A pen and some paper
I was doing a bit of doom scrolling this week - as is my wont. Well done if it's something you never do. It's a bad habit, but there are worse. Mainly, I find myself reading instructions on how to reinvent myself in 5 easy steps or cooking instructions for chicken stuffing balls or watching Victoria Wood be a genius. However, this week I came across a clip of Emma Thompson being interviewed. She was explaining how irritating she found it as a writer when the Internet kept offering to check and correct her work. She also explained that she writes using a pen and paper because she feels that there is a connection between the brain and the hand. Without pretending to have any sort of scientific light to shed on this theory, I would say that she may well be right. For one thing, when you are writing with a pen, it slows you down. That may well make the act more thoughtful and add depth. Certainly, if I want to memorise something, I find that writing it down helps more than anything else - even repeating it in front of a mirror, which can be quite disconcerting after a while.
I wonder if there's something even deeper going on. The book The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron addresses, among other things, a way forward out of creative blocks. One of the ways that she recommends is writing three pages every day. She doesn't seem to be that bothered by what we write - just that we write - every day - three pages with paper and pen.
When I was young, my daily Bible thoughts were jotted down in my notebook with the fish on it, using my pink pen with a small gonk on the top. Like the scripture above, I would tell God about my life and write down what I thought he was saying.
As I am older now, time is at a premium, and the act of writing sometimes has to be done in tiny moments. A pen and paper in the park, working something out or jotting something down before it disappears from a menopausal brain. It will be transferred later on to a laptop for AI to prod at and criticise, but I remain convinced that the use of a pen wakes up a part of my brain and thoughts that a keyboard doesn't quite reach.
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