In laptop age, these writers still love longhand
Did you know that Obama drafted his 700-page-plus memoir with pen and paper? And he’s not the only author who feels that when words matter, machines don’t cut it
Ketaki.Desai@timesgroup.com
13.12.2020
Handwritten manuscripts hold many secrets and insights. Take Marcel Proust’s lined notebooks that contained absent-minded doodles, surrealist artworks and his dogged revisions. Or the notebooks in which Virginia Woolf drafted Mrs Dalloway, writing on the margins an affirmation of sorts: “A delicious idea comes to me that I will write anything I want to write”. Ernest Hemingway’s handwriting was described as boyish, reflecting a disdain for punctuation and capital letters, with his sentences often ending with an X.
In an age where keyboards are mightier than the pen, literary texts written in longhand might seem like relics of the past but many writers still swear by the process. Barack Obama’s The Promised Land — all 751 pages — was written entirely in longhand because as he says, “a computer gives even my roughest drafts too smooth a gloss and lends half-baked thoughts the mark of tidiness.” Many Indian writers have also cultivated this habit, not because they’re Luddites, but because they prefer it.
Novelist Anita Nair says her thoughts flow better in longhand. “I write using a fountain pen, so my standard process is that I fill the ink in the morning and I write until it dries out,” says Nair, who has written all of her novels, as well as poetry and non-fiction works in longhand. “It’s more fluid and I think that has to do with the action itself. When you’re keying it in or even using a touchscreen, there’s a staccato motion, which is jerky,” she says, adding that writing with pen and paper takes away the ability to just erase the words one typed, and fosters careful thought.
This aspect of greater deliberation is also important for poet and author Jerry Pinto, whose habit of writing in longhand soon became a conscious choice. “In the beginning it was because I would get ideas at inopportune places and times like bus-rides, and late at night. At that time, one would then have to type them up with carbon copies and hand the stories in. It was almost as much labour to type as to handwrite,” he says. “When the computer came along I was frightened at the speed at which I could type. I felt this was not a good thing because I was using unnecessary words and long sentences. So I started working with paper and pen.” Pinto calls it his version of the Slow Cooking movement — “I want my thoughts simmered; I want my ideas marinated.”
Oral historian and author Aanchal Malhotra only began to write in longhand in 2017 when she began working on her first novel. At first, it was a way to differentiate her fiction from her non-fiction, yet now much of her writing is being shaped in her Moleskine notebooks. “I find it a lot more comfortable writing things down, like it’s closer to my brain somehow,” says the 30-year-old Delhi-based author.
Writer Anil Dharker never learnt to type. “My first job in journalism was as an editor. Before that, I was doing various things like engineering and heading the National Film Development Corporation where I always had a secretary to type for me,” he says. The ritual persists — Dharker writes down the novel or column and his assistant types it in. Editing takes place on a computer when a deadline looms, or he prints out the typed version and makes revisions by hand. This process, including the choice of pen used, is shared by Jeffrey Archer whom Dharker was recently in conversation with at the Tata Lit Live litfest.
Meanwhile, Amit Chaudhuri writes his novels and poems in a generic student’s notebook which he has used for years because the spacing and density of words on the page are just right. “I write it down longhand and after I’ve written down a paragraph, I return to it. For me, the basic unit of writing isn’t even a sentence, it’s a paragraph. I have to take out sentences, maybe add something until I find this paragraph is working and has come to some kind of life.” It’s only after this that the author and poet keys it in on a computer. When writing poems, however, he has the unusual habit of starting with the last page “as if it’s an afterthought”.
Dharkar doesn’t like the impersonality of a keyboard. “This laptop may belong to you but this keyboard is the same as every other keyboard,” he says. “With pen and paper, it is your own very individual handwriting that is not replicable. There is something so personal about it.”
Oral historian and author Aanchal Malhotra has written her upcoming novel in longhand. She feels that it’s more personal “like it’s closer to my brain somehow”
I write using a fountain pen, so my standard process is that I fill the ink in the morning and I write until it dries out
— ANITA NAIR
Novelist
