How Writing by Hand Helps Unleash Your Creativity

And Why Journaling Is a Great Way to Dig Down Deep to Your Creative Roots and Soar to Great Heights

Low-technology pen and paper offers a different kind of freedom, and a different kind of space. And we’d be wise to embrace them.

When was the last time we embarked on something truly inspired that we started from scratch and saw through to its marvelous completion?

Creativity. So easily blocked and repressed. Life is both a source of it (as it should be) and a barrier to it (because it can be). And so are we ourselves. We distract ourselves, we let others distract us. It’s difficult to see an idea through when we are constantly looking at our screens. Not only that, but in this hyperconnected digital age, we find ourselves more and more often playing to an audience. We rustle something up to share with our friends, with strangers who follow us or subscribe to our brand/content, for clients we want to please and those we want to land as clients. We create something according to schedule and according to what we believe our audience will embrace.

Nothing wrong with that. If anything, it’s a great, motivating setup. That is, until it becomes our only creative parameter, and frames everything we do. Soon enough, some tinge of mindlessness and routine starts bleeding into our work, and eventually, we forget what it means to be creative.

Well, creativity is messy—messy schedule, messy workspaces, messy experiments. And it’s this messiness that we want to hide from those we wish to share our finished work with. Which is well and good. But then we start feeling uncomfortable with the mess ourselves. And nothing can be done about us witnessing this mess. We are our first audience. We see everything that ends up on the floor in the cutting room, every balled-up sheet of paper hurled into the wastebasket. We know of every ill-considered early draft, every jarring false note, every ill-decided pinch of spice.

What now, then?

Now we embrace the idea of “creating art for an audience of one,” where mistakes are glaring to just one critic—that is, if we insist on being too hard on ourselves and being a barrier to our own creativity.

And the mess? We embrace the mess even as we sort through it to create something sleek in execution, clean in lines, polished in diction and syntax, or something deceptively messy. We clean up as we go. Because we need the clarity. We take notes to arrive at clarity. We start a diary, a log, or a journal; and we write down things to flesh out an idea, or to stumble on an idea. And if we really want to see things more clearly, we strip down to something as basic as pen and paper. That’s instant freedom—from reliance on the working condition of a gadget or machine, the limitations of battery life or electricity, the restraints of a desktop computer situation. It’s the freedom to be without, and it is complemented by the neural activity triggered in our brain when we write by hand. Pen and paper allows us to be mindful: it puts the brakes on our mad rush toward some hazy point of coherence and actually brings that coherence closer, sooner.

So: how about journaling your way out of a cramped, fenced-in, and noisy place and into a wide open space where you can soar?

Explore how we can get you started on your own journal about your creative endeavors.

We have more articles coming as we explore the benefits of writing by hand.
Don’t stay away too long!