Pen, Pencil or Keyboard

When I’m online, I’m alone in a room, tapping on a keyboard, staring at a cathode-ray tube. — Clifford Stoll

Someone once asked me why I compose music in longhand rather than using computer music software such as Sibelius or Finale. I don’t do much of that kind of composing, and when I do I like to force myself to focus on what I have written, which helps me to fine-tune it and find mistakes. I need occasional reality checks when I write in different clefs and do transposing. Sometimes I get distracted and start writing the viola part in the violin clef, ­especially after a few drinks. When I have to copy the whole thing out by hand note-for-note,­ I see and hear the music again as though for the first time and spot weaknesses I might have overlooked and any just plain lazy writing. If I just had to hit a key and the whole thing reproduced itself automatically, it would be too easy to miss these kinds of problems. However, if I was writing out scores for a living daily I might consider using music software to save time. But at this stage I actually get more self-education out of doing it the longhand way.

I was reading the letters of Ted Hughes over the weekend. I have always considered Hughes a B-grade poet at best. Yes, yes … I know he was Poet Laureate of England and the Queen bestowed the Order of Merit on him. Tie a tinkling bell around the neck of a ferret; it’s still a ferret; the benefit is at least now you can hear it coming. History lesson for those attracted to tinkling bells: Robert Southey, friend and associate of Coleridge, Wordsworth and Lord Byron, was chosen over all of them as Poet Laureate in 1813. His work has been almost totally forgotten.

It is completely logical that Ted Hughes should be made Poet Laureate by the same Queen who made knights of Mick Jagger, Elton John and Bob Geldof. The monarchy ain’t what it used to be, folks. Vale Sir Lancelot.

I have always felt that the letter writing of Ted Hughes was much more interesting than his poetry, the main reason being that he allows himself to be somewhat confessional in his letters. More of the real deal—the frustrated man—leaks through.

Hughes is an aggressive debater and puts a convincing argument for any topic he chooses to defend. But with a little thought and preparation, his positions are easy to counter. Take this following persuasive theory on why handwriting is more creative than typing, in a letter to Nick Gammage, of May 1998, just before he died:

Have you noticed that you write quite different prose on your word processor than when you’re writing by hand? You do. The reason: because handwriting is basically drawing of images (that’s how graphologists read it. They decode the images in the various letters, read them as “pictures”)—it engages not only the whole record of your psychological history (as your unique handwriting does) but it engages from word-to-word all the preverbal activities of your brain (as drawing images does), which then bring the (non-verbal) associative contribution to bear on what is being written about, and therefore help to determine the sequence of ideas and expression, tones & rhythms etc. That is why hand-written letters give you the impression of dealing with the real i.e. the whole person. And why you feel a formality about a typed letter. And why a word processed letter from a friend (word processors are a whole range further removed from that preverbal engagement than typewriters, as typewriters are removed further than handwriting) can seem to be from an unknown person, or even from a robot, and why the writer feels the need to apologise for it (as you did.)

 I was mesmerised by this until I realised that it is shallow thinking and incorrect: one size fits all, when it’s clearly different strokes for different folks.

Hughes wrote: “word processors are a whole range further removed from that preverbal engagement than typewriters, as typewriters are removed further than handwriting”, to which one might parry: “as handwriting is further removed from speaking, as speaking is further removed from grunting …”

I can’t even read my own handwriting most of the time. The only thing my handwriting engages is my desire to break my pencil. And has anyone seen Ted Hughes’s typing skills? I have a letter he wrote me once. He’s using some kind of old-fashioned Royal portable with a missing letter. No wonder he doesn’t get pictorially inspired.

The main point Hughes overlooks in his argument is that most of the deepest-inspired creation, whether writing music, poetry or prose, happens in your imagination before you even get near pen or paper, or the keyboard. Much of the time, it resembles taking dictation: you compose it in your head, turn it over, rework it mentally, over and over—and then simply write it down with whatever is handy: pen, pencil, crayon or computer.

During the writing of my Leadbelly Ballad Novel, I would get up in the middle of the night and write the lyrics out to five songs that I had been turning over in my mind for an hour or so while I was lying there in the dark. I’d sit up, switch on the light and I’d write them out by hand, then go back to sleep, get up in the morning and then type them out. (So I could read my somnambulant scribbling later!) I wrote the ten verses to one of my best and more poetic and emotionally complex songs about my father completely in my head, while I was taking a walk through the bush.

When I really get excited, my handwriting resembles something between an EEG machine and a Lie Detector graph. Now some people’s handwriting is more expressive (and legible!) than others and I can see how that might further inspire them, as Hughes suggests. But what about calligraphers in that case? Doesn’t it stand to reason that they would get more pictorial inspiration than people who simply write in normal script? In that case, the best writers should also come from Japan. The pub-scrawlers like me (and Beethoven—that slut of penmanship) would waste too much time trying to decipher what we actually wrote down by hand to have any energy left for writing more of it.

Consider also that the type font you use when you compose on a typewriter or computer makes a difference. After all, fonts are pictures too: set your font size to 36 and watch the difference in how you think!

One day down the track, when we can speak our text directly onto a screen accurately, and no longer need to write anything down, or further on still from that communal cave wall, when merely by controlling our alpha and beta brain rhythms, we can move cursors around on our computers and no longer need our hands for anything except holding a beer (no fooling! these experiments are already under way), we will look back with affection to the good old days when the forgotten physical act of pounding a keyboard made one feel like a whole person.