Writing our lives into existence

I am an unashamed lover of my handwriting.

An opening that smacks of unabashed arrogance, and constitutes a brash and abrupt first sentence to be cruelly assaulted with, I feel. And so now, please allow me to retreat to the more wordy and ethereal meat of this post.

A few months back, a dear friend playfully teased that my handwriting "is funny, like a teenage girl's". This left-of field comment led to a profusely argued response on my part, that my handwriting is nothing of the sort but is, in fact, elegant, beautiful, italicised. The perceived attack on my handwriting was a perceived attack on me, and threw me into a defensive stance.

This blog has spoken before of how someone's handwriting can be intensely personal; on how a personality, mood and purpose can be found in the strokes of a pen that is absent from the generic fonts we see on screen. To read a handwritten letter or message by someone is to have them in the room with you, to know that they've sat down and scribbled or carefully inscribed the words you're reading. The few books I have that have personal messages written in the first few pages mean more to me than many of those that are my favourite, battered, well-read paperbacks. The letters and postcards I have from close friends will remain dear to me in a way an email or printed letter never quite could, despite the fact the content may well be just as heartfelt. Seeing letters from my great-great grandmother to her daughter, or a letter from the child-version of my father to his father, suddenly made them more real to me than any stories or photographs could.

And for me, connected to that love of handwriting - the feeling that to see your words drawn in ink rather than typed in pixels, and to see the way that you controlled and moved the pen across the paper, is to see yourself - is a whole host of other related phenomena. A fetish for stationary. A need to handwrite to learn a subject fully. The ability to throw away a laptop and take up a pen when stuck for ideas or suffering from writer's block.

And, not least, a slight nostalgia for the days of letter-writing. Again, there is something intensely personal in writing (and posting) a letter to someone. There's obviously numerous reasons to write, but let's choose a single instance that is arguably dying out: the letter that constitutes the written catch-up. That moment when you sit down to tell the story of your life as it was in the intervening time between the last letter and now. For the receiver, there's something exciting about receiving a handwritten envelope, recognising (or not recognising) the handwriting, and opening it. Reading the page or pages, holding the sheets that the writer has also held and written on. Reading the story of their recent life. For the writer, there's the process of writing, of selecting what to put in and what to leave out. The tone you adopt, how you tell your story. The thought that goes into the words, the crossed-out mistakes that you know the reader will be able to see.

And here, perhaps, is a sign of our changing times. The written letter, or even email, that constitutes the 'art' of the personal exchange of monologues as a way of story-telling and communicating feels to be disappearing.

Conversely, many of us are most likely writing to each other more than ever before, as we rely on texting, instant messaging, social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook to let people know what's going on in our lives, what's important to us, and to see what our friends are doing. We still construct our narratives in the same way those handwritten letters were constructed, but as just-in-time snippets rather than reflective monologues. We learn to read the tone of our friend's words as an identifier to who we're communicating with, rather than also the shape of their handwriting. We're in constant contact with those closest to us as part of a single on-going conversation that can be dipped in and out of without a single word having to be spoken. For those in the future that want to reconstruct life in 2013, there will an endless source of material from which they can draw: Tweets, emails, texts, blogs, photographs, videos. We can download our Twitter timelines or our Facebook activity for posterity, make them available for us and others to wade through.

But who would we find, when reading back over these words? The real-time messages we post either to many publicly, or to an individual privately - is that who we are? Is that who we become, simply through the act of writing? But then again, can the same not be said for handwritten letters, or even the diaries that we often rely on as sources? Is the memory required for a monologue letter or reflective diary not fallible, and perhaps less reliable than the real-time written conversations many of us are now parts of? Are any of these written lives a true reflection of who the writer is, or simply a persona they choose to portray? We write our lives into existence, whether through ink or pixels, whether through letter, diary, text, or blog. A distorted mirror on our lives, and our lives a distorted mirror of our words.

The love of the handwritten word then perhaps boils down to nought but a love of evidence that a real person wrote the words, and a connection with that person. And so, my friends, whether your handwriting be a beautiful cursive or a spider's footprinted trail, don't dismiss the power of it to tell a story all of its own.