In Laptop Age, These Writers Still Love Longhand

Did you know that Obama drafted his 700-page-plus memoir with pen and paper? And he’s not the only author who feels that when words matter, machines don’t cut it

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Handwritten manuscripts hold many secrets and insights. Take Marcel Proust’s lined notebooks that contained absent-minded doodles, surrealist artworks and his dogged revisions. Or the notebooks in which Virginia Woolf drafted Mrs Dalloway, writing on the margins an affirmation of sorts: “A delicious idea comes to me that I will write anything I want to write”. Ernest Hemingway’s handwriting was described as boyish, reflecting a disdain for punctuation and capital letters, with his sentences often ending with an X.

In an age where keyboards are mightier than the pen, literary texts written in longhand might seem like relics of the past but many writers still swear by the process. Barack Obama’s The Promised Land — all 751 pages — was written entirely in longhand because as he says, “a computer gives even my roughest drafts too smooth a gloss and lends half-baked thoughts the mark of tidiness.” Many Indian writers have also cultivated this habit, not because they’re Luddites, but because they prefer it.