Two months ago I finished a draft of the next Craft Sequence book. I collapsed for a week. Then, I began to type.
Wicked Problems will be the second book I’ve handwritten (since I was a kid anyway—I used to do everything by hand, because I didn’t have much access to computers), and I’m sorting out what it means to write a full novel this way. There are advantages and drawbacks.
The biggest advantage is that the work gets done at all. In 2018-2019 I noticed it was harder to write on a computer—the internet, politics, et cetera crept one into my attention loop, like those tiny attenuated roots that corkscrew through invisible cracks to shatter concrete.
After I became a parent, the concrete was well and truly shattered.
Parenting is a lot of work—maybe there’s someone for whom it’s not, for whom the work feels like their most profound telos and for whom the days are never long, someone whose well of emotional resources draws from the most profound aquifer of compassion and wisdom and mercy. I hope that person appreciates how good they have it. If they subscribe to this newsletter, maybe they can leave a note with some helpful tips.
Anyway, when I’m tired and emotionally worn, I’m open, and a bit raw, and all that’s good for the work—but not if the work can only be done in a place that is simultaneously a funhouse mirror and a casino and the repository of every piece of mail that I absolutely should have answered three weeks ago (sorry). I’d sit down to dwell in my story for an hour and end up doing nine things, about six of which, on a good day, were necessary, and none of therm was ‘dwell in my story for an hour.’
A good notebook, by contrast, is one thing. And it is a thing: a real and joyful physical thing. A good pen dances on the page. Yes, handwriting for long periods of time has its own drawbacks and physical considerations, but especially if you’re working with a fountain pen (and speaking as a right-handed person) it’s always possible to relax your grip a little more, to lighten your touch. Suddenly you find whole new ranges of motion and ease.
The work gets done, and it gets done well. I write more slowly when I write by hand. Sentences pulse onto the paper. They complete themselves and rewrite and reweave while unwritten, settling into their inked form like a river into its bed. I can never write quite as fast as my thoughts. The exercise, then, is one of denial and fulfillment, of following foxfire into the woods. As I follow the words ahead of the nib, sometimes I catch flashes of insight: what happens on the next page, or in the next chapter, or at the end of the book. Bits of revelation.
But there are challenges.
One is implicit in the foxfire: it will lead you off the path. Perhaps into a strange and wonderful place—but still away from your place. My handwritten characters reveal themselves more deeply, and in ways that surprise me, but I’m also prone to dwelling in their thoughts—which may interrupt the flow of action.
Cecilia Tan introduced me to the concept of scene and sequel as important dramatic units for books: moments in which narrated action takes place, and separatemoments where characters respond to the action, or contemplate it. I’ve thought a lot about the concept since, and it strikes me that it addresses a key issue prose writers encounter when they take storytelling cues from film and tv: a film audience has a more visceral response to a character’s emotional reaction in the moment than a novel reader. When we see an actor play suffering effectively, our inner small mammal responds at once, without intervening language or cognition. But when a character in a book contemplates implications, makes, experiences a memory or dream, when they connect different aspects of their life to their present circumstances—that internal work is hard to present on a screen. But so much goes on inside a character that narrating it in the moment can interrupt the reader’s ability to see the scene. So it can sometimes be important to go back through and refactor narration and response into separate beats, to preserve flow.
In extremity, this foxfire wandering can lead me into whole new realms of story—which then have to be discarded, or folded into the structure of original intent.
Another challenge is that it’s harder to cut. A character’s thought process, handwritten, feels more dense to me, more subtly and intricately connected. There may be extra work on the page—but the work is better. Unnecessary introspection, in purely typed work, has a tendency to flail, to skitter across the meat of the scene. That’s not the problem here. A character’s page or two of thoughts about their experience of gentrification, say, might be vital and relevant and accurate to the process of their soul—and still not right for the scene, the beat, or the project. That doesn’t mean the work has to disappear forever, but it might need to be shortened or moved, or transformed. Or saved for later.
But of course the surprises, the sudden revelations, are also one of the great advantages of handwriting. So I find myself asking, again and again: which is this? A useful detail, a revelatory or load-bearing aside, a narrative cul-de-sac? And then I make my best guess and proceed in faith. And with full backups, in case I got it wrong the first time.
The last drawback, of course, is that once I’m done handwriting the draft, I have to type up the whole dang thing.
Even that has its gifts. By the time I approach structural revisions, I’ve laid hands twice on every word of the manuscript, in a real and physical way. If there is an editor out there more ruthless on a line by line level than me after I’ve already typed 10,000 words today, I haven’t met them. But still, it’s important to take breaks. And, once in a while, ice your wrists.
This Wednesday I participated in a panel called BURN IT DOWN, hosted by Loyalty Bookstores, with Ryan Van Loan and Sarah Gailey. It was a great conversation, and you can watch it all here if so inclined, though the last six minutes or so might need a content warning for Muppet Cannibalism. Hey, when someone asks you a question, you do your best to answer. Watch here!
(Hi, Max!)
I drafted all my early novels by hand (including the Machineries trilogy, which I wrote with fountain pens) because I'm a weirdo who used to write in high school while the teacher thought I was "taking notes." And as you say: upsides and downsides. I'm also the weirdo whose revisions process, time permitting, *already* involves retyping entire drafts - the nice thing about this is that if a bit of writing isn't pulling its weight, I yeet it rather than go to the work of typing it!
I recently acquired a manual typewriter for nostalgia reasons, and started writing an experimental Thing at the rate of one page (400 words) a day. For years I chased *faster* writing. I envied writers who could write 8,000 words/day. Then I decided to go in the opposite direction, not because fast writing is inherently bad but because I can't do it - and I'm a slow thinker. When I slow down, I have time to *think*. To sink into the character and to luxuriate in the setting. It's kind of nice! Maybe not practical, but nice. Writing by hand has a similar quality, for me.