My hand hurts. The right one, as I am right-handed. (I have one left-handed child, and I remember noticing her preference, not when she picked up a crayon but her toothbrush, the fork beside her plate, a spoon to stir soup on the stove). I can feel tightness all the way up to and through my right shoulder blade. When I finally stop writing this afternoon, having completed three hand-written pages, my fingers stay gripped around their fine-point gel pen. I extend and stretch the fingers; pain runs to the tips of each one.
I have not handwritten this many pages in cursive since college, taking in-class essay exams and filling up the infamous blue books (Do they still use those? My guess is no.). I have written five pages so far, one printed page equaling, approximately, one notebook page, front and back. In those five pages, Stepan Arkadyavitch (whose full name I must write out numerous times, at least twenty so far) wakes on the couch in his studio, kicked out of his wife's bed when she discovers he has been has sleeping with the governess, an act for which he is unwilling to repent, because, he does not love his wife.
Arkadyavitch does not roll off the fingertips. Decisively, however, feels smooth and lovely as I write it, as does happened, possibly, cruel, and upper lip. I had forgotten the pleasure I used to take in evenly spacing the words, maintaining a constant motion until I reach that last letter, and only then, going back to dot my i's and cross my t's. In high school, we hand wrote everything. Laura P and I competed for the neatest handwriting; I confess that I have kept my frog dissection lab report from Freshman Biology out of pride for my penmanship. Years later, after my first child, is born, I am tutoring kids with dyslexia and dysgraphia, and I learn why handwriting is important: our ideas are lost if the person with whom we want to share our thoughts cannot even read the words. Later, my son's fifth grade teacher requests that we respond to classroom papers in cursive, so students can practice reading the unfamiliar shapes. Now, of course, handwriting is being phased out. I wonder how this will change the way this generation of students sees and handles words. Handwriting is a skill that has served us well.
In my own fiction writing, I often rewrite or retype stories as one step in the revision process. I consider each word carefully, punctuation too, an often overlooked and powerful tool in storytelling. I can change the meaning of an entire scene by removing quotation marks from dialogue, or writing a series of words without any commas or semicolons or dashes to break them apart.
But I am not revising. I am only copying, looking up to grab onto a few words, four or five if possible, and then moving my eyes back down, watching letters form, hearing the smooth scritching of pen on paper as the ink leaves its black stain on white pages. I don't think too much about what I am writing, just put word after word after word, capitalizing at the beginning of sentences, crossing out and rewriting when I make a mistake. Kids come in and out of the kitchen, can I have a popsicle, why do I have to change out of my school clothes, what's for dinner, mingling in my head with converstions between Stepan Arkadyavitch and his valet and and his barber, and finally, in the last few lines, the nurse, who encourages to Stepan Arkadyavitch to seek out his wife and beg forgiveness.
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