I’ve been an avid writer since I was a kid, scribbling my stories about elves and dragons in cheap exercise books with brightly coloured gel pens. However, as someone who grew up just as computers were becoming ubiquitous, I gradually switched to typing all of my writing, and have pretty much continued with that until last year. 

It was getting into the fountain pen hobby and wanting to use my pens as much as possible that brought me back to writing by hand, and reminded me of the benefits. Yes, if I want to publish my writing, I eventually have to type it up, which might seem cumbersome, but I’ve found so many benefits to writing my first drafts by hand. And the switch has really boosted my inspiration levels, creativity, and even the quality of my work!

So here are the benefits I’ve discovered to writing by hand: 

It’s slower.

The main reason I never considered going back to hand writing is that I know that my typing speed is much higher than my handwriting speed, and I always figured that meant it must be better to type. 

One thing I’ve learnt the last few months though, is that there are actually some benefits to writing slower, mainly that it gives me more time to think, and write the best possible version of each sentence as I go. Perhaps a few lines or ideas escape me, because I can’t get them down fast enough, but having more time to formulate the sentences I’m writing has definitely upped the quality of my work, and made editing much easier.

It’s tactile.

Yes, to type, you have to touch the keys, and I have always found the clatter of a keyboard to be very satisfying. But there’s something even more satisfying about the feel of a pen dancing across the paper (especially if you’re a pen person!), and to have notebooks full of your writing to flip through, instead of scrolling through a Word document. 

I just find it to be a more fulfilling creative experience too, to have a pen in hand, and to create words from my brain that go directly onto the paper, instead of feeding them into the computer, and having that extra barrier between me and my work. 

It’s easier to get in the flow.

There’s a reason people recommend journaling by hand, and that’s because it’s easier to freewrite and slip into a stream-of-consciousness style of writing when you’re working straight on the page. Without the technological middle man (i.e. the computer) it becomes easier to write from instinct, and I also find that if I’m journaling, it helps me to process my thoughts easier if I write by hand. 

Freewriting in this manner is also a great tool for writers to get unblocked, or just to get new ideas and inspiration, and it’s something I often do to get the creative juices flowing! 

It’s easier to edit. 

As satisfying as it may be to hold a notebook full of your writing, if you want to publish or share your work online, you will need to type it up. This may seem like an annoying extra step that makes hand writing your work difficult, but it can actually be incredibly useful.

All first drafts need substantial editing anyway, and it’s much easier to make changes when you’ll be writing the whole thing from scratch anyway, as you input it into the computer. When I type up any of my handwritten stories or blog posts I improve on them as I go, cutting bits out, adding things in, and overall polishing the piece of writing. Nowadays, by the time I have my first typed draft of a piece of writing, it’s already pretty clean, and will only need minimal tweaks to get it to a place where I’m happy with it. So despite the extra step of typing my work, hand writing my first drafts has actually made my editing process far more efficient. 

Nostalgia. 

This one might just be me, because of my childhood spent scribbling in notebooks, but I can’t deny the sense of nostalgia that writing by hand has given me. 

In recent years my love of writing has continued, but started to feel a little fraught. I haven’t hit a lot of the writing milestones I would have ideally liked to, and keep feeling as if I’m making little progress on my projects, and time is slipping away. But returning to writing by hand has taken me back to those days when writing was purely for fun, and I would let my imagination run wild on the page. It takes me back to the days when my writing was just for me, and I wasn’t bogged down with both my writing hang-ups, and also the everyday stresses of adult life. In short, it’s brought the magic of writing back!

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Despite my waxing lyrical about writing by hand in this blog post, I understand that for some people, writing by hand just isn’t for them. All writers have their own process, but since I also used to think that I would never write by hand, I think it’s worth trying, even if it’s just to try something different if you feel blocked. There’s just so many benefits to be found from writing by hand…including getting to buy lots of pens!

So do you like writing by hand? What do you think are the benefits, and the downsides to hand writing vs typing?