Learning to Write

For some time I’ve mar­veled at the con­sis­ten­cy that cal­lig­ra­phers are able to main­tain when doing their work. Every­thing else is just know­ing how to move a pen to get a par­tic­u­lar shape, flour­ish, or effect. No indi­vid­ual part of cal­lig­ra­phy is all that mys­te­ri­ous, but actu­al­ly get­ting the let­ter­forms the same again and again, that’s a skill that has so far elud­ed me.

Posts on the Foun­tain Pen Net­work led me to Paper­pe­na­li­a’s hand­writ­ing method of writ­ing by mov­ing from the shoul­der rather than flex­ing the wrist. I’ve been prac­tic­ing when I can for a page at a time in my Claire­fontaine note­book (I find pur­pos­es for all these note­books! you’d almost think I was mak­ing up excus­es to write on paper) and am get­ting a page in maybe every oth­er day. I try to remem­ber the rest of the time, but I’m not con­vinced I’ve real­ly got­ten the hang of how to hold the pen.

Yes, it is almost total­ly like learn­ing to write all over again. I can begin to see how using this set of mus­cles helps to estab­lish a rhythm that may even­tu­al­ly lead to more reg­u­lar hand­writ­ing. I hope so, because it’s been a lot of work. I’m writ­ing a lot of diag­o­nal lines and hor­i­zon­tal lines and cir­cles — it’s all to get that mus­cle mem­o­ry trained until these move­ments become nat­ur­al. Right now it feels like that’s a long way off, but I’m com­mit­ted to get­ting it going.

My hand­writ­ing has already been reha­bil­i­tat­ed quite a bit in the last few years. Some­time in grade school I gave up on cur­sive writ­ing and then in high school I aban­doned low­er­case let­ters alto­geth­er. It was the only way (so I thought) that I could make the words I put down on paper leg­i­ble. Five or six years ago I decid­ed to rein­vent my hand­writ­ing and rein­tro­duce low­er­case let­ters. I made some let­ter­forms that I’d nev­er been taught in school, most­ly pick­ing shapes I admired from typog­ra­phy. My low­er­case g’s are bicam­er­al, my a’s have ter­mi­nals, and I’ve added lig­a­tures com­mon to typog­ra­phy. The inten­tion­al­i­ty I brought to cre­at­ing the shapes has made a big dif­fer­ence and my hand­writ­ten text is now much bet­ter-look­ing and leg­i­ble than it ever has been.

Yet I still have trou­ble keep­ing my text on a reg­u­lar base­line with­out using ruled paper and keep­ing the size and angle of the let­ters con­sis­tent. If my let­ters are slop­py and out-of-con­trol, it does­n’t much mat­ter how many times I rein­vent the alphabet.

So one thing at a time. For now, I’m work­ing on get­ting used to hold­ing the pen between two fin­gers with the pen rest­ing on my big index knuck­le. The biggest trou­ble there is that it feels unsta­ble and I tend to grip the pen way too hard. Prac­tice, prac­tice, practice!