Anti-facile

I am approaching, as I pen these words in a hardback notebook, my first full week as a writer who does not type. Typing would be a relief. At a keyboard I can almost keep up with the speed of my thoughts, but, since I’m left-handed, my pen is slow and painful. Typing’s easy; writing by hand is hard.

That’s why I’m writing by hand.

After years trying to make writing easier for myself, now I’m trying to make it harder. It’s not just an AI thing, although it’s also an AI thing. In an age of fraudulent fluency and Pangram inquisitions, I want physical paper smeared all over with my DNA to stand behind everything I publish. Ironically, what unlocked my ability to stop using a computer to write is the fact that modern software excels at transcription—I can turn a picture of my notebook page into a flawless text file in seconds. Previous experiments with handwriting have always run aground on the need to retype everything I write. Not anymore. But, as I said, this isn’t just about AI. I want writing to become harder for me for deeper reasons.

I’m 36, about to become a father for the first time, and although I’m facing the physical aspects of aging with equanimity, one psychological consequence scares me: my subjective experience of time is speeding up. It’s not just me. This happens to everybody. I’ve read that psychologists attribute the perceived acceleration of time to the greater efficiency of the aging brain. We feel time to be slow or fast based on how many memories are formed in a given stretch of it. Thus youth feels slow, because it is full of firsts, a constant bombardment of new experiences. Age feels fast, because it is full of worn routines and well-understood situations. As adults we navigate life without much attention, relying mostly on memories we’ve already made, with a kind of desensitized patience. The only oases of slow time in a desert of oblivion are disruptions: emergencies, vacations, special events.

So what does this have to do with writing?

Well, I’ve noticed a slickness spreading across the surface of my writing in exact parallel to my accelerating consciousness of time. Once, I’d reach into the darkness groping for words to embody inchoate thoughts, and what came to me would seem wrong, inexact. So I’d reach out again, clawing fistfuls of alternatives out of the air until I’d found a phrase all my own that seemed to express my special meaning. (Is that actually what was happening? Do concepts exist apart from words, or was I cycling through different thoughts and not just different sentences?) My sentences back then fit together, but their roughness stood out like rusticated stones in a wall. They had a quiddity about them. I think the same efficiency of brain that speeds up an adult mind sands the roughness off a practiced writer’s words. We acquire syntactic strategies, favored phrases, a style whose very recognizability betrays insensitivity. Age tries to turn us all into hacks.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Sometimes while I’m exercising, out for a run or a long bike ride, I begin to think about the next thing I plan to write. And I begin composing its first sentence in my mind. My memory’s not that great, so one or two sentences is as far as I get, and I play with them. I tinker, mentally trying out alternatives, just like I did when I was a younger, rougher writer. And those sentences are so much better than any that I type. The literary toll of accelerated consciousness can be counteracted by, quite simply, taking time.

It’s all about time. Slow writing is unique writing. Unique writing is better writing. And therefore, slow writing is better writing. “Slowness,” wrote Peter Handke, “is the only illumination I have ever had.”

Happily, such writing is only slow at a certain level of magnification. This week I wrote a book review for a magazine, the first draft of a short story, several chapters of a novel, and a bit of a book proposal. Every sentence arrived more slowly than when I typed, but I produced more finished texts than I would have in the same period. Slowing down speeds me up by eliminating the necessity of several of my drafts.

But why go to the ostentatious extreme of giving up typing?

It’s because the slowness of better writing is not just a mechanical slowness. Fundamentally, it’s a slowness of patient concentration. You try one way of expressing yourself, then another. You sigh and stare at the wall. You suspend your intention like the violin in Bach’s Air on the G String, modulating through changes in your mind, until the resolving exactitude of le mot juste rings out. Physical slowness helps, but a mind that can focus and hold decision in abeyance is the only mind capable of using that slowness.

You know where I’m going with this: Keyboards are attached to computers. On a computer you are always one click away from the internet and social media, email and news feeds and memes and porn. I can manufacture slowness at a keyboard, but I cannot manufacture patient concentration. But when I’m sitting in front of a blank sheet of paper, I find patient concentration a default mode.

Over-facility is the curse of our time. It gives rise to a pervasive agedness of style, prose sanded smooth of personality. It makes us replaceable. We are so addled by the argot of our feeds that generational slang now functions as history’s most public inside joke. We all rush to utter the same bon mots about the same viral topics. We write like each other.

Speaking just for myself, I can see one hope for individuality, slowness, and patient concentration, the virtues literature requires: I seek difficulty and solitude on the lonely paper page.