Doing Things the Hard Way By James Freitas

​It’s safe to say that being alive today is pretty damn easy. We can order pizza on Twitter without writing out a single word. Just tweet a pizza emoji and a pizza is on its way to your door. We can answer any question within seconds, thanks to our good friend Google. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that there was a time before emojis, before Twitter, and before either of these things could be used to put food on the table.

As writers, we are both blessed and cursed by our laptops. Pros: We can type anywhere and we can type quickly. We can send the stuff we type to basically anybody without thinking anything of it. We have tools like spell-check, automated word count, and the list goes on.

But, sometimes we overlook the negatives of writing on laptops.

For starters, it’s incredibly easy to get distracted when you have the vast entirety of the cyber-world at your fingertips. at 7:33 you might be on a roll, forging ahead in your novel, your story, your poem, what-have-you—but by 7:41 you could be watching cat videos on Facebook or taking “Which Disney princess are you?” quizzes on BuzzFeed.

It’s also incredibly easy to over-edit when you’re writing on a laptop. You write a sentence, you re-read, you don’t like it, you re-write it, you re-read the revision, you still don’t like it, and the cycle goes on and on. Forty five minutes go by and you’ve re-written and erased the same sentence two dozen times without even being able to look back at each draft. All you have to show for your time and effort is blank white space with nothing to learn from.

Sometimes, if only for a little while, it’s important to step back from the blue-light of your Macbook screen and write how writers wrote before computers, before typewriters even: paper and pen. Recently, I’ve experimented with writing by hand. I’ve found some interesting things.

1. I work slowly, but deliberately. Typing on my laptop, I can average around 50 words per minute. I’m not claiming that, when I’m writing creatively, I am able to generate content at the same rate. But, when ideas come to me, speed is never an issue. I usually aim to write a minimum of 700 words per session when I’m typing. Writing by hand, my word count per session is much, much lower as well as much more inconsistent. In the last three days, I’ve written 269 words on one day, 161 the next, and then 402 words last night. I’m not even touching my old minimum. However, the quality of my 161-402 words seems to be higher than the 700 I might’ve written on my laptop.
   
2. I’m reading and rereading what I write a lot more than I would if I wrote on a laptop. My writing process when writing by hand is this: I write, I re-read once, I re-read again while counting my words, and ultimately, I transfer the words I write onto my laptop. This provides for a lot of revisions. However, unlike when I type, I revise only when I’m done writing. And, again—unlike typing—when I revise I can still see the skeletons of my old sentences (usually I just cross them out and re-write in the margins). I can see how I started and how I shaped my sentence to its final form. It’s an education and it allows me to chip away at a sentence rather than just erase and start fresh again with each attempt.
   
3. Writing feels more like writing. Writing on my laptop can be an overwhelming experience. I’ve got my document, front and center, but I’ve got applications open in the background. There are emails coming in that need to be addressed in a timely manner. Notifications pop up in the corner of my screen. My phone is charging to my left, buzzing more than I’d like. There’s a pile of fat, hardcover reference books to my right, a lineup of books behind my screen, and three half-empty coffee mugs just begging to be knocked over. In a nutshell, there’s a lot going on. Writing in a small journal with nothing but a pen, I’m more inclined to leave my workspace. I bring the journal out into my garage—I sit and write on a small, cold stool. I bring the journal to a rocking chair in front of a dormant fireplace. I bring it down with me to breakfast. My mind's more at ease and my ideas flow more naturally.
   

Basically, especially during National Novel Writing Month, it is important to try new things and new ways of writing. As far as practicality and convenience go, the laptop can’t be beat. But sometimes a little shake-up is the push you need to allow your best work to be produced.