The spark of life goes through the hands

Is it worth stifling creativity in the service of efficiency?

I'm guessing that if you read this Substack you're going to agree with me on a big fat NO. But that's what's happening as cursive writing is no longer taught in schools. If you can't write cursive, writing by hand is tedious and laborious. You're writing letter by letter rather than word by word—like taking tiny steps instead of strides. You're hobbled.

What's the result? Your homework is easier for your teachers to read, but you need a device of some kind to record your thoughts. Worse, you've lost access to one of the simplest ways to hotwire the imagination.

The spark of life goes through the hands. Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel ceiling. Not the most original choice of illustration, but a classic.

Some people, when they first come to the Imaginative Storm method, argue that if they write by hand, they can't keep up with their thoughts. It's a valid point: even cursive writing is slower than typing. But is keeping up with your thoughts such a good thing? Yes, if you just want to get something down, but that's not how creativity works. It bubbles up; it forms as you write. It's not all there in your head ready to be downloaded. When you're writing creatively, your thought-beats probably don't follow hot on the last one's heels. There's a little downtime while your imagination formulates its next move. If you're typing close to the speed of thought, that leaves you sitting there wondering what comes next. Eek! You don't know! You engage your rational mind, which is after all your default setting for problem-solving. What did you just write?

Two roads diverge in this particular wood. You either think:

1. Oof, that's pretty feeble. Maybe I can make it better if I change that word and move that sentence around and just delete the whole damn thing.

or

2. Hmm, that's not half bad! Dammit, I wish I hadn't lost my train of thought. Where should I go from here?

Either way, you're in your rational, judging mind. You’ve lost your imaginative flow.

But let's say you're not typing, you're writing by hand. Your imagination is moving ahead of your hand, so the actual process of writing is keeping you occupied in the time between thought-beats. There's less space for judging what went before and stressing about what comes next. Often the next thought-beat starts to form before you've finished writing down the current one, making you write fast and messy. Now, you've got momentum. You're more immersed in your writing than if you were on a computer, because you have to focus on keeping the words legible, lined up, and on the paper.

Typing on a computer doesn't require that kind of visual focus. You know the words are going to go in a straight line and not fall off the edge of the page or crash into one another. You can look around the room, or have part of your mind elsewhere, and when you look back at what you typed the software has flagged misspellings and dodgy grammar. Oh no, better fix that typo!

What's happening? The tools are taking over the workshop. They're great tools, but you have to be telling them what to do, not the other way around.

It takes iron discipline not to read your words on the screen, since they're so beautifully readable! Even if you've turned off spell-check, typos jump out at you. Also, that's a pretty clunky sentence. And is that really the right word? Very likely you're dissatisfied with what you wrote--because you're applying the wrong standards. It's a rough draft, but it doesn't look rough. It looks tidy, but it doesn't read tidy. What's wrong? Must be you. Must be that you're just not a good writer.

What's happening now? You're subliminally comparing your rough draft—if you want to dignify it with the name of draft at all—with other printed words you've read. Even if you know, rationally, that those other words have been developed and edited, your gut feeling is a simple "not good enough."

It's impossible to be creative if you're being told what you're doing is not good enough. Creativity is exploration. It's curiosity. Curiosity and criticizing can't coexist.

I think this book cover is a work of genius.

I think this book cover is a work of genius.

When you write by hand, you can't read what you wrote so easily (especially if your writing got faster and messier). You can't edit so cleanly and surgically. Crossing out is much uglier than deleting. Inserting requires squeezing words between the lines, and if they won't fit you have to turn the paper sideways to write up the margin. Nothing tempting here! Much easier to just say "what the hell" and keep writing.

Result, you up your chances of staying in the flow.

The more you write by hand, the more you teach yourself to go with this flow. That focus on physical movement puts you in the mindset of doing an activity rather than attempting to accomplish a result. The connection between writing and what you're writing loosens a little; you start to enjoy exploring rather than worrying about whether what you're writing is good. It's also super obvious that you're writing a rough draft! Nothing finished-looking about this. There's no reason to criticize it now; you can do that later when you come to type it up.

And in my opinion, it's not double the work. It’s necessary. When you're typing up what you wrote, you'll be editing.

And there’s more. When you write by hand, you get a little dopamine rush as pressure points on the outside of your hand are stimulated by brushing against the paper. I've been told that these pressure points connect directly to the heart and the emotions, and I believe it. I'm way more connected emotionally if I'm writing by hand.  

I believe that you're also calling up a bodily memory when you write by hand. As a child, when you drew with crayons, immersed in the moment, those same nerves on the outside of your hand were stimulated. So, the feeling of your hand moving across paper is the feeling of being creative. You confirm to yourself on a physical level that you are a creative being.

Neuroscience backs this up in various ways. I recently read Scott Barry Kaufman's Wired to Create, and it felt like reading the scientific version of the Imaginative Storm method! EEG studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology show much more connectivity in the brain when people write by hand than when they write by keyboard, as well as better memory of what they wrote. Maybe you found this in school, as I did: highlighting or typing notes was useless. If I took notes by hand, I didn't even have to read them over before the exam.

Writing by hand seems old-fashioned and analog. But humans are old-fashioned and analog. We were fashioned millions of years ago. Our brains and bodies evolved in sync. We connect to the heart and the imagination when we write by hand,