✍️ Slowing Down, Writing By Hand

Plus a comic about buying my first bike

As part of our reading assignments for IWL, my writing workshop recently read The Book of Delights, in which author Ross Gay writes an essayette every day about what brought him delight. One essay stood out to me—”Writing By Hand,” where he speaks to the merits of writing by pen and paper, rather than by computer.

“Handwriting is slower and can’t be corrected as quickly as electronic notes…if you are writing by hand, you are forced to think about what you hear (or read) — otherwise you wouldn’t be able to grasp the underlying principle, the idea, the structure of an argument.”

— Ross Gay, The Book of Delights

It struck me because it’s very similar to how I’ve come to think about drawing as a practice. In her TED talk illustrator Wendy MacNaughton says that art is an invitation to slow down and pay attention to the world around you: “Drawing is looking, and looking is loving.”

I independently rediscovered the delight in drawing by hand during my residency at St. Nell’s. I normally draw cartoons on my iPad, but I’ve always felt a mental block when it comes to cartooning digitally, both in terms of style and creation. During St. Nell’s, I was inspired by one of my fellow residents to draft a comic by hand instead. I worked messily and loosely, with imprecise figures and lines, and soon found myself in a flow I’d never experienced before. I whipped up a comic in a matter of hours that I’d been putting off for months. I stumbled upon a newfound confidence for creating art that I didn’t know existed.

The reasoning is simple. As Gay explains in “Writing By Hand,” the computer forces you into straight lines and perfect grammar. It encourages you to code switch between editor and creator. Creating by hand frees you from the tyranny of the editor.

With this in mind, I am switching up my cartooning process and starting my ideation and generation process on paper. If I feel like polishing or pitching the piece, I will move to Procreate on my iPad. I’ll leave you with a comic I drew by hand this week. The drawings are imprecise and typos abound, but making it by hand gave me the permission to put my thoughts to paper. Enjoy—

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Until next time,
—Zzzz