The Original Longhand Gangsta

Here's an interesting tidbit about the life of a proto-writer for you to chew on.

I'm in a lot, like wat too many, Facebook writers groups. The predominant members of these groups are fresh writers who, despite their various ages, are just learning their chops. There are also writers, like me, who've been at this for a while and know a thing or two. Mostly we've learned these things through brutal trial and error.

Brutal man, just brutal.

More often than not, the older (more experienced) writers do their best to help sheppard the newbies along. But there's always those sanctimonious condescending jackasses who don't want to help. All they do is try and ram their ways of doing things down the new writer's throats.

I've witnessed more than one new writer being destroyed by their "Peers" when they're seeking out help and advice. There are plenty of so-called writers who seem to think they must cull those they feel aren't worthy from the writing world.

Of course, this isn't a new thing. As long as there have been writers, there have been critics and trolls in one form or another. Let me give you an example from my own experiences in the pre-internet (for 99.9% of humanity) world.

I've been a writer my entire life, or at least since I could pick up a crayon and put words in a semi-logical order. My writer's journey started in the early 1980s. Suffice it to say I had no access to a computer, and I had no inclination towards learning to use a typewriter. So I wrote everything longhand from those first crayon stories until my teenage years.

Let me say right up front, I hated it with the fire of a thousand stars.

Ok, maybe not. But it sounds cool. Right?

When I write longhand, my hand hurts, and my wrist hurts. Inevitably writing longhand leads to an inability to concentrate, and everything feeling thick and muddy. Writing longhand, for me, has always been a torturous process. Eventually, it got so bad that it almost made me give up writing. In the end, I wrote two novels no one will ever see, longhand and dozens of short stories.

I still hate working longhand.

Now let's fast forward a few years from my nascent years. We're taking a journey all the way to the fabulous year of 1994. I was a High School senior in Belleville, Michigan. I worked 32+ hours every week at McDonald's while still going to school. I was obsessed with REM (I still am and always will be), Star Trek, comic books, Palladium Books RPG's, and at the time the Lord of the Rings was my safe place.

I think it's safe to say that 17-year-old Josh was a geek of Lewis Scholnick proportions (without all of the bounce house rape).

I can assure you 43-year-old Josh is worse (again, without the bounce house rape).

When I was in Junior High and high school, I took a lot of English and Creative Writing classes. Even then, I wanted to learn and hone my chops. Of course, back then, I thought I was a great writer just bursting with talent. If you thought about your writing, please take a second and look at your stories from back then.

Go ahead, I'll wait.

Did you read them?

Do you want to roll up into a ball due to the shame?

Relax, we all feel that way.

In my senior year, I had a creative writing teacher, I will never forget. And trust me boils and ghouls, it's not for a Good Will Hunting reason either. He was one of those teachers who brooked no dissension. You'd do everything exactly the way he told you, and you'd like it. I won't go as far as calling him a Writing Nazi, it never seemed like he hated the Jewish students. But I will say he was a breed of fascist when it came to the craft of writing. I wish I could tell you he was a rarity, but a lot of the old school writers fall into this category.

I went through the Hilden-Maynard school of criticism, so I could more or less handle all of his bullshit. All of it that is, except for one thing.

This teacher, let's call him Teacher X, insisted every first draft must be produced in that damnable longhand. If we didn't turn in a longhand version, we'd receive a zero for the entire assignment. Considering we only had a set number of projects, and each weighed heavily, a single zero would have tanked us.

I handled it, like I said, until one particular project that stuck in my craw.

We were assigned a 10,000 story on any subject and in any genre we wanted. I went for post-apocalyptic Sci-Fi (shocker, I know. Water is wet, and Josh loves end of the world fiction). More than any other time, my hand hurt. It felt like my wrist was on fire as I wrote. I wanted to stop, but in the end, I did the damn longhand version (wasn't much of a rebel back then, or now for that matter) and suffered the days of aches and pain in my right hand.

Interesting side note. These days I live with moderate nerve damage in my right hand.

After we moved on to the finished the computer drafted versions and received our grades, I approached Teacher X to question his position. I told him I thought being forced to work longhand was pointless. I asked Teacher X why it was so necessary that we wrote in longhand first.

Teacher X's answer was significantly less than satisfying.

He said all of the great writers of the past used the longhand method for t least the first draft. He told me it was the way it should be done. He said longhand made you really feel the story in a way typewriters and computers didn't ( I still don't get that one).

I bet you either think I'm going to say I told him off or that he convinced me he was right.

I did neither (remember, I'm no rebel).

Years, really more than a decade later, I got my writer's legs under me. These days I write only on a computer.

Do you know what happened when I went solely digital (Because I hate typewriters, like seriously I'd shotgun one if I had to use it)?

For the first time, I was able to actually write and concentrate without the physical discomfort of longhand.

Long story short (I know, too late) I'm not saying people who write longhand are wrong. I am saying a writer should write in a manner best suited for them and their comfort level.

Do what works best for you.

Please, new writers, don't let anyone else tell you how to do it.

Fuck the writing fascists.

- Josh (06/20/20)