words by hand

[marycatelli]

One thing that writing by hand makes difficult is determining how far you get in a day.

I suppose I might mark off where I started, but I don't.  And it would feel funny.  And Neil Gaiman's observation about how you can't tell whether something was written on a good day or a bad day applies very quickly:  you glance back over the pages, and it blurs together.  (Must be worse for those writers who make it a rule to stop in the middle of a sentence.)

Even if I did mark it off, there's the question of how much I wrote.  There's variation in how many words go on a page.  Stichomythia has its advantages for prose dialog as well as for that on stage, but it does leave a lot of white space.  Action, description, decision-making can take up large blocks of text. . . . I've wondered about how people who do NaNoWriMo by hand manage to keep count.

But the real danger is that plopping down a sentence or two is not enough writing to really get the story done, which is, after all, the point of the matter.  If you can't determine how much you have written you can't really tell whether you are writing slowly.

sigh

Comments

[marycatelli]

I believe you. . . I got into it myself because it was easier to lug about folders than laptops. And experimenting with it reveals some things. Whether it changes how I write fundamentally is another issue.

[marycatelli]

Then I would have to break my habits. . . .

[alivion.livejournal.com]

I always write fiction by hand because it's easier to think through a pen than through a keyboard, and because I'm forced to do a quick re-write when I transpose a story from notebook to computer.

I always put the date at the top of the page, and if there's already something written on the page, I put the two dates next to each other. Very rarely, during remarkably uninspired times, I end up with three dates at the head of a page, but being able to narrow something down to one of three days is plenty of information for me.

How far I get in a day or an hour or a week has never bothered me, I'm a terribly slow writer and I'm just fine with that, but when I was trying to do NaNoWriMo I'd actually count the words by hand and write the count for every few lines in the margins, and then the count for the whole page on the reverse of the sheet. Updating the wordcount online was simply a matter of adding the big numbers on the backs of the pages.

[marycatelli]

Yeah, I worry about it because I can write briskly enough -- once I get warm to my work.

[jennygordon.livejournal.com]

One advantage of writing by hand is that, by the time you type it up, you're already on a revision stage.

[marycatelli]

Heck, I'm in the revision stage while still writing.

[jennygordon.livejournal.com]

Ha! Know what you mean.

[marycatelli]

You have my condolences. 0:)