I recently bought a reMarkable Paper Pure, an e-ink writing tablet that is advertised to be “Made For Thinking”. I’ve long wanted one of these writing tablets, but never truly believed I had a use for one. Then recently, two things happened:
- I made a little bit of extra money from performing in a play.
- I’ve been looking to build some sort of writing practice, which I believe is essential to living a thoughtful, intentional life.
With the caveat that I’ve only had the Remarkable for a week, I love writing on it and have been using it every day. It’s like a nice notebook but I can erase cleanly, draw straight lines and shapes, and I never have to worry about wasting pages. I have been jotting down stray thoughts and phrases, and occasionally compiling longer writing like this. I don’t really know why, but I never would have done this by typing on my computer. Perhaps it’s just that a dedicated device is better suited for the dedicated task of thinking.
The downside, of course, is that I need to type out my writing before posting it here (or use some transcription software, but my handwriting is too terrible for even the best AI to transcribe at this point). That takes extra time, but I largely think it’s a good thing. Typing it out is a separate part of the process where I edit my writing and compose it together as a blog post. This frees up my initial writing to be less polished and consequently better.
Why a writing practice?
The practice of taking ideas and formulating them into shareable writing is what smart people do. The most creative periods of my life have been times where I spent the most time writing. Writing slows down time. It allows me to figure out what I believe. It gets ideas out of my head in a form that can be shared with others.
Why write longhand?
Writing longhand has long been a trick I’ve used when I need to think through an early idea. I don’t really know why it works… maybe because it’s slower. Maybe because it allows me to have a rougher first draft—writing sentence fragments and notes instead of jumping directly to a finished product. Or maybe because I spend my entire day typing on my computer, it’s a nice change of pace for my brain. I don’t know, but it works.
