Is a pencil better than a keyboard?

Find out why and how a published author is drafting his novels by hand

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Photo by Jan Kahánek on Unsplash

The Case for Longhand

Last month, I tried to unpack why “writing at the speed of thought” might actually be a bad thing in Writing Fast and Slow. The main idea was that the faster your mind races, the less valuable your thoughts are.

Around the same time, I read a couple of articles by

T K Hall

, about how switching to pencil and paper had entirely changed (and improved) his writing practice. He goes so far as to credit the method with helping him write and publish the second two books in The Blind Bowman trilogy.

So, in this era of abundant digital tools, including vastly improved voice dictation, generative AI, and brain-machine interfaces, we decided to explore the virtues of returning to longhand.

Being a strong believer in the revelatory magic of good conversation, I thought the best way to plumb some wisdom from the subject would be to get on a call and record it. So that’s what we did. (After some staggered back-and-forth messages to manage timezones the eight-hour difference in timezones.)

What follows is a version of that conversation that has been edited and restructured for clarity and value. The full video and transcript are available to paid subscribers (I’ve got to throw those noble souls a bone every once in a while), but I wanted to make the best bits as accessible as possible.

Also, here’s a dirty little secret…

In order to create the abridged version of our conversation, I fed the whole thing to an AI and gave it the following prompt:

I've cleaned up a transcript of a long conversation I had with a friend. I'd like to turn it into an interview-style article that preserves the language we used in the interview, but also tightens it all up considerably from about 7000 words (the cleaned up transcript length) to about three thousand words.

It did a much better job than I expected.

The success of this test accomplished two very cool things:

1. It saved me a LOT of hours of editing, and

2. it illustrated one of the key themes from our actual discussion: you’ve got to find the right tool for the right part of the creative process.

While AI helped compress and organize this conversation, the ideas and experiences we shared, and the insights we were able to synthesize in the process, were only possible in the slowness of our unfiltered humanity.

***BONUS: At the end, you'll find an invitation to join a community challenge Tim and I agreed to host, where we can put some of these ideas into practice together.***

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Visual proof!

Finding a Way Out of Writer's Block

Jordan:
You've become somewhat evangelical about longhand writing. What initially drove you to make that shift?

Tim:
It came from a place of desperation, really. After publishing my first novel, I got terribly stuck writing the sequel, Dark Fire. I was producing work constantly, but it was all going in the bin. At some point, I realized I had to either stop writing altogether or find a radically different way to work.

I rehabilitated my whole creative process, and one major change—though it sounds relatively minor—was turning off the computer and writing drafts in longhand. That, more than anything, seemed to unlock my writing and help me make daily progress.

For the longest time, I didn't believe the method of getting words down would make much difference. You can write on a typewriter, word processor, whatever—surely as long as the words are getting down, that's what matters? But I've found there are profound differences in how we write when we step away from the screen.

Interestingly, when I started writing my first novel, Shadow of the Wolf, I did do the first draft in longhand, but somewhere along the line I switched to word processing, mostly for the speed. That's where the tension comes from—these tools are very good at what they do. Your word processing software is supremely efficient in many ways. Once you've started working that way, going back to longhand feels like regression, maybe even psychologically, like we're going back to being children at school with pencil and paper.

But that might actually be a good thing. There was an artist who said, "It took me a year to learn to paint like the masters, and a lifetime to learn to paint like a child." When you watch children writing stories, they just dash them off without overthinking. There's something very freeing about returning to that physical way of working.

Speed vs. Value

Jordan:
The speed at which you write really influences what you write. When you're typing, your fingers are moving independently of conscious thought, with words appearing on screen slightly behind your thoughts. That can be great if speed is the priority, but for creative writing, maybe that's not always what we want.

This reminds me of dictation, which I've tried because it would theoretically be even faster than typing. But I have an enormous block with it—it's so uncomfortable that I give up immediately. It stands to reason that the paradigm would shift again, maybe just as dramatically, between typing and writing by hand.

I love what you're saying about the somatic relationship we have with writing—when you have the pen in hand and paper under it, you have a much more intimate relationship with the words themselves as you're scratching them out, literally, one letter at a time, one stroke at a time. You feel the words in your body in a way that you can't when typing.

Tim:
Exactly. The more perfunctory the writing gets, the more non-fictional, the more likely I am to use a keyboard. But with fiction, there's an almost mystical element to the process. When it's working, it feels like you're dredging something up from somewhere you can't consciously access.

Longhand writing seems to tap into that because it slows you down and gives you physical feedback. Anyone who's practiced yoga can tell you that the shape and movement of your body affects how your mind works. When you've got a pencil in hand and a notebook, there's a flow and rhythm that seems to naturally produce more balanced, elegant sentences. On a keyboard, it's very staccato—you're hammering away, and you tend to get something with sharper edges.

Jordan:
My words per minute might be much higher with typing, but is the value per word higher? In my experience with longhand writing, the value per word is much higher. You might write slower, but you're more likely to keep what you write. The total equation of speed actually favors longhand because the material you're producing, even though it's generated much more slowly, is more likely to be worth keeping.

Tim:
That's exactly right. There's also better momentum. When I was in the midst of writer's block, the backspace key on my keyboard literally broke off because I was reaching for it more than any other key. With word processing, you can just delete something and it's gone—you have no record of your progress. Writing on paper, I might put a line through a whole paragraph and start again, but it's still there. It's proof of progress, so it keeps up morale, and it's something to build upon.

Jordan:
How different would a carpenter's workshop be if all the things carved away from a block of wood just disappeared? If there was no sawdust or extra pieces, just this clinical environment where objects either existed or didn't exist—which is basically the digital space we work in. No wonder we can get demoralized staring at a cursor on an empty page after deleting everything we've written.

Creating a Sacred Space

Tim:
My writing process now is very deliberate. I have an analog writing room above my garage—a tiny cell with no WiFi where my phone doesn't work. As early as I can in the morning, I go into that space with my pencil and pad. I do a little meditation, then write about 1,500 words longhand. After a short break, I type those words up on an old computer that doesn't connect to the internet, using that time to polish things up slightly.

I won't do big changes during transcription unless I've made a note in the margin about something I'd like to add. Then hopefully I'll walk out of that office with a document that has a good flow to it, knowing I can continue the next day. I could easily write more words, but you get to that point where you've exhausted the well. It's very much about rhythm for me—that Hemingway thing of stopping where you want to go on. The right pace seems to be much more important than getting loads down in any particular day.

Jordan:
The disconnection seems really important. A lot of people beat themselves up over not having enough discipline to avoid YouTube or email, but the reality is that if it's in front of you, you'll use it. It's like keeping cookies in the house when you have a weakness for cookies—you know you'll eat them if they're there.

I live in a two-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles, and there's no space I can go that's not connected in some way. So what I've started doing is putting my laptop in a drawer at the end of the night. That way in the morning, the first thing I have in front of me is a notebook. It's much easier to sit down and have a physical experience with writing. Later, whether it's fifteen minutes or an hour, I'll pull the computer back out for other work.

Longhand Logistics, from First Draft to Publication

Jordan:
I'm curious about how you manage the organization of your writing. I think this is a challenge for everyone, even if they're exclusively digital. How do you handle the transition between longhand drafts and digital versions?

Tim:
I keep it fairly straightforward, partly because I transcribe the same day. When I used to write a hundred pages before typing them up, I was intensely worried about losing them or them going up in a fire. But transcribing daily also gives this sense of progress. If every day I've written 1,500 words and then put them on screen, they're there, and I just carry on the next day. The manuscript builds itself until I get to the end.

I don't want to be editing during this process. Even though I've transcribed it, I still think of it as the first draft, and I want it to be as pure—or as rough—as it needs to be. After I've got an end manuscript, I'll leave it to cool off for a few weeks, then come back with fresh eyes. At that point, I've got a printout I can share with my editor and read myself.

Jordan:
So the first draft all happens longhand, and you're transcribing as you go, but from that point forward, do you find yourself doing all the editing digitally? Or do you go back to longhand for any of the rewriting?

Tim:
It's more the latter actually. Ideally, the manuscript will have some material that's usable as is, needing just tweaks and polish. Those changes I'll make on the word processor, but that comes later. After we've got that first draft, the next thing is identifying the big holes or things that need to be reworked—and those I will go back to pen and paper for. Don't get me wrong, word processing is brilliant for fine-tuning, but anything that's still building character or adding scenes or radically changing anything, I'll go back and do that in longhand again.

Toward Greater Depth

Jordan:
One of the things technology delivers is a vast amount of spiritually valueless content—iterations of the same thing over and over. If we're asking ourselves what we're for as writers, especially now with AI, I think longhand gives us the opportunity to explore answers that are more satisfying and lasting.

There are all these different tools we have now—longhand, typing, dictation, and even AI-assisted writing. I think it would be a mistake to dismiss any of these modalities of creation. It's about using the right tool for the job, even when it's hard, maybe especially when it's hard, if it feels inconvenient or slow or irrational. Just try it because you might discover deep value there that you hadn't accessed before.

Tim:
I think we recognize this more readily with visual artists. A friend of mine is doing more and more with physical paint and drawing by hand because the digital space is being taken over by AI. This is what he's still got. More than that, it's becoming more apparent just how beautiful the things he produces are compared to that soulless, flat, reproductive product that comes through AI.

Writers aren't as different as we might think, because words look like words no matter how they're generated. Where those words come from is a much more profound and mysterious question. That's what I'm driving at with the whole longhand thing. There are lots of practical advantages, but the deeper you go into it, the more it becomes a mystical practice that is an antidote to so much of the noise. It's a gateway into deeper stuff where I'm hopefully getting to know myself and the stories that want to be told through me.

I think of that moment in Star Wars where Luke turns off the targeting computer. For me, that becomes more and more profound as we go further down this strange technological track we're on. The stuff that's worth doing isn't easy to get at. So much of our culture now is surface level, but more and more, we know that depth is what we're trying to achieve. For me, one way to find that depth is to turn off the machines and pick up a pencil.

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The Community (yes, that means you) Longhand Challenge

The best way to understand the value of writing by hand is to — you guessed it! — write by hand.

Easier said than done, of course. So Tim and I want to invite you to start small, with one simple challenge than anyone can pick up and do to get a real feel for some of the things we talked about, and Tim himself has personally demonstrated.

Here’s the challenge:

Write a complete short story, by hand, in two weeks.

And here’s the rules:

1. Write the first draft entirely by hand

2. Any length is fine, but the story needs to have a beginning, middle, and end

3. Give yourself permission to be messy, and then clean it up in the process of transcription

4. Try to find a quiet, disconnected space for your writing sessions

5. Complete your story by January 15th

If you want to take on the challenge, just say so in the comments.

Then, on January 15th, Tim and I will go live right here on Substack, so save the date:

Longhand Challenge Post-Mortem

January 15
9am PST // 12pm EST // 5pm GMT

During the live video, we’ll talk about how the challenge went, share insights from the community (you!), and maybe read some stuff.

If you’re feeling resistant to all this, remember that the things most worth doing are often the things we most don’t want to do.

In other words: Saddle up, partner!