Suzanne Askham

Fiction notes: Can writing by hand improve a novel?

The scratch of pen against paper, and the flow of midnight ink. A rustle of turning pages, and the feel of a notebook against skin… When we write by hand, our senses get involved. It’s a tactile experience, involving texture and sound and even the evocative scent of the writing materials. 

Contemporary authors have been known to write by hand. JK Rowling, for example, scrawled Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in notebooks in an Edinburgh café; Stephen King wrote Dreamcatcher by hand as a sort of pain-reducing therapy while recovering from a serious car accident; and Neil Gaiman hand-wrote Stardust, to help him to feel closer to that novel’s Victorian setting. All three novelists have continued to put literal pen to paper in later works, and they all use fountain pens to do so.

Why would any author opt for the relative messiness of an ink pot? Using a keyboard is generally much faster; you can move words around every which way in a document, and of course you don’t end up with ink-stained fingers. But tapping onto a keyboard does not please the senses in quite the same way. It seems that the extra effort involved in handwriting helps our brains to work differently, and that can be useful. 

I have yet to write a full-length book by hand. Maybe, one day, I will. However, for every work in progress, I do keep a daily notebook. The jottings in it – about plot, and character, and dialogue that comes to me willy-nilly at any time of day and night – are hugely useful. They’re helpful for the creative process, and they bring contentment. When the nib touches paper, and the ink flows, I’m convinced that ideas flow too, in sensory and meditative ways. 

How about you? Do you ever write by hand? And have you penned, or would you pen, an entire book by hand, inky fingers and all?