my handwriting has vacillated between horrendous and prize-winning at various points in my life.
i`ve always owned a pen with a nib, it`s the one thing that redeems my handwriting. it forces me to form my character shapes correctly. i still do pretty well with fine tipped roller-ball pens, but the sad truth is that i dislike writing now.
any prolonged writing and my hands and wrist start to hurt. the other problem with writing for me is that i can type as fast as i think or close enough to it, for me to catch the mistakes [ok the blog is not a good example, but you know what i mean]
in high school i always got into trouble over my hand writing because, primarily i actually didn`t care and secondarily you try to avoid anything that makes you stand out in school. my mother however put paid to that, when i was 14, schaffer had a penmanship competition and my mother though it was a good idea that i enter.
at that age, there was no stopping my mother once she had her mind set on something, so after much stalling and excuses, i wrote my piece, submitted it and completely forgot about it, until that fateful afternoon the principle walks into my english class and announced that i had won for my age group. so much for my low profile. after that i could no longer get away with scrappily done, late essays, cause the entire teaching staff was aware that i`d won.
my poetry writing career coincided with the beginnings of my career as a graphic artist, so i can say with some certitude that those first poems are the last things i wrote creatively by hand. i think i still have the book somewhere to remind me.
a couple years when i started writing for the newspaper i wrote columns, reviews, pretty much anything that didn`t require me to take any massive amounts of note taking on my part. if i went out on an assignment, i would make my notes as concisely and quick as possible and always make sure i had a number for follow up questions, i could type in the responses in the shell of the story.
i think i get by on writing once a week and signing my name or sketching doesn`t actually count. i still own a pen with a nib, actually it`s pretty cool, it doubles as a stylus for my pda.
as i`m on the topic, i`ve realised that a person writing with a traditional implement is fascinating and they always want to look and touch, but nothing infuriates me more than someone attempting to write with said implement. i`m left handed, that means once i`ve started writing with this pen, the nib is going naturally curve in the direction in which i write, which in most cases completely opposite to the direction they write, thus bending the nib and rendering basically useless. but that`s just my pet peeve.
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