Rediscovering handwriting

The perhaps most accessible and obvious mirror of your self could be… your handwriting.

Morning Pages

Six weeks ago I started a new daily practice: Morning Pages. At the time I had just started reading “The Artist's Way” by Julia Cameron. I had heard and read about her concept of Morning Pages before, but now I was finally ready to try it out. Of course, six weeks ago I didn't know if I will be able to establish a new habit. But today I can say that I have.

Morning Pages are a simple concept: When you get up in the morning you commit to writing three full pages every day. What you write about doesn't matter, you just write what comes to mind. A stream-of-consciousness dump¹. This is not a results-oriented exercise, but a process-oriented one. You're not even supposed to read or share the three pages after you wrote them. Consider the whole thing a form of meditation.

There's one interesting decision I made right away, without knowing how important it would turn out to be: Julia Cameron suggests to write your three pages by hand with pen and paper. That's partially because of when she wrote the book. Naturally, with my digital lifestyle I had a conflict with that. However, I also have an iPad and an Apple Pencil. So I decided to start with writing my morning pages by hand, but with digital ink on virtual paper. A sort of compromise, I guess.

I thought of this as a small experiment and didn't expect any specific outcomes. Maybe I was hoping for settling into a more regular writing routine, although Julia is very clear about how that is absolutely not what Morning Pages are for. They are for clearing your mind in preparation for your actual creative work. They are not your creative work.

Ah, well, what does she know…² Maybe it works for me? Another reason for me to try this is that I also like to switch up my tools and techniques around knowledge management every now and then, so that seemed a good opportunity to do that.

Her advice is: Do it for at least two weeks. After that you will see some benefits. Before that it might be difficult to notice any. She also says that especially in the beginning it will be difficult to write, but you should just write what comes to mind, even if you end up writing down “I don't know what to write.”

So I began writing. And indeed, my first few sessions were about not knowing what to write about and complaining about all kinds of little things that happened the day before or about things that were supposed to happen today. That's another thing she anticipated: Morning Pages are to get your grumpy complaints out of your system and set you up for a more successful day.

Before I write about what I learned over six weeks, I want to tell you about something I noticed after just a few days. It seems like a pretty insignificant detail at first. But now I'm not so sure anymore. It could be the most important learning of all.

The look & feel of digital ink

To write text by hand on my iPad I obviously needed an app. I tried Apple Notes, which crashed on me on day two, which was extremely frustrating and disappointing. But I also remembered that I had bought an app for exactly that a long time ago, called Nebo, which is for handwriting notes on iPad.

What both Apple Notes and Nebo allow you to do is: You can choose from a variety of different pens — felt tip pen, fountain pen, brushes, markers, etc. And you can choose a stroke width. All that of course has a big impact on how your handwriting ends up looking. However, what I totally underestimated was how much it impacts how it ends up feeling.

I think it was in my second session where I once again had no idea what to write about, and so I started switching pens and playing around with the stroke width. That was the note I lost due to Apple Notes crashing, so I can't remember exactly what I was writing. But I certainly discovered what my favorite virtual pen is: a fountain pen with a slightly thicker stroke.

It's remarkable: the way it physically feels to write with an Apple Pencil on your iPad does not change at all (I didn't go into changing tips or buying screen protectors for my iPad with a paper-like feel… yet), but just how the ink looks on screen as you make your marks on the page makes a huge difference! At least to me.

It reminds me of the time I was using actual pens on actual paper. Yeah, I was around when that was a thing. And I happened to be an avid note taker already back then. And I was picky about my pen and my paper.

There were notebooks that had low quality paper that felt too rough to write on with a fountain pen or a felt tip pen — it felt too much like scratching, and I wanted it to be smooth. How the ink was absorbed by the paper was also important. I wanted to use both sides of each page, and leaking through onto the next page was an absolute no-go. I also had a phase where I would only write with a particularly soft graphite pencil, just because I liked how that felt. Maybe you can relate to these things. I don't know. I assume there are people today who only wrote with pen on paper for a brief period in primary school (they still teach that there, right?) and then switched to typing and never looked back.

Anyway, so on day two I discovered my favorite virtual fountain pen in the app. And what can I say, I kind of became obsessed with how it feels to write with it.

At that time I still thought that's just the usual phenomenon of enjoying something new and fresh, and that it would fade soon. But even after a week I noticed how it still made me want to keep writing. I still wasn't getting any better at knowing what to write about. But I wanted to keep going, just because it felt good. I liked the experience of writing just for the sake of writing itself.³

There I was trying out a new practice, hoping it would somehow make me more productive or deliver any other valuable benefit — and what I get is some strange kind of excitement out of making marks with a virtual fountain pen on a screen masquerading as a lined paper notebook. Weird. And not a big thing, right?

Well… Turns out this is a major motivational factor for me. I look forward to writing now. Of course, once I realized that, I wondered what exactly is going on here. And so I tried to find other occasions where I had similar experiences.

Little interactions, huge impact

I'm also quite picky about typing. I tried a few mechanical keyboards with different switches. And sure enough, I remember that especially when I just started using a new keyboard, the simple act of typing — pressing buttons — became a little more fun. At least for a while. And yes, I enjoyed typing for a while so much that I wanted to type more. I don't think it lasts as long as this handwriting thing seems to last though. I'm still using a mechanical keyboard and I'm happy with it. But I can't say that I sit down and type, just because typing feels good. Also compared to handwriting the act of typing seems less… dynamic? There is a certain haptic feel, which is what the switch types define — some people like clicky keyboards, others like a silent linear resistance, I prefer a tactile switch where you have a little more resistance in the beginning but when you get over the initial resistance it just feels like a linear switch. Yes, we are just scratching the surface and we could easily go much deeper into these little details, but that’s not the point.

There's another thing my pattern recognition made me aware of: the kind of video games I like playing. I'm a huge fan of Nintendo's Zelda and Mario series. And at the core of these games — at the tiniest level of the human-computer interface — are fantastically designed interactions. In a way you could argue that both Zelda and Mario are just programs to teach you how to perform more or less complex interactions with the controller. But of course as you play these games it is all about how they react to your controller input. It’s responsive, it makes sense, it has a good kind of intelligible complexity that you learn over time as you play the game so you get better at it. It simply feels good.

From here it's not far to make a connection to certain touch intercations I like to bring up as brilliant examples for user experience done right, like the home gesture in iOS that replaced the home button with iPhone X. Have you ever witnessed yourself just playing with that gesture without actually wanting to do any of the actions you can control through it? Just because it feels so good? I'm not sure how universal this feeling is, although I suspect that it is something pretty wide-spread but just not talked about much, because it is ultimately not important, it’s pretty insignificant, or is it?

There is something about these well designed interactions that has an impact on how good they feel to us. Simple actions and gestures with little feedback often seem just barely functional to us. Just a little lag or inconsistencies and it feels broken. But if it’s responsive and you add a little bit of physicality such that the interaction behaves and feels more like what we are used to from interacting with physical objects, they begin to feel more exciting to us. Effectively, if we add what could be considered useless complexity that is not required for function, like animations that model physicality with ease-in and -out effects or spring mechanics, it begins to feel better. Isn’t that interesting?

Ok, back to handwriting

Isn't it fascinating how much complexity is encoded in these simple marks we leave on paper (physical or digital, doesn't matter)? Every letter does not just represent a letter of the alphabet, it also subtly encodes the way we wrote it.

There is a shadow of the movement my hand made in every letter of my handwriting. Take just the simple uppercase “I”. In my handwriting that's just a vertical line. Except that it’s never perfectly vertical. And thanks to my virtual fountain pen I can see how the top part of the stroke is a little bit thicker, then the middle part is thinner, and then the lower part is thicker again, but not symmetrically with the top, but slightly shorter. That's because this particular pen simulates the effects of making marks on paper with different speeds. Like physical ink absorbed by physical paper, dependent on how quickly you move the tip of the pen, more or less ink will be absorbed.

In a way you can see the residue of my tiny motor movements of a physical object in physical space embedded in the marks. My intention to draw a tiny vertical line maybe just that — an intention, but my execution is dependent on my fine motor movement and ability to respond to all kinds of tiny physical forces acting on my movements, like the weight of the pen and the friction of the pen gliding over the surface.

And so my vertical line comes out imperfect. And it does so every time. And every single “I” looks slightly different. Each version of every letter I write looks different from each other version of that same letter. Although they are meant to represent the exact same thing. How inefficient!

So much useless information encoded in our handwriting that has absolutely nothing to do with the message encoded in it. In the worst case scenario, all this extra complexity encoded in there just makes it harder to decipher later on what we actually intended to write there.

That's one way to look at it.
That's a very analytical, results-oriented, functional way to look at it.
That's a way to look at it that ultimately leads to the invention of the keyboard, where you just do the least amount of physical work necessary to encode a letter, by pressing its dedicated button. So much more efficient! Right?

Handwriting as a mirror of your self

There is another way to look at your handwriting. It is your handwriting. It has a part of yourself in it.

All that extra complexity in the way you make your marks on the paper with your hand is unique to you. So unique that for a long time we used handwritten signatures as a token for identity. Part of your identity is encoded in your handwriting. And when we choose to transcribe a handwritten note (or let AI recognize the message in it for us), we essentially strip most of the information that represents our identity away from it.

The resulting message might still carry a little bit of us in the way we phrased things and which words we chose, but look at how much of our identity got stripped from it. It's a lot less personal. It can still be personal, of course, because there is still enough complexity to encode a lot of our identity “between the lines” as we like to say. But we also like to say that nothing is more personal than a handwritten note or letter. Is that because there is so much more of us in there?

As we embrace the digital and the virtual more and more and as we leave behind the physical, I begin to wonder what we really leave behind with it.

There's a mountain of information that we consider completely useless that we strip out for efficiency and because many of our modern tools are not equipped to deal with that kind of information. Unless we find ways to bring this capability back to our digital and virtual worlds. But why would we? We often don't see good enough reasons to invest the significant effort of bringing something “useless” into our experience in exchange for lots of additional “unnecessary” complexity.

Beauty in handwriting

I’m sure you’ve seen somebody else’s handwriting at some point and were astonished by its beauty. Perhaps you even had to say it out loud and tell the person. Even though everybody’s handwriting is unique and therefore we could easily fall into the trap to declare its beauty as completely subjective, there are aspects to it that we can appreciate as a group, that we can agree on, for instance legibility. Good handwriting is legible.

But legibility is not the only thing that matters. The beauty comes from how it is integrated with the now legible complexity of the writer’s unique style. We can make sense of the writing, it serves its function, but we can also connect with it as a unique artifact of someone else’s creation. Coherence, purpose, significance. It’s not just a message. We can see through it into some part of the soul of its creator. But the more we strip away this complexity, the more we simplify and optimize for the limited capabilities of our tools, the more we end up with soulless, lifeless products instead.

When I learned about Christopher Alexander’s Mirror of the Self test and looked at hundreds of photos of physical objects and buildings and artworks, it was difficult for me to develop a sense for which of those things have more of my self in them. It never occurred to me to imagine that one of these tests could have been between a page with my own handwriting on it compared to the same text typed on a typewriter or printed with a computer. There it becomes obvious, which one has more of my self in it. Literally.

Now, of course it’s obvious if it is my own handwriting. But isn’t it equally obvious when you look at somebody else’s handwriting and compare it to a printed version? Even if it’s not your own handwriting, isn’t it still obvious that there is so much more life in the handwritten version than in the printed version where most of it was stripped away (or was never even there in the first place).

I believe what Alexander saw in those objects and buildings and artworks that had more life than others was the same residue of their maker encoded in its structure, much like your handwriting encodes your self in it. It is not exactly required for function, which is precisely why we keep removing it from most of the things we create. But if we manage to leave some of it in, we seem to end up with something that somehow feels better. That somehow feels more human.

(This newsletter was drafted in handwriting on an iPad.)

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Mirror of the Self is a fortnightly newsletter series investigating the connection between creators and their creations, trying to understand the process of crafting beautiful objects, products, and art.

Using recent works of cognitive scientist John Vervaeke and design theorist Christopher Alexander, we embark on a journey to find out what enables us to create meaningful things that inspire awe and wonder in the people that know, use, and love them.

If you are new to this series, start here: 01 • A secular definition of sacredness.
Overview and synopsis of articles 01-13: Previously… — A Recap.
Overview and synopsis of articles 14-26: Previously… — recap #2.

Another great way to start is my recent presentation Finding Meaning in The Nature of Order.

1. Or is it a stream-of-subconscious dump?

2. Turns out a lot. But we’ll get to that in another newsletter.

3. Process-orientation achieved!