The pen softly scratches the paper. Ink glides onto the page: a glossy, liquid black, or a blue like deep waters. The hand brushes paper, which was once a tree. When the writer is finished, he holds his work between his fingers, scanning the looping arcs of the letters traced out by his pen. Writing by hand is a rich tactile, sensory experience. Nothing comes between the writer and the concrete medium, the bare page. His connection to the page isn’t just emotional or intellectual; it’s physical. There’s a reason most love letters, even today, are written by hand on real paper; only this tangible medium can reflect the passion and intimacy of love.
Pen to Paper
In a 1998 interview, British author A.S. Byatt commented, “I write anything serious by hand still. This isn’t a trivial question. There’s that wonderful phrase of Wordsworth’s about ‘feeling along the heart,’ and I think I write with the blood that goes to the ends of my fingers, and it is a very sensuous act.”There’s something grounding about writing by hand, especially in an age where most words are lost into the intangible, amorphous swirl of cyberspace. When the writer writes by hand, his or her words become embodied, intertwined with the physical world. The writer carves out a space, grasping at permanence pixels on a screen will never have. Writing is about the world; it helps when it exists in the world in concrete form.
