Favorite Enemies
- A Little Sisterly Advice
- Cheeky Reads
- DRD aka Donna's Blog
- Gunner Marnee's Blog
- J.K. Coi: Living with Immortals
- Just Janga
- Killer Fiction
- Kimberly Killion
- Maggie Robinson
- Maureen O. Betita
- Megan Kelly
- Pam Clare
- Renee Lynn Scott
- Romance Bandits
- Romance Dish
- Scapegoat's Blogspot
- Smartass Romance
- Terri Osburn Writes Romance
- Tessa Dare
- Vauxhall Vixens
Blog Archive
Powered by Blogger.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
The Lost Art of Penmanship.
Purify- Lacuna Coil- Unleashed Memories (In honor of their newest CD release, Shallow Life on the 21st of this month. Can't wait to get it.)
I'm an impatient perfectionist. You might say that this is one and the same; but it's not. I get my impatience from my daddy, who flips through TV channels so fast it makes your head spin. Someone who will ask you a question and if you pause to breathe before answering you've already made him wait too long.
I'm a Sagittarius born to Virgo parents. Perfectionism is a family trait. Perfection takes time to create but it's also a honed skill. Since I'm impatient, perfectionism annoys the hell out of me. So you can see my dilemma when I'm working on something. I'm too impatient to wait it out, and every fiber of my being demands perfection. It's a double edged sword. Years and years of perfecting something is still not good enough. Never good enough.
When I was a child, penmanship was actually a graded part of schooling. We spent hours and hours learning how to properly curve cursive "S"s, "I"s, "T"s and how to connect our letters just right. I *obsessed* about getting this right. I wasn't great at math. I wasn't special at science. But reading- I rocked. Penmanship? I was equally determined to be awesome. I wanted to be the best in the class. Penmanship was the first thing a teacher saw when it came to homework. So every time a written assignment had to be turned in, you bet your pretty little ass that my handwriting was tops.
In the age of technology, computers have pretty much made penmanship obsolete. With each new gadget or software we lose that little piece of our past because we now have something to double check our mistakes. Times New Roman is the new perfect handwritten report. Spellcheck searches each document like a hound dog on a fox trail. Doesn't mean it's always perfect, which in lies the problem. I need perfection. I crave it. Goes back to the editing while writing. I try to catch everything as I'm typing. Typing is a new art form ever evolving. You can always be more accurate. Always faster. I'm not bad. I'm about 120wpm if the wind is blowing the right way.
But there is something about the feel of a pen between your fingers, nestled into the curve between your thumb and index finger. The way the pen glides along the paper, so smooth, so perfect. Each letter is art, your individual footprint on page.
My grandmother and I have written letters back and forth for the past ten years. I can usually tell what type of day she's having by the way the cursive slants across the notebook page. How shaky her hand is. How tired she's feeling. There's a lot of feeling and emotion you get by looking at ink. You can tell if it's a fresh pen, almost smell that strong ink before you open the envelope. It's therapeutic to feel the slide of the pen as you spell out everything on your mind. It's not the same with the disconnect of the keys. Keys underneath your fingertips is a completely different experience. You can convey the same type of emotion, but you can't see the evidence. It's clean. Concise. A ninja mechanism. The keyboard is a way of hiding your true feelings from the world around you. You can read my words, but you can't see my mood. My emotions bleeding from my fingertips or feel the pain as my penmanship starts to fade.
Me typing these words is not the same as me writing them. My penmanship is my signature, my keyboard is a device. You can hear my voice; but you hear what I want you to hear. Whereas, when I write with a pen and send you a handwritten letter, you see the evidence of my despair, joy, sadness, triumph. It's very apparent in the way you write. Disguising something like that isn't as easy as you would think. It's another learned trait. Like having a poker face. You aren't born with it.
I wrote my first story by hand. I spend hours a day on the computer, working until my eyes are bloodshot and dry, painful to blink. The last thing I want to do when I get home is turn on the computer and stare at the screen more. Not to mention flying fingers over a keyboard is kind of noisy.
The first page, turns into three, turns into nine and turns into thirty. Your hand cramps. Ink blackens your fingertips. But the smell of fresh ink on a page and your handwriting keeps you going. It's humbling to see something you've created on page, in your own handwriting. And I think I've forgotten that.
Which do you prefer, handwritten or typed? How is your penmanship? When was the last time you truly sat down and wrote something other than bills?
I'm an impatient perfectionist. You might say that this is one and the same; but it's not. I get my impatience from my daddy, who flips through TV channels so fast it makes your head spin. Someone who will ask you a question and if you pause to breathe before answering you've already made him wait too long.
I'm a Sagittarius born to Virgo parents. Perfectionism is a family trait. Perfection takes time to create but it's also a honed skill. Since I'm impatient, perfectionism annoys the hell out of me. So you can see my dilemma when I'm working on something. I'm too impatient to wait it out, and every fiber of my being demands perfection. It's a double edged sword. Years and years of perfecting something is still not good enough. Never good enough.
When I was a child, penmanship was actually a graded part of schooling. We spent hours and hours learning how to properly curve cursive "S"s, "I"s, "T"s and how to connect our letters just right. I *obsessed* about getting this right. I wasn't great at math. I wasn't special at science. But reading- I rocked. Penmanship? I was equally determined to be awesome. I wanted to be the best in the class. Penmanship was the first thing a teacher saw when it came to homework. So every time a written assignment had to be turned in, you bet your pretty little ass that my handwriting was tops.
In the age of technology, computers have pretty much made penmanship obsolete. With each new gadget or software we lose that little piece of our past because we now have something to double check our mistakes. Times New Roman is the new perfect handwritten report. Spellcheck searches each document like a hound dog on a fox trail. Doesn't mean it's always perfect, which in lies the problem. I need perfection. I crave it. Goes back to the editing while writing. I try to catch everything as I'm typing. Typing is a new art form ever evolving. You can always be more accurate. Always faster. I'm not bad. I'm about 120wpm if the wind is blowing the right way.
But there is something about the feel of a pen between your fingers, nestled into the curve between your thumb and index finger. The way the pen glides along the paper, so smooth, so perfect. Each letter is art, your individual footprint on page.
My grandmother and I have written letters back and forth for the past ten years. I can usually tell what type of day she's having by the way the cursive slants across the notebook page. How shaky her hand is. How tired she's feeling. There's a lot of feeling and emotion you get by looking at ink. You can tell if it's a fresh pen, almost smell that strong ink before you open the envelope. It's therapeutic to feel the slide of the pen as you spell out everything on your mind. It's not the same with the disconnect of the keys. Keys underneath your fingertips is a completely different experience. You can convey the same type of emotion, but you can't see the evidence. It's clean. Concise. A ninja mechanism. The keyboard is a way of hiding your true feelings from the world around you. You can read my words, but you can't see my mood. My emotions bleeding from my fingertips or feel the pain as my penmanship starts to fade.
Me typing these words is not the same as me writing them. My penmanship is my signature, my keyboard is a device. You can hear my voice; but you hear what I want you to hear. Whereas, when I write with a pen and send you a handwritten letter, you see the evidence of my despair, joy, sadness, triumph. It's very apparent in the way you write. Disguising something like that isn't as easy as you would think. It's another learned trait. Like having a poker face. You aren't born with it.
I wrote my first story by hand. I spend hours a day on the computer, working until my eyes are bloodshot and dry, painful to blink. The last thing I want to do when I get home is turn on the computer and stare at the screen more. Not to mention flying fingers over a keyboard is kind of noisy.
The first page, turns into three, turns into nine and turns into thirty. Your hand cramps. Ink blackens your fingertips. But the smell of fresh ink on a page and your handwriting keeps you going. It's humbling to see something you've created on page, in your own handwriting. And I think I've forgotten that.
Which do you prefer, handwritten or typed? How is your penmanship? When was the last time you truly sat down and wrote something other than bills?
Labels:
Quartermaster's Queries (Sin),
Sin
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Books by the Crew
26 comments:
I remember cursive lessons. I never made the top grade, that belonged to a lovely Japanese girl named Mary. I used to love to write by hand...
But I have come to prefer my keyboard. Because of the speed, Sin. My mind flies faster than a pen can keep up. Often my fingers fly faster on the keyboard than even they can keep up.
My first story about the Caribbean came from a pencil and morning pages. When I do write, I prefer the pencil. Blackfeet Indian Pencil number 2. I even have several boxes of them in reserve.
I take notes in pencil at conferences... Because in my own way, I am a perfectionist, too. I like to be able to erase and redo.
I will sometimes sit in the garden on a warm sunny day. The scent of the lilac intoxicating, the hum of bees chasing nectar in the flowers is soporific, and I practise telepathy with a small robin that likes to stand on my foot and look hopeful.
All set me daydreaming. With pen and paper to hand, if I stay awake, I might even pen some thoughts and capture my dreams.
Indoors though, the computer hums, simulations may flash up graphs or streams of numbers, and I type. I don't stare at the screen while typing, so don't get eye strain that way, and when writing for others to read I get the computer to speak my typing back to me to catch any errors.
I have a colleague who likes to speak to the computer (using speech to text software!). His communications always read like spoken word, so this approach might not suit a novelist, but it would certainly relieve the eye strain problem. I'm sure that with a bit of practise you could curb any tendency to chatter and think through your thoughts before speaking them.
Anyway Sin, you have such beautiful thoughts that I find all of them quite irresistible...please don't prune too many! :D
I always wanted to write pretty. But my hand gets tired quickly and it hurts to write after maybe half a page and you can always see this when I'm penning something, the letters slowly get messier and messier until it becomes ineligible to all but me (and even that's not always the case).
I much prefer the computer keyboard. And in another time, I would have used a typewriter.
I have terrible penmanship. It's a running joke in our office -- I'm the only female employee, and yet my handwriting sucks worse than the guys'. LOL. But that said, I know what you mean about the connection. I have friends who exchange letters instead of emails - they have for years, even when they were roommates. And they each keep the others - it's literally turned into a diary for sorts for each of them, kept by the other. It's just so much more personal, so much more real than just an email.
I can't write by hand - my brain moves faster than my fingers and I get frustrated after a page or so. And I often can't read what I wrote anyway. But plotting - for some reason, I can only plot by writing long hand. No idea why. I sit down with a legal pad and write every thought going through my head. All the possible things that could happen, all the random ideas, all the characters. I've filled entire legal pads doing this, and always, something comes together in my head out of that mess. But if I try to do it on the computer - nope, I got nothing.
Well, I have the Lacuna Coil CD and I must say... it's not as good as the old stuff but much much better than Karmacode.
"Not Enough" is my favorite.
Great to be back after having a couple of weeks off. I sort of missed the gentle rocking of the ship (and that's not from the Capt'n and Capt'n Jack gettin' busy below deck.)
MM, I'm a bit of a speed demon myself dear. I give people headaches listening to me peck away at the keyboard like a chicken at feeding time.
I like pencils too, but since my patience level is very low, I use a pen. I have my favorite pens. Mostly pens that I clepto out of hotels. My favorites are the pens that I get at the annual conference at Tan Tara. There's something about the smell of ink gliding over the recycled paper pages of my wore out notebook that gets me every time.
Q,
As always dearest I have missed your comments so. Reminds me of summer days in the hot sun. Bumblebees buzzing around and purple clover blooming.
Like your collegue, I have the communication software for my computer. Training it to recognize my voice this time was much easier than the first time years ago when the software was being made to the public. For me, creativeness doesn't come from my voice, but from my thoughts. And gets those thoughts to connect to my voice isn't as pretty of prose as when typed or written by hand.
There is just something about the way thoughts become "written" that gives it a special flourish finish.
Tiff, I still have a typewriter. I prefer the look of the old typewriters to the newer electronic typewriters. It always amazes me that Stephen King prefers to use his typewriter to using a computer.
Like you, my handwriting tends to get worse the longer I'm writing and when I'm trying to go back and reread what I wrote, it's not very conducisive to time management.
Hal, working with doctors has ruined my good handwriting. I'm very good friends with a paralegal and we always argue who's penmanship is worse- a doctor or a lawyer.
I still say it's the DR. Try transcribing medical conditions when you can't read 98% of the word he just wrote.
But it's like anything else, your eyes become accustomed to finding the essential letters in the word to make it correct. Or if you're like me, I go grab the chart and try to decipher his notes. These are not usually legible either. LOL
LOL Sin. It's a wonder anything gets transcribed accurately! I always wonder if pharmacists have any idea what the doctor prescribed, or if they're just throwing drugs out there *g* Though having worked as a paralegal before, I do have to agree that lawyers also have terrible handwriting.
There are times we have offices call ours to ask for clarification. Some doctors are better than others, but I have to admit that I think ours is the worst. LOL
I don't like my handwriting a lot. I don't think it's calligraphy-quality or anything, but sometimes I think I write better than I type on my stories.
Staring at a blank computer screen is a lot like standing on a stage and realizing, "Crap, I have stage fright and I can't remember my next line." You spend valuable amounts of time trying to improvise until you remember the right lines. Sometimes the improvisation works out, but mostly it has to be scrapped. And sometimes you never remember any lines and improvisation is impossible. It's like trying to perform a play you've never read the lines for, barely know the plot for, and are trying to improvise. It doesn't work. That's a bad night at the theatre.
But writing on the page is like theatre rehearsal. It's sloppy and inky and a mess. You scratch out stuff and it's okay. Then when you type it up later, at the REAL THING, it works out great. You had some background, so now if you want to improvise, it works a lot better. It's not junk.
And I didn't bring my computer this week. I wasn't sure I could get away with it or if they'd make me "check another bag"--so I didn't chance it. I have notebooks though and my favorite pens...so I'll just make some messy bases for stuff. :)
love the analogy Hellie. I spend a lot of time improvising on a blank page *g*
Have fun with Terri this week!
It's only since I started posting on boards and blogs that I compose anything at the computer. For the most part still, whether I'm working on a novel, a poem, or an academic essay, I have to do the first draft longhand. It's as if I need to see the pen forming the words in order for my brain to fully engage. Once I transfer the first draft from the page to the screen, I can revise on the computer. But since I am a one-finger typist, both the transfer and the revisions can take a long time.
I don't like my handwriting either. It's not horrible, it's just not very pretty of feminine. I don't write in cursive anymore, though I think my cursive is prettier than my printing. But none of it is particularly lovely.
I could never write my stories longhand though. I need to get things down on paper fast, so if I don't I get frustrated. More it's about impatience than anything else.
I also would have to cross out and rewrite over and over. Sometimes it takes me 5 or 6 goes at one sentence before it sounds right to me and I move on. So if I had to do that on paper, no one would ever be able to translate what the heck I'm writing about. :)
Oh! All I have to say is: Trusty Notebook :)
One thing the hand writers will have on the rest of us...something to auction off as memorabilia when they are famous.
An early draft on a memory stick somehow won't carry the same mystic, I'm thinking!
Sorry guys! Busy day today!
Since I know Hellie and Ter are lazing around on the beach, I'm going to skip Hellie because she's got more important things to do. Like Rum and Capt'n Jack.
I have horrible penmanship! My print looks like that of a kingergarden kid and my cursive is a beginner's guide in what not to do. I wish I had beautiful flowing penmanship and could address an envelope where it doesn't look trashy!
Sabrina
Janga, I need the interaction with the pen and paper to get the right words on the paper. And for me, poetry is very personal and if it's started on the computer, it feels detached from my person.
I will have to teach you how to speed type. That way we can all be assured to get lots more out of you for our reading pleasure. :)
Nic, I should buy you a lifetime supply of notebooks.
Marn, I can't imagine that your handwriting is that awful. Sometimes when we don't use it for a while it's not as pretty as it once was. But with a little one running around like a chickie without a head, I can't imagine there's much time for pretty handwritten letters.
I spend a lot of time looking at notebook pages with lines through the words. That's me, thinking quietly about word choice. I tend to get on a roll and use the same word fifty million times.
Sabrina, I wish I could address an envelope with the skill of a calligrapher, but I can't. And usually I end up having to pitch the first envelope and get out a new one. But we are all very critical of our own handwriting skill and envious of others. I bet yours is really great. :)
It's so coincidental that you blogged about this subject. I was writing checks last night to pay some bills and my penmanship was terrible. I thought about how long it had been since I wrote anything by hand. I couldn't remember. Just qanother way computer technology has changed our lives! Other than signing my name on papers at work, I never write freehand anymore. All of our charting is computer doumented. I use the keyboard to write. Sometimes if I think of random ideas for a storyline I make notes.
Sorry so late commenting today, I was swamped at work.This has been a busy week!
Great blog.
I hear that. It's been swamped at the old office this week too.
I have to sign off on stuff at the office too and slowly but steadily my signature is the stuff doctors dream of. I mean, it's terrible. It's two upward circles and a bunch of scribbled lines. At least my initials are readable. Sometimes.
If all I have to do is sign a check or address an envelope, I'm good. But for speed? It just looks horrible. Why when I take notes, I print.
Ya gots ta wonder...do modern nuns still teach penmenship? I asked a teacher friend about diagramming sentences and whether that is taught anymore. Nope. I still use that technique when writing, making sure I have an actual subject, verb, etc. that fit together.
Save when I write in blogs. Then it's freeform!
But with today's internet and texting shorthand, the art of diagramming sentences is gone! Sob!
Hey, Sabrina! Have a Glittery Hooha! And welcome back ta the ship. Lets me know when the swag arrives...
Post a Comment