Creative friction

Do you remember the callus? It was on the inside of that first knuckle, first one down from your middle finger’s tip.

If you were so blessed as to be born with and enjoy an intact body, full and unfettered use of that body, and with parents or guardians who understood the value of education, you had one. It could have been on your right-hand middle finger or your left-hand middle finger, or maybe, if you are a truly rare animal, both middle fingers.

It first appeared on your grade-school finger rather abruptly. You probably weren’t sure how it happened. Maybe you felt a little burn as the friction of a new tool in your hand pulled in tiny tugs at your tender skin. As you spent weeks concentrating on control with still-developing hand-eye coordination, your skin responded, in kind, by fortifying that little out-of-the-way patch with layers of dead cells. Before you knew it, a pad had formed and likely remained a part of you for at least 12 more years.

Waxing and waning with the seasons, it was the physical manifestation of your intellectual growth, a scar earned from lessons in magic, or at least some form of alchemy. It was the mark of an apprentice learning to unleash the powers of a yellow wand that could fantastically transform the sounds of your breath shaped by your jaws, throat, tongue, and lips into symbols. And you were learning how those symbols could be arranged to express your feelings, your thoughts, all of those once intangible and ephemeral abstractions flashing through your brain.

At the time, it was just schooling to you—sometimes-fun-but-mostly-annoying work that must be done before red rover and freeze tag with your friends on the playground. But it was one of your first steps into a vastly larger world, a passing down of the knowledge used to record our knowledge.

You didn’t know, couldn’t know, that you were awkwardly wielding, perhaps, the most commanding transformational force known to humanity.

I know I didn’t.

My callus vanished decades ago. Much like when it appeared, I don’t recall when it disappeared. Just one day, it was gone. I didn’t miss it, never even thought about it until a few weeks ago when I caught myself pondering on the metamorphosis of communication during just my lifetime.

You could find keyboards wired to electronic screens with flashing green or blue cursors somewhere in the world of 1977, but they were nowhere near my world. Typewriters were a novelty, too. I think I had seen two typewriters at this point in my life—one where my mother worked, and there is some hazy memory of one living in a zippered case that belonged to an aunt. I don’t know when I made the mental leap to understanding that all of the printed words I had been gobbling up like a starving beagle pup were conjured with a keystroke as opposed to the careful and precise manipulation of a No.2, but I’ve always been slow on the uptake. Especially so when reality pales to the version I’ve concocted. Or maybe it’s not that I didn’t know, but rather that I chose not to.

Regardless, by the time I made a connection to typed words and publication, media had already thundered galaxies beyond my naiveté. Flashed is the better metaphor, and the typewriter—that mysterious mechanical word-making machine—was itself on the way out, the “ding” of a completed carriage route fading into an echo of simpler times.

If you’re more than seven or eight years removed from those days of wall-mounted sharpeners and chalkboards, I’ll bet your callus is gone, too—bet you haven’t picked up a pencil since. And now only one digit is seemingly vital to our intra-species communication: our good ol’ opposable thumb. Sliding and tapping on smooth glass doesn’t wear and tear on your hide—nothing like transforming our fingers into a tripod of sorts for supporting a slender piece of painted cedar does. There are no calluses on our thumbs. It’s almost like it’s too easy, like the manipulation of these paradigm-shaping symbols—a skill once considered a discipline—is now an unearned mastery we take for granted.

That skilled discipline was something I never mastered, though. If I took my time, made careful strokes on the wide-margined paper, I could print something legible. But turn me loose without those guardrails, and “chicken scratches” was the best you’d get. Cursive, with its confounding loops and tails, its incongruous upper-case and lower-case, only made it worse. I was always envious of the smart kids—mostly girls—who could print and write with such elegance, their dexterity a marvel I longed to emulate. Slowing way down, the handwriting version of “enunciating” each letter with care, I could get close. But I couldn’t sustain that careful pace with a brain shifting and sifting through words so quickly. So sentences and paragraphs that started off with neat and tidy lines, crosses, and dots wound up as nearly indecipherable tangles of syllables that even my own eyes had trouble unsnarling.

While (unbeknownst to me) typewriters ruled the writing universe during those schooling years, there was a lingering, pervasive notion that handwriting would always be a medium of communication. It may well have been a socio-economic decision—the largely lower-middle-class to poor families in our district could not afford typewriters for their kids—but writing it out by hand was the only way anything ever got on paper in every class in every grade. Of course, typewriters and typing classes existed in the school, but I never took a typing class because I never planned on typing for a living. I knew very few men who typed for a living, none in my family. I might very well be the first.

Even after more than fifteen years of earning a humble income by finger-tapping my way through essays and journalism, churning out marketing copy and building digital newsletters for clients, I am an awkward and often stumbling typist. Though mistakes abound, much like my handwriting of so many years ago, I type at least five times faster than I can write by hand. This means, of course, that I can get more words down in a shorter amount of time. A considerable advantage in a time-is-money economy. I can also increase my productivity— which sounds blasphemous in this context—in the increasingly limited blocks of time I set aside to write just what I want to write.

Typing here in the age of computers and the internet also means that my sins are instantly absolved—and with no record that they even existed. No more dirty rubbed spots to map my screwups. No more blinding white Liquid Paper coverups. I can also adjust font size to accommodate my ailing middle-aged eyes and font style to suit my bucolic taste. Instead of flipping through a pile of books after an afternoon at the library, I can open a legion of tabs, each one packed with more information than I could uncover within hours or even days of research the old analog way. Right now, there’s a tab telling me exactly how pencils are made, one offering me the perfect synonym for a particular word I’m prone to overusing, and one showing me the correct spelling of “callus” for this essay.

Truly, the advantages of digital word forming are mind-blowing, insane capabilities eons beyond anything I thought possible back in the 20th century. But deals with the devil always include a tradeoff, a hidden clause. There is no such thing as no strings attached. Thing is, sometimes those strings are nearly invisible or so subtle in their manipulations that, when something feels off, you’re never quite sure of the cause. It could, after all, just be you that’s off.

Some research hints that it’s not just you or me. It’s that typing on a keyboard (and likely sliding your thumbs), once the keyboard pattern is ingrained, is a rote activity. It becomes automatic. You do it without thinking. This is one reason typing is faster than handwriting. Even only adequate typists can keep up with most speakers this side of an auctioneer, and that means they can capture every word nearly verbatim. But handwriting, with its demands of more complex hand-eye coordination, form, and the resulting methodical pace, requires notetakers to process the information more deeply. Taking notes by hand means you must at least partially digest the concept—not just remember the words—and then summarize. You gotta think.

That part, right there, was eye-opening to me. Spitting out a few facts untethered to the larger contextual material is often, in this damnable age of memes, considered synonymous with true knowledge and understanding.

It’s not.

To be fair, the study I’m referencing centered on classroom note-taking. No one tested computer vs. pencil in the shaping of syntax from scratch, of crafting essays over the course of days, of forming fictional worlds over the course of months or years, or of simply wrestling with your own free-flowing ideas. But reading the study reinforced some gut feelings. It made me consider, again, other ways that this bright flashing MacBook, a veritable doorway to all the knowledge of humanity, might actually be an impediment to what, and more importantly, how, I want to express myself.

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A pack of pencils, half a dozen 80-page composition notebooks, and a pencil sharpener will set me back ten bucks. Feeling delightfully out of my timeline, like a 2025 John-Boy Walton, as I place them in the buggy—that’s priceless. I also want a Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, but Walmart doesn’t carry dictionaries anymore. Pretty much no one carries dictionaries anymore. I make a few phone calls (thanks to this mobile phone I’m griping about) and find one—one— at a small independent bookstore, and all they have is the regular Webster’s.

You might be asking: Why not a box of pens? Well, pens are slippery—both in hand and on paper. They’re too modern, too clicky, too plastic. You can’t sharpen a pen with a pocket knife. And with a pen in hand, the letters tend to stampede away from me even faster than with a pencil. I also can’t fix my mistakes by simply swapping ends. I’ve got to uncap the Liquid Paper and paint a hideous, glaring reminder of my screw-ups as opposed to the more subtle rubbing out of an eraser.

In short, a pen doesn’t vibe with my personal aesthetic. The essence of a pen—in-hand and on paper—is mechanical. And there are sensual aspects of writing the old, tree-made way that I want to feel again.

Just unboxing the pencils at home feels like uncovering a forgotten component of myself. Sharpening one is unexpectedly gratifying. When I finally rest my fingers on the pencil’s six flat surfaces and begin, soft, soothing scratches release an atavistic pleasure. I think about the word “graphite,” that it comes from the Greek word “graphein,” which means “to write,” and rolling this thought around triggers a feel-good wave of affirmation.

I should have been doing this a long time ago. Or, I reckon, I never should have stopped.

I’ve not handwritten more than grocery lists or hasty notes in years, and what emerges from the dark gray scribbles is a weird hybrid of print and cursive symbols. There are strange spacings between letters and words—some strung together neatly, some way out of their lane, and some with too much airy space on either side. I’m capitalizing every dang “B” no matter where it is and what word it starts. I have forgotten how to print a lowercase “d.”

This is harder than I remember. And I remember it being plenty hard.

There’s resistance in every pencil stroke—friction of the graphite leaving its mark on paper, friction from the pencil rubbing on my middle finger, friction in my brain as nearly forgotten lessons scrape through corroded neurological pathways.

I try to write a paragraph of free-flowing thought. It freakin’ takes forever and is riddled with errors. Auto-correct and Grammarly have ruined me. Digital crutches have atrophied my writer’s skills. Or have they masked the vast deficiencies there all along? Do I even know how to write? Did I ever?

Ideas spark to a flame with the same speed they always have, but capturing those sentiments before they flicker away feels impossible again. So many awesome words, phrases, and sentences evaporate before I can pin them on paper. Low-key panic creeps in, and I rush the symbols into existence. But my wrist and fingers can only go so fast before the letters crash and burn.

Just like fourth grade.

I take a deep breath.

There is no deadline. No word count goal. No one waiting on the playground. There’s only the lined paper and a pencil—flimsy harnesses for wild and racing postulations, sure. But I’ve got all afternoon to splice letters and concepts, plenty of time to tune tools and technique for the snaring and taming of thoughts.

Several painful paragraphs later, a jazzy tempo develops—Write. Think. Write. Erase. Think. Write. Erase. Think. Write. Think. Think. Think. Write.

I settle into careful crafting—no tapping of homogeneous keys arranged in a familiar pattern, but really writing.

Whether this tangible act of creation—physically placing words on paper—leads to more retentive capabilities is a question I can’t answer. But an energy emerges in the pairing of simple implements with mind and body, something quite different than those vibrations felt while summoning words into the digital ether. Maybe it’s the removal of distractions, something to do with the austerity of a blank sheet of paper and the precise focus of creative power channeled from mind to wrist and three fingers, and all brought to bear on this precise point of graphite.

Or maybe there’s revelation, something about who I am—as a writer, as a human—unveiled in my own idiosyncratic handling of the pencil. Our handwritten words are much like the unique whorls on our fingertips. Not quite that distinctive, of course, but here on the paper, phonetic symbols are formed only by my organic electricity and motor skills, my practiced competency and flawed techniques.

It’s a personal, deeply intimate form of communication, but one where inhibitions are subdued under a blanket of detachment. Writing in any medium fosters this sense of pseudo-anonymity—you’re expressing your thoughts, but not out loud. And though an eye familiar with my style would absolutely know this is my handwriting, it’s still liberating to say exactly what I want to say in silence— personal, definitely my words, definitely my hand, but with a comfortable distance between me and whomever I share it with.

Adding to the genuineness, any reader can look at a paragraph and see those tell-tale smudges where I’ve stitched thoughtful corrections into the tapestry. Sometimes they could even, if they wanted, read my erased mistakes. That’s the authenticity I aim for, to write unencumbered by any desire for perfection. To just write, revise, and write, while striving for only one requirement—the words must be mine.

There’s an incalculable, maybe ineffable significance uncovered in that level of sincerity. We all know this intuitively. It’s why a handwritten love letter is really the only form of a love letter. It’s why anything else is just fan mail.

But I can’t go full Luddite. There is the issue of speed, and there is the more problematic concern of dispersal. I can’t handwrite letters to all of you and stick them in the mailbox. I mean, I could, but as much as I appreciate the support, I don’t have time to acknowledge it as I should. Until I figure out a way to make money without working for it, freeing my time for these more important endeavors, electronic mail will have to do. But the pencil and paper will figure heavily into all of my future writing, just like they did for this essay—drafting paragraphs over and over, jotting ideas as they coalesce in predawn ponderings over a cup of coffee, scratching on paper for the pure tactile joy.

There is a profound satisfaction in the act of creation handled in this old-fashioned manner. It feels like a return, the rediscovery of a humble but potent sorcery still accessible in that magic yellow wand. And just this afternoon, I felt a little burn on the inside of my knuckle—the first tingling confirmation of a true scribe in the making.