Writing by Hand is Good for your Brain

Writing by Hand is Good for your Brain - Here's how to do it

Because I am known to write using a fountain pen on paper, a number of people have pointed me to this post and its underlying research. I won’t rehash what is said in those sources, but the gist of it is that when you write things down by hand you’re recruiting more of your brain, which is a good thing.

I’m not an expert on how the brain works, but I can say that, when writing by hand, one is continually solving a series of small problems having to do with the spacing of words, how letters are connected, the crossing of the letter t (sometimes more than one in the same word) and the dotting of the letters i and j, and how to accomplish all of those things through coordinated movements not just of the fingers but of the whole arm. All of that has to be integrated in real time with whatever is happening on a more abstract level in the brain’s processing of ideas and imagery.

Concurrently I have been following discourse on Reddit and other sources about how widespread use of AI has forced educators to return to the long-abandoned practice of having their students take exams in person by writing things out longhand in blue books. This has created new challenges for students who never really learned how to write by hand, and for teachers who can’t make sense of their students’ terrible handwriting.

About twenty-five years ago I stopped composing at the keyboard and switched over to fountain pen on paper. Since then I have written many thousands of pages that way. The manuscript of The Baroque Cycle was a stack of handwritten pages 42 inches high, which for a time was on display at the Museum of Science Fiction in Seattle. With the exception of The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O., which I co-wrote with Nicole Galland by emailing Word files back and forth, every book I’ve written since then has been composed with fountain pen on paper.

Every so often, when I’m signing books at a book tour appearance, someone will come up to me and say something like “you must have writer’s cramp!” or “is your hand sore yet?” I never have the time to provide a full answer. If I did, however, my answer would be that never, at any time during a quarter of a century during which I have spent a substantial fraction of each working day writing by hand, have I experienced even the faintest traces of so-called “writer’s cramp” or any other such hobgoblins.

Yet I can remember getting a sore hand when I was a kid writing out assignments in school. Many people probably remember such experiences and assume, reasonably enough, that it’s a natural consequence of writing by hand for any length of time. This is not the case.

Here are some fairly simple dos and don’ts for people who want to reap the benefits of writing by hand.

Don’t use a pencil (or a cheap ballpoint)

It’s pretty obvious that you’re going to get tired faster if your muscles have to exert more force. Writing with a pencil requires significantly more force than writing with a good pen. Old-school ballpoints with thick ink are no better. You can see visual evidence of this if you flip over a sheet of paper on which you’ve been writing with a pencil or an old ballpoint. The paper will bear a visible imprint where it was pressed down by the writing instrument. Often that will continue down into the stack of paper beneath. That’s because you had to push hard. This doesn’t happen with a fountain pen. If the nib is working properly you need to exert very little force. The nib is basically skating on the little lake of ink that it has just laid down.

Pains me to say it, but rollerball gel pens are about as good as fountain pens on this front.

Don’t use a gadget

It might then seem reasonable to think that writing with a stylus on an iPad or similar would be best, since no force is needed and friction is minimized. I don’t think this is true. A small amount of friction is actually desirable. You don’t want the tip of the writing instrument to skid out of control. Your brain and your little hand muscles are relying on a little bit of friction. Since I’m writing this during the World Cup, I’ll make a soccer analogy. Soccer players have spent many hours dribbling balls across playing fields, and they’ve internalized the physics—they know about how far the ball is going to travel when they kick it a certain way, and how often they need to give it another kick to keep it moving. If you put them on a giant, frictionless air hockey table, all of that knowledge would become useless. Every touch on the ball would send it out of control. Dribbling the ball down the field would become more tiring because they’d have to be making continual efforts to control the ball’s movement. Relying on a little bit of friction reduces the amount of mental and physical effort.

The combination of fountain pens and paper embodies a balance that has been worked out over a long span of time by people who write a lot. This phenomenon is called “tooth” by aficionados. Removing friction by using a hard stylus on glass will actually make the process more tiring.

Too much friction, and too little friction, are both more tiring than just a little bit of friction, and that’s the balance that is reflected in the fountain pen/paper technology.

Stick to a pen/paper combination that works

Rresults vary when you use various pens on various kinds of paper. Generally I get the worst results on cheap printer paper, because it wicks ink out of the nib too fast, and so creates fat, blurry lines. Often I have the same problem with yellow legal pads. But almost any paper in a blank notebook, or higher-grade printer paper with at least 25% cotton content, works fine. I’ve learned over time that some of my fountain pens work better with certain kinds of paper than others, so I match them up without having to think about it too hard.

Here’s a 300 dpi scan of tests I did with three different pens on various types of paper. You might have to zoom in to see much difference.

The pen on the left is a Jorg Hysek with a wide nib, and you can see that the cheap printer paper soaked up a lot of ink and left a thicker, fuzzier line. The legal pad wasn’t much better. Everything else basically worked. The 100% cotton paper is from a box I purchased a long time ago - it was marketed for printing resumes, back in the days when people printed resumes. It is the toothiest of all these papers and felt noticeably scratchier. I guess it goes without saying that fancy Italian paper is the best, but the comp book and moleskine work perfectly well with just about any pen.

(For those scoring at home, the middle pen is a Diplomat Aero and the one on the right is a Monteverde Invincia)

If the paper is thin, writing on one side can bleed through to the other, so the results can be slightly harder to read if you write on both sides. Which leads me to:

Don’t worry about conserving paper

The ecosystem isn’t going to collapse if you use more paper. It’s cheap. Focus on what’s important here: your brain and your time. Write on one side. Trying to cram more words into a sheet will take you out of your natural and comfortable writing style and make you tired. Just buy a shitload of paper or notebooks or whatever it is you want to use, and use it.

Use cursive

There’s a reason cursive was invented. Don’t even think about not using it. It is far less tiring than printing one letter at a time. I learned cursive as a child. Then I went for many years without using it much, and forgot some of it. Later I re-learned it by sitting in my kid’s elementary school classroom during a parent-teacher conference and examining the forms printed on a long strip above the chalkboard (I still remembered how to do the lower-case letters, but I had forgotten some of the capitals).

Don’t get hung up on legibility

Legibility was more important back in the day when written documents had to be read by other people. Hence the need for exacting