Analog

Dear Republic,

Frequent ROL contributor is finally on Substack; but also—inspired in part by Tehching Hsieh—he's been writing his new novel by hand.

• ROL

ANALOG: OR, HOW TO WRITE A NOVEL ABOUT EATING A CAR

I’ve long felt that for certain writing projects I was meant to shift to writing by hand. I’ve jotted things down in notebooks, and fetishized writing implements for as long as I can remember, but the more saturated we become with the internet, with phones, with laptops, the more I feel it’s not only a gesture to myself to do my more serious written work by hand, but to potential readers saturated in chatGPT.

It’s often shocking to discover the ways in which writing is difficult. Writers who show any early promise in classes are usually frustrated to find out the ways in which they now need to devote themselves more seriously to something that initially just felt pretty good. What I’ve started to recognize in choosing at certain times to write by hand is that it’s not unlike consciously doing things in practice for a sport that make the work harder, such as wearing weights, so that when it’s time to play a game you’re slightly lighter, freer in a sense to play the game in that initially passionate, innate way you came to love it.

What phones and laptops are good at is making us feel as though our thoughts and interests are innately interesting. How could they not, when every prominent site is filled to the brim with examples of people just like us whose thoughts and interests, seemingly dashed off like nothing, are earning them tens of thousands of dollars. When you’re writing a book, however, your thoughts and interests are only part of the exchange, because at best they’re only likely to line up with like.1 percent of the population’s thoughts and interests, so finding ways in which to slow yourself down, to embrace the notion that you are actually doing difficult work that warrants serious attention, will benefit you endlessly.

I knew that I wanted to w…