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Typing vs. Freehand Writing
Is there really a difference?
When I attended a writing intensive a couple of years ago I learned that many of the talented published authors who were there as mentors still wrote their books in freehand. The multiple hand-written drafts it took to get from the original manuscript to the final published product could fill boxes.
I’d guess that most of the new writers in attendance had done just about all of our writing on a computer of some kind. I come from an in between age where I can recall typing out high school essays on an electric typewriter after doing my drafts in cursive. By university I had my first computer. Everything I’ve done since then has been typed onto a screen, edited there, with the original thoughts vanishing, and then printed to paper as an afterthought.
Well, not everything. As I look around I have piles of notebooks, all full of my rather illegible lefty handwriting. What on earth are they all doing here? What have I filled them all with? A lot of them are to-do lists of items with boxes either checked off or long forgotten. Some are leads lists and notes from calls with clients from past lives of work. Others are journals.
Journaling is something that I started doing late in life. I just dreaded it as a child. I didn’t know what to write! Today was a boring day. That was the typical lead-in…
