A weekend writing session. Max’s notebook and a Paddington-inspired coffee-shop doodle.
Inspired by Anushka Shah’s article last month, Max Parfitt and Harry Ashton-Key (with help from a couple of Harry’s friends) reflect on methods of writing.
Max Parfitt
I’ve been a laptop user all my life. Whether due to the various labels and learning difficulties suggested while at school, or to what my first university “disabilities advisor” deemed an unfortunate mix of acute motor neuron malfunction and calligraphic perfectionism, the quick pen-stroke has always alluded me; the pleasing flick that should come with a fountain pen (the peak of my 10-year-old aspirations) has always turned quickly into a puddle of ink and a mis-shaped nib.
As such, I have some forgiveness for typing. What it gives me (as now) is flow. Speed and flow that, for me, could never be achieved with a pen and paper. Typing is the art of imparting thoughts in the immediate form they came, bashing them out at 70-words per minute – or at least at precisely the same speed that my brain can parse.
That said, writing on a laptop has rarely been my choice for pleasure, or for “exploration.” If my brain is creating something new (rather than rummaging back through old drawers), then the limitation of my pen-speed ceases to be a limitation. It becomes freedom – freedom to pause, freedom to think.
I don’t think I’ve written a single poem on Microsoft Word, or not for years. A poem is something to be taken slowly, with the air-light coarseness of paper beneath your palm and the subtle weight of a pen in your hand – each anchoring you somehow back to the page, egging you on to that next thought without nagging you for it (in a way that the cursor flashing before me now nags me for it); physicalising thoughts and making them tangible, touchable. Real. (There is a separate discussion to be had here in favour of crossings-out and scribbles too – tacit evidence of semantic roads left untravelled, verbal cul-de-sacs escaped…)
Handwriting, if slow, can also allow selection. There is a temptation, if sat in a meeting or an interview with your screen in front of you, to type down everything of even remotest note – to fill the page at whatever pace you can, because you can. If you are bored of notetaking, it is a task AI might now take from you altogether, listening in and transcribing or summarising to the best of its ability. But what this gives you is not “notes” so much as replay – ready to be skimmed and slimmed in two or three days’ time when the true shape and feeling of the conversation has vanished away. Is it not better to allow the moment and the pen to select the “important things” as they emerge? Is your pen not listening more than your blindly bashed-out or AI-generated transcription ever could?
I suspect the answer there is why not have both? And perhaps that’s the answer all round. But I can often be the only person in a coffee shop on a Sunday morning with a notebook (teal, moleskin) in my hand, and something in me – despite years of laptop-based education; despite a continued dependence on Microsoft Word and Outlook and on the keyboard-tapped notes, content, budgets, and press releases that pay the bills. Something in me still thinks that’s a shame.
Harry Ashton-Key
I have a substantial preference for writing with pen and paper, rather than with a laptop. The pen is an extension of myself rather than a tool to be negotiated with (like I find myself negotiating with a laptop). Work done in a notebook feels closer, more intimate, more “me” than work written on the screen. Perhaps because it is “me” who is writing the words – dragging the ink across the page and leaving a permanent mark on it (indelible), instead of a single tap of a button magically creating a letter in front of me (very… delible).
As a tool, the laptop has its place of course. But when given the option between the two, I choose paper. I spend so much time in front of screens for work that it is nice to disconnect from them for my hobbies.
I asked two of my friends, Will and Tom, this same question: computer or paper. My friend Will is not a writer but a mathematician. His argument for paper, at least in how it relates to his work with maths, is that “your pen is much smarter than your brain.” Which is to say when working through a problem, going through the steps by hand with a pen and forcing yourself to be meticulous yields better results than just thinking it in your head.
My other friend, Tom, also prefers pen and paper. His issue with laptops is he overthinks and overworks his sentences when given the opportunity. With the computer, he finds it incredibly easy to spend an eternity tweaking even a single sentence. The ability to delete and restart is all too tempting when there is, essentially, limitless space to write on. Perfection feels so possible, if given enough time. Not so with a pad of paper. Every line takes up space and if you want to rewrite something? That takes up more space. Tom finds he’s a lot more forgiving of his prose when he can’t just instantly delete it.
This is all very pro paper and pen and I didn’t intend it to be, but that’s just the way the cookie crumbles. I do prefer paper and pen to the laptop, but is that because of my relationship to pen and paper or is it my relationship to the laptop? Does spending eight hours a day working, sat with that machine, taint my ability to be creative on it? Or do I simply enjoy writing with these other mediums for the merits of these other mediums?
As it happens, I am travelling right now and don’t have access to my laptop or to pen and paper. Instead, I wrote this on my phone. Somehow I feel it has many similar qualities to pen and paper – it feels responsive, I feel less of a disconnect between the keys and my fingers as I do with the laptop. Having texted my heart and soul to a number of people, there is a truthfulness to it.