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Wiley Wednesday: In Defense of the Pen — No Comments

  1. Awesome! I used to write stories instead of typing and ought to try going back to that. I really had fun, then! My thoughts took longer to put down but also seemed more of an experience instead of just a recorded idea. 🙂

  2. I've noticed I get different results if I compose stories by pen. I prefer to write stories on the computer, but do journal work by hand – unless I'm REALLY in story mode, in which case I'd write on paper towels if I had to.

  3. I find that writing by hand is the best way to beat the Critic a lot of times. I do not allow any editing when I'm hand writing (I'll cut or move whole paragraphs at times, and that's just too distracting when you're handwriting and there's no mouse or delete key), so it forces me to keep the idea flowing without getting bogged down in the execution of it.

    And sometimes there is something about the quiet space of pen on paper. Email or IM doesn't pop up, I don't think about the 10 or 15 websites I haven't visited in a while…If I've got pen and paper I'm writing and that's it.

    I still don't do morning pages much. Too often I begrudge the time it takes to write them or something. That being said, I was surprised to realize the other day I'd gone from Oct to March (and then from March to July) without doing pages. I don't normally re-read them, but I took a look at the Oct ones quickly before starting something new and it shocked me to hear my tone on the page. At least it means I was using them honestly, lol. And it was interesting to see that I'd wound up in almost the same place in June as I was in Oct, although from a totally different direction.

    Of course, if I actually did pages every day there'd be a better balance of content, I suspect.

    I do agree that making time to physically put pen to paper is something everyone should do more often, whether it's pages or postcards or whatever. It's a great way to make sure you're really present in the moment you're in.