faced the crowd one last time and hurled it over our heads. Without so much as stepping away from the standing-room-only spot I occupied near the back wall, I reached out and excaliburly closed my fist around the handwriting instrument.)

Years after integrating this piece of advice, I read Bolaño’s 2666. There’s a part where Hans Reiter (Benno von Archimboldi), the fictional author around whom the novel revolves, throws his typewriter off a cliff onto the rocks after buying a laptop computer that he uses to write all of his subsequent books. It’s not as if he throws his notepad and pencil into the ocean, but the anti-sentimental force of the image was enough to make the handwriting-first/only idea sound silly. Here was Archimboldi (I didn’t care that he was a fictional character—nothing matters less than this) throwing away his typewriter! It was as though Archimboldi (and Bolaño with him) had tossed the handwriting advice onto the rocks, too. And there was nothing romantic about this being thrown onto the rocks. The rocks were also discarded.

A temperamentally sympathetic image: I started typing more often and writing much, much more in general—by hand, just as much.

A few years later, I came across the advice exactly opposite to that of “handwriting first.” I don’t remember who said it, but it was something like this:

It’s good to type first because—by seeing the sentences regularized and controlled through font, spacing, margins and so on—one is able to distance oneself from the text in order to make more sober, depersonalized changes.

(It matters less what the rules of war are than that rules exist in the first place.)

This method, that of alienating oneself from the text so as to more appropriately judge it as something outside oneself, is one that I immediately felt to be correct—it confirmed what I had already emotionally decided while reading the computer-dashed-against-the-rocks passage from 2666.

It occurs to me now that the “handwriting first” advice only makes sense from the perspective of a writer who is already used to frequently seeing their work in print. What could such a writer possibly do with this advice?

The truth is that it doesn’t matter how you do it, in the same way that it probably doesn’t matter which translation of a book you read first: someone prefers Remembrance of Things Past to In Search of Lost Time. Either way, you’re reading Proust. Some trust the translations of Pevear–Volokhonsky, and others admire and remain with Constance Garnett for their Russian. It’s all Dostoevsky to me.

If you read both translations of a single text, the original may reveal something of itself to you like the hovering specter of a line of Augenmusik, played by neither the left nor the right hand and yet implied in the negative inflections between the two.

But there will always be people who sulk and hedge about not being able to read the original French or Russian or whatever. These whiners often use the precious, almost superstitious esteem in which they hold the original as an excuse to avoid the dangers of reading anything at all.

1. —which, as Céline puts it, illuminates only its beholder— . . .