I’ve always written the first draft of my thrillers longhand in a notebook, but friends—non-writers I should stress—look at me in amazement. “Why?” they ask. When that same question was asked for the tenth time and, once more, I’d struggled to give a convincing answer as to why it works better than bashing it straight into a computer, I thought I’d better try to find a more robust response.
It turns out I’m not alone. In a 2001 interview for CBS’ The Early Show, Stephen King described how he was forced to change to pen and paper after a car accident made it too painful to sit at a PC, and he admitted that he discovered longhand was a more beneficial way to write. It forced him to slow down and consider every word, he said.
Other writers who adhere to pen and paper include the scriptwriter Quentin Tarantino, who takes it further by buying a new notebook and a fresh set of felt-tip pens for each new manuscript. “I suppose it makes it special,” he said when asked about it.
Pulitzer prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri provided insight to her writing process when, in a Harper’s Bazaar interview, she explained, “I feel freer when I write by hand.” And I think that’s part of it—you’re not tied to that keyboard and your arms and fingers aren’t trapped in that repetitive digital motion of typing. Because you now physically move your arm across the page, your body is free; in some way, that lack of constraint conveys itself into the writing and helps the imagination fly free. That might sound like an airhead thing to say, but there does seem to be some science behind it. Pam Mueller (Princeton University) and Daniel Oppenheimer (University of California) studied two groups of students—those who recorded lecture notes on laptops, and those who used paper. Their results, published in Psychological Science, showed that the laptop users did “significantly worse” in standardised tests than students who had written longhand. They hypothesised that, when typing, which is faster, the lecturer’s words converted directly to finger movements, with the brain doing very limited processing. When using a pen, however, the process of converting speech into the loops and lines of written text required the writer to think about the words flowing through their brains; it required more of the brain to be involved in the process.
Writing creatively is very similar. The (slightly) slower process of putting pen to paper allows the brain to process the flow of words, while the need to recall the shapes of letters and the patterns of words stimulates more of the brain, allowing its creative part to be more imaginative. It’s a very analogue process compared to the digital up-down of keyboard hammering.
There is also more feedback to the brain when writing on paper because the emotion of the phrases is conveyed in the intensity of the marks on the page—descriptions of fast action are reflected in the words because they become more scrawled; tension is seen by the additional pen pressure making the words darker. Those subliminal signs get fed back to the brain and stimulate more of the same emotion, which helps the author “get into” their story more. No such feedback occurs when typing.
Brain scans taken while writing and typing clearly show that writing generates more brain activity. Several studies of this were summarised by the American Association of Social Administration, who also concluded that using pen or pencil improved people’s ability to construct sentences.
So I’m not a freak to write my first drafts in a notebook using my favourite pencil: science shows it is a better way to do it. So if you create directly on a keyboard, give longhand a go—see if it helps the creative forces flow more smoothly and gives an overall better result. Come back and let me know how you got on.
Ian Coates is the author of a thriller, Eavesdrop, first published by Bad Day Books, the suspense and thriller imprint of Assent Publishing. He worked in the high tech electronics industry for 30 years, where he specialised in the design of radio communication equipment. His intimate knowledge of that environment always triggered his imagination to think about the mysterious world of spies, and allowed him to bring a unique authenticity to his thriller. Ian is proud to support the British Science Association and donates a proportion of his book proceeds to that charity. He lives and writes in Worcestershire, England, and is a member of the Society of Authors and the International Thriller Writers Association.
Writing and the characters used have come a long way over the last 5,000 years. Perhaps our twenty-first century addition to this continued evolution is the introduction of emoticons, which provide a mechanism for representing the tone in which something is spoken. If the human race is still around in another thousand years, perhaps historians will see it as the next significant step in the development of writing. Or maybe we’re just craving a return to the hieroglyphs of our early forefathers!
Eavesdrop (originally published by Assent Publishing) is a thriller of assassins, modern-day smugglers, and high-tech spies. Who ruined Customs Investigator James Winter’s career, and what’s their link to a Middle East assassination plot?
notes. It’s a Word document and we’ve agreed to use its ‘review’ feature to track each suggested change. It’s rewarding to see how few edits he’s proposing—little more than minor word changes here and there.
Being back with these old characters feels strange. Very glad I’m not being asked to add any more descriptions of them because I can’t remember the team well enough—that would end in continuity errors, I’m sure. Somewhere in the loft I’ve got my original notes from the book—I did character details for them all, and even had pictures clipped from magazines for people who resembled my characters—but I’ve got a horrible feeling some of those have been thrown away by now.
Feels like I’m in a black hole. I want to know the production schedule so I can plan my own publicity and press releases. You’re supposed to start at least six weeks before launch for e-releases (more for physical formats), and a launch of “quarter one” could easily mean we’re almost there already.
Time to check out the narrator. I’d hoped to have been introduced to him earlier, possibly even get a photo together for my publicity. Too late now. I Google him: IMDb tells me he’s best know for parts in the TV shows The Bletchley Circle, Silent Witness, and Call The Midwife. Sounds hopeful. I go back to the Audible site, search for other books he’s narrated, and listen to a few extracts. Impressed. And he is great at accents from the bits I hear. He’ll have done a great job, I’m sure.
It’s about 300 words in length—a little long, but I’m pleased with it and send it out to about half a dozen local papers and magazines, directly addressed to the relevant reporters and editors.
Release day today. Still heard nothing from Audible, which surprises me. Went to Amazon and clicked “hear sample”. Sounds good, but I’d like to hear the full version. I’m surprised Audible didn’t send me a copy once it was ready. I email the always-helpful and always-patient Alex, who rapidly puts me in touch with the “author-care” team; they will send me a code to get my free copy.
Our experiment was prompted when I started to think about blurbs for my latest thriller, The Rival. I eventually came up with 25 words that I felt effectively engaged the reader and I was pleased with the result. For a comparison, I re-read the blurb I’d created for Eavesdrop in conjunction with my publisher a couple of years before and realised that Eavesdrop’s blurb was missing something that the one I had just moulded for The Rival had somehow captured. But why did one feel so much more effective? I read and re-read them before I suddenly realised the difference was in the depth of emotional involvement.
To test whether my thoughts on this were correct, we then held an on-line poll among readers to get their view on 3 slightly different blurbs for Eavesdrop. We used the original one that had been so highly polished with my publishers, and put it alongside the one that maximized emotional engagement, and threw in a third that I made up in ten seconds. Here they are below in random order. Read them quickly. Don’t analyze them just yet, but simply read them as you would in a bookshop and see which draws you in most:
The hacker who stumbles over confidential government data, the virus creator who can infiltrate an organisation’s systems and extract sensitive documents, these all offer new plot lines that couldn’t exist in Agatha Christie’s day.
The James Bond films are a good example of this, which for many people veer into unrealism. Think of 007’s Aston Martin Vanquish in Die Another Day for example: it was a car that the touch of a button rendered invisible. The idea for this probably came from technology that even today is still in its infancy. Take an object you want to disappear and coat the side facing you with a full-size colour display. Next, fix a camera array facing away from you to its reverse side. Voila—you now have the ability to make your object disappear at the flick of a few trillion pixels: by displaying what the camera sees over the display, the item can appear to disappear because the user sees instead what is behind that object.
style stories harder to site in the modern day. Rather than leading to the death of the thriller, technology simply shifts the landscape that’s available to the writer.
ocal police station. The modern writer creating stories based in the 21st century must therefore work a little harder than their predecessors to make crucibles work.
For instance, hacking and virus generation are now sciences in their own right, and the author needs to be aware of what can be done. Think, for instance, of Israel’s scheme to destroy Iranian nuclear plants in 2008. They could have sent F15 and F16 fighters across Saudi Arabia from their Negev base to drop 2000lb bombs on the reactors as they did in 1981. However, twenty-seven years later they took a more subtle approach.
There are frequent cases of industrial espionage, where hackers have succeeded in getting their spying software installed on their victims’ computers. Some years ago, a London couple ran a profitable but illegal business selling trade secrets. Their main tool was a piece of highly sophisticated software (called a Trojan), which they embedded in DVDs containing business proposals, which they mailed to CEOs of a variety of companies. Because their software was so targeted at those individuals, the anti-virus programs failed to detect it, and the CEOs happily inserted the disks into their machines. The Trojan set to work and scanned the companies’ entire computer systems. Anything interesting was copied and sent back to the hackers, who promptly sold them to that company’s competitors.
how the NSA developed an innocent-looking USB lead with a tiny transmitter built into the connector. A spy just needed to break into an office and swap the cable with one already in use (for example to a printer), and they’ve got access to that computer’s data the moment its owner entered their password the next day.
