David Foster Wallace wrote by hand, in spiral notebooks and with a ballpoint pen, and only then typed the text. That double step forced him to reread and rewrite each page. Julia Cameron demands the same thing in the morning pages: the hand is slower than the mind, and that slowness is exactly what we are looking for.
How I really wrote
David Foster Wallace wrote his texts in spiral notebooks, by hand, with a blue or black pen. He wore a scarf on his head to work. He then typed the writing, which meant that each page passed through his body twice before reaching an editor.
In the case of The infinite joke, with more than a thousand published pages and hundreds of footnotes, that involves an amount of manual work that is difficult to imagine. His notebooks are preserved in the archives of the University of Texas.
The important detail is not the eccentricity of the method. It is the consequence: typing the manuscript was not transcribing, it was the first revision. The second writing happened inevitably, without the need for additional discipline.
Wallace didn't write by hand because he hated computers. He wrote by hand because the computer allowed him a speed that his prose could not tolerate.
What happens in the brain when you write by hand
The hand writes between twenty and thirty words per minute. The keyboard, between fifty and seventy. That difference is not a drawback: it is the mechanism. By writing slowly, the brain has time to compose the sentence before finishing it, and the process forces selection.
Research on handwriting suggests advantages in retention and processing, although it is advisable not to exaggerate the strength of these findings or turn them into dogma. We have carefully reviewed the evidence available in scientific studies on morning pages and in neuroscience and morning pages.
What is indisputable is the negative: on paper there are no notifications, there are no tabs, there is no search engine, it cannot be deleted cleanly. A mark leaves a trace, and that trace is information about how you thought ten minutes ago.
Julia Cameron is blunt on this point: the morning pages are written by hand. When people ask if they can do them on the computer, the answer is that they can, but then they are doing something else. We treat it in morning pages by hand or on the computer.
Slowness as a filter
Writing by hand prevents compulsive editing. On screen, each sentence can be rewritten four times before it is finished, triggering the interior censor at the worst possible time: during generation.
On paper, the sentence ends. It can be crossed out, but it is still there, legible under the line. The page preserves the process, and by rereading it one recovers not only what he thought but how he thought it.
Wallace, who was obsessed with detail, needed precisely that brake. His manuscripts show layers of correction that in a digital file would have disappeared forever under the latest version.
There's a lesson for anyone with a stuck project: If the text on the screen doesn't advance, print it or copy it by hand. The change of support reorganizes thinking with an effectiveness disproportionate to the effort.
The digital temptation, forty years later
Wallace wrote about distraction and entertainment as a form of anesthesia long before social media as we know it existed. The irony is evident: their concerns have aged better than their technology.
The problem today is not the word processor. The thing is that the device where you write is the same one where everything that can prevent you from writing lives. No notebook offers you a thirty-second video when the sentence resists.
The solutions that work are crude and physical: leave your cell phone in another room, write in a notebook before turning on anything, use a device that is only used for writing. We have written about this in morning pages without internet and in blocking and social networks.
Cameron adds a thought-provoking observation: Most people are not blocked by lack of talent, but by overload of stimulus. Nobody has new ideas when they spend five hours a day consuming someone else's.
How to set up your own paper system
A notebook that is not scary. If the notebook is too pretty, the first page becomes a test. Wallace used cheap spiral notebooks. Our guide to what notebook to buy insists on the same.
A pen that flows. The resistance of the paper to the pen determines the speed of the hand. A fine tip marker or gel pen writes faster than a dry ballpoint pen. See best pens for long writing.
A no delete rule. Cross out, don't tear off the page. The ugly page is proof that you were creating and not layout.
And a transcription step. If you write a project by hand, typing it afterward is your first free revision. Don't skip it by using dictation or scanner. That seemingly stupid work is where many texts improve.
None of this requires spending money. A three-euro notebook and a fifty-cent pen are enough for twelve weeks of the method.
A case, not a model
It is worth saying it clearly. David Foster Wallace lived with severe depression for decades and took his own life in 2008. Nothing in his writing method explains or justifies that story, and romanticizing his suffering would be disrespectful both to him and to anyone going through something similar today.
His rigor with the page is admirable. His pain was not a creative ingredient. Literary culture has confused the two too many times, and that confusion does real harm to real people.
Julia Cameron, who wrote her method while recovering from severe alcoholism, always separated the two things: creativity helps you live, but it is not a substitute for treatment. We address this in more detail in Artist's Path versus therapy and in morning pages when you are depressed.
This is a delicate topic. If you're going through a tough time, talking to a professional or someone you trust matters far more than any writing technique, and seeking that help has nothing to do with creative failure.
What to take
That the support is not neutral. That the slowness of the hand protects the thought from the shortcut. Copying a text to make it clean is a form of revision that no one has surpassed. And that distraction is not fought with willpower, but with architecture: paper, silence, physical distance from the device.
You don't need to write a thousand pages by hand. You need to write three, tomorrow, before you turn anything on. It's the entire proposition of the method, and it's surprisingly difficult to argue after you've tried it for a month.
If you decide, this guide in seven steps It saves you the most common mistakes of the first weeks.