My Writing History Is Best Told Through Handwriting

Aditi Malhotra tells us about how handwriting has been a through line in her friendships, shows how handwriting can be incorporated into a generative practice, and offers some tried-and-tested stress-relief postures for happy handwriters.

Trotting around the dinner table, my friend and I are conjuring up a meal with concentration on the final, all-important garnish to complete the experience—stories. Along with dal, chicken, aloo-gobhi, yogurt, pickle and chutney, a feast was ready to commence. Sitting at the dinner table, we draw the attention of our captive audience to the story about our beginnings in friendship. We travel almost sixteen years back in time to our high school classroom, which was located at the corner of a corridor in a five decade-old building in New Delhi, India’s capital city.

We were a pair of benchmates—part by choice, part by teacher’s instruction. In a room with forty-five others, we claimed physical space on a wooden bench just wide enough for our hips to stay apart with ease. All forty-five of us were acquainted through our similarity in age, clothing (we wore uniforms to school), and our choice to study Sanskrit as our “second language” in high school. We chose Sanskrit over continuing to study Hindi—a “mother tongue” language that most of us grew up speaking, reading, and writing. Hindi and Sanskrit were both second to English—the language of our colonizers widely used as the medium of written and verbal instruction in urban and semi-urban schools in 90s India.

Together we sat, my benchmate and I, breathing into our academic hunches that were used to bearing the burden of a quintessential chase for “marks,” or good grades. For as long as my rendezvous with schooling in India, there’s been an alarming preoccupation with high scores in the country’s education system. Top marks are glorified to the extent that there is a dangerous expectation of flawlessness from learners—it’s either a 100, maybe a 99, or it’s a no-show. In the cacophony of the system and its loud method of measuring “success,” my friend and I found each other in frequent camaraderie. A friendship grew through our days-long preparations to get that perfect brain-meets-speedy-recovery-of-information moment during tests and exams. When calendar hit, we’d fill out ruled sheet after sheet with handwritten information. The fast-moving exam routines meant we were constantly preoccupied with the scores that would trail one examination season into the next.

In our origins-of-friendship story, we don’t relive trauma of the marks-mania as much as we tend to narrate about our connection through a craft that sustained our unyielding focus in the midst of this chaos—writing by hand. As we grew into our teenage years, my friend and I shared a meditative care in our respective lives for our capacity and ability to handwrite. By the time we met in high school, we’d both built a conscientious and strong cursive-writing practice. Our well-honed flow was evident in our notebook pages—paper loafs loaded with attractive cursive art.

My friend enjoyed a public love for solving math problems. Her numbers were a garnish between letters strung together in musical consistency. The letters launched and fell evenly between the lines. She had a signature stroke that shone brighter when her cursive started to flow on blank sheets with no supervision. Imagine a wrist taking confident parabolic swipes, slanting letters to the right.

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Writing by hand isn’t just a romanticized slice of my past. Over the (adult) years, I’ve felt silent pride in maintaining a daily cursive handwriting practice. (Save for the brief phases of manic keyboard typing when reporting breaking news was my muse.)

Along the way, my practice gained some immigration miles. In 2016, a few months before American politics took a sharp right, I migrated from New Delhi to New York to pursue advanced journalism study. My practice involves taking to the page everyday, pen and grip in tow. I’ll write something, anything. I’ll cook up a list, write this paragraph, mend my mindset, plan the future, feel stuck in the past, plant some seeds in the present—all in cursive. Perhaps there’s always been a tad bit of anxiety toward signing myself up on a professional path that takes me too far away from handwriting. Perhaps it’s this separation anxiety that prompted me to pursue a career as a journalist. After all, so much of the movement in journalism translates into writing notes with prowess and connecting rounded letters in unfamiliar fields.

That said, I am a child of India’s Internet revolution that’s all of three decades in the making now. In a way, writing by hand in mellow cursive offers respite from a life that is otherwise digitized from fingertip to toe. For the most part of my work day, I’m typing emails. Communicating with friends and strangers alike through WhatsApp texts and direct messages on platforms like Twitter and Instagram is also a staple. I find this digital way of recording written messages to be fast and impulsive. More so because I am a writer well-versed (almost dependent) with the deliberation, liberation, reflection, and imagination that comes while writing by hand. The soothing overtones of handwriting feel so obvious when I step away from the screen and transition to writing in an offline world.

To be sure, maintaining a handwriting practice has always taken more out of me than simply “getting it out on the page.” It takes skill, for sure. But it also takes courage, shows life experience. To me, the profundity of the craft as an aid to creative resurrection and generative writing became evident during a trip to India, my homeland, during the first official year of the Covid-19 pandemic.

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It was peak pandemic in July 2020 when I had to take a trip from San Francisco, my current place of residence, to India, where I was born and raised. The world was still coming to terms with navigating the pace and scale of the coronavirus infection. Traveling by plane was no less than a big risk when I, a speck in convoluted bureaucratic systems, found myself taking an 8,400-mile journey on a sixteen-hour nonstop flight.

This journey wouldn’t be a longed-for vacation or family reunion. In fact, I had no choice but to go: Unless I exited American borders to renew a legal travel document, my work visa (that allows me to practice professional writing and journalism in America) would expire. Immigrants in America typically navigate this requirement by traveling anywhere outside of the US, like Canada or Mexico. But sealed borders and limited air travel meant I would be going home.

For two weeks after my arrival in India, I would have to mandatorily isolate myself in a hotel room-turned-temporary residence for international travelers like me. A Covid-19 test result at the end of this two-week period would determine my departure from isolation.

Safe to say, in the run up to this trip, my creative muscles had experienced a dramatic slump. Anxiety bloomed and the stress of navigating this situation during a world-class pandemic ballooned. I couldn’t see any open doors that could take me away from my fears rooted in public health concerns. My thoughts were flooded with narratives of the miscellaneous miserable consequences of navigating the merciless immigration system during a global lockdown. I continued to write here and there by hand, but the flow was definitely not a soothing one. My handwriting and notes were a royal jumbled mess—scribbles of alphanumeric information spilled over margins, and questions written in shorthand for immigration lawyers, law enforcement officers, and airline employees were strewn across pages. I forcefully attempted an “om” or two in the hope that it’d grace my peace.

That summer, I boarded a plane on a one-way ticket leaving life, work, and family on an adopted land. I couldn’t imagine fighting through the sudden change of events without my handwriting tools. When I arrived in the isolation room in New Delhi, I seemingly had enough familiarity to help restore balance—a couple of notebooks, pens that wrote in a few fond colors, a pencil, a sharpener to dress up its nib, and an eraser to wipe superfluous thoughts out. I was surrounded by scents of home that felt so close yet so far. I had time. I had access. Still, writing by hand felt onerous. Heck, even the thought of it felt exhausting.

“I shouldn’t do it if it feels like such a stretch,” said my self-care self. A counterpart self knew that the aesthetic of my practice, the cursive itself, and my muscle memory attached to the craft, could rescue me. The symphony brought alive by the very act of writing by hand could wondrously and momentarily pause my buzzing nervous system.

And so I willed it. I joined my weekly virtual writing group in America with a patchy Internet connection from my isolation pod in New Delhi. There, I could write to prompts in the company of others I’d seen writing . . . by hand. Hopefully, I’ll crawl back into a space of sacred semblance, I thought as I managed my expectations from my handwriting practice.

My itch and flare felt a therapeutic flush as I took to the page and began moving my hand and wrist in a familiar motion. I didn’t know what would come out on the page. “I am here,” it started. I disciplined myself to not lift my wrist from the page unless I felt like I needed to stretch it out. It was my version of adhering to a commitment; to resist the urge to strike a thought out once it had come out of me. When I couldn’t think of what I wanted to write in a moment, that’s exactly what I wrote. I’d be on write-repeat-write-repeat until I’d arrive at something I wanted to write. Imagine page one of a free write with plenty of lines squeezing this confession: “I don’t know what to write.”

One page led to another and I started to see through the fog that had followed me from my home in San Francisco on this trip to the homeland. In fact, so powerful was the pull of the writing practice that I started seeing my wrist flowing in poetry. Until then, I’d mostly written to news beats and huddled facts together in nonfiction prose. But here I was, penning spoken word in a word-art form that decorated pieces of paper in hope and peace.

A cursive flow had taken over my mental strategy and inner dialogue. My writing and the handwriting practice was truly the hero of that moment.

Sticking to the spark that rubbed off on the page during that time was a bonus for the repressed adolescent inside me that had much to say about the politics of appearance and hair color (I have early canities, meaning my hair started to change to grey when I was all of twelve years young). By the end of the fourteen-day stint, I had regained my mental health, drafted about ten handwritten spoken-word pieces. I felt optimistic and full of appreciation for where I had landed. I saw through the systemic forces that had put me there. Trailing through the process of combining will and skill to see my hand move again, and to see it not stopping, brought back a sense of breath that had gone missing for some time.

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Writing-by-hand is a physical exercise as much as it is a craft tool for artists and writers. It requires a range of muscle strength in the hands and body. Lettering artist Clarice Cho says she often fears losing her strength and ability to hand-letter the way she does now: “There have been many occasions where I have pushed myself too far and felt the physical strain of the art form,” says Clarice. Over time, she’s learnt that it’s necessary to take breaks and stretch the hand muscles.

At my end, my posture takes a toll when I sit for a long duration of writing with pen and ink. For relief, I’ve relied on the physical, mental, and spiritual practice of yoga, which has some bounty to offer for handwriters working their body, especially their wrists, hands, and fingers. I’m practicing asanas, or postures, alongside my handwriting as I grow older with my craft. Here are some tried-and-tested pain- and stress-relief postures for happy handwriters:

Table pose and cat/cow

Come down to your hands and knees, arranging yourself on a table top with hands below shoulders and your knees below hips. Inhale to round your back toward the ceiling (cat). Exhale to tip your tailbone up and back as you bring your heart forward (cow). Lightly draw your belly in.

Table post and cat/cow with inverted wrist stretch

After several breaths of this, switch your hand position. Point your fingers towards your knees, palms down. If this is too much for you, turn your fingers to the sides instead. Continue inhaling (cat) and exhaling (cow). Keep breathing through the stretch. After a few breaths, try switching your hand position again—this time with your palms facing up, fingers pointing to the knees or sides.

Table pose and cat/cow with fists

Remain in table pose and support your weight on your fists instead of your palms. This modification can actually help strengthen the muscles surrounding wrist joints. Avoid practicing on your fists if your wrist is unstable or you have trouble sufficiently aligning and supporting it.

Child’s pose with hand in prayer

Stay on your hands and knees. Separate your knees to hip-distance apart. Then sit back on your heels and walk your hands out in front of you. Bend your elbows and bring hands together above you in a prayer position. Elbow tips will remain on the ground and fingertips will point towards the ceiling or sky. Keeping breathing in and out.

Audio journalist and fellow writer Jenny Luna says she’s attracted to the slowness of handwriting. Her handwriting practice began in earnest when she started a penpal relationship with a new friend after reading Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. “I do notice that the more excited I am, perhaps the more caffeine I’ve had, the sloppier my penmanship gets,” says Jenny. Regulating the pace of her handwriting is closely related to her lifestyle. “After a good sleep, perhaps a meditation, my handwriting slows as does my mind. Everything becomes much more legible.”

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Don’t handwrite alone! If you write by hand, tell us what draws you to the practice? Do you follow any techniques to keep your hands fit, your writing fine? Where do you draw the line?