Indite

Is choosing to pen a handwritten note over typing an e-mail to a loved one the equivalent of baking brownies from scratch rather than serving store-bought?  If I was taking one of those standardized tests where the task is to select like-comparisons I’d probably have to go there.  There is something unbelievably personal about handwriting.  It’s like a finger print or the sound of a voice, a unique identifier; no two people on earth have the exact same handwriting, although I have seen some amazing facsimiles of my own scrawl.  It’s been studied and mimicked quite convincingly by a desperate middle-schooler choosing forgery to gain the required verification that a parent put eyes on the detention slip for an act with consequences that included serving time.

 

I’m the first one to admit I’d be lost without the convenience of a lap top.  I can’t imagine how novels were written before spell check, on-line thesaurus, auto-save (just found out about this feature in Google docs – wow!) and the delete key.  An epic like War and Peace, written around the same time the first commercially successful typewriter was invented in 1867, had to have taken eons to put on paper.  Tolstoy’s wife, as his scrivener, is said to have written seven complete manuscripts of his book before publication. Yikes!  Who’s got that kind of time?

And that’s what it comes down to, time.  It’s the difference between combining butter, sugar, eggs, chocolate, flour and salt to create your own brownies and stopping at the grocery store for the finished product.  More often than not the store-bought version is just fine.   But when you mean to send extra love, there is no substitute for starting from scratch.

Read more from a writer passionate about this lost art here:  The Missing Ink