Derek Magill

nietzsche

How often do you write by hand?

Friedrich Nietzche bought a typewriter in 1882 because his vision has been failing him and he feared he would have to give up writing entirely if he had to write by hand. The typewriter saved him. Once he had mastered typing, he was able to write while his eyes were closed, sparing himself from the headaches he experienced while focusing his eyes on the page during hand writing.

If our date is correct, we owe to this typewriter most of Nietzsche’s later works including Also Sprach Zarathustra and Zur Genealogies Der Moral. Interestingly though, the typewriter may have had some unintended effects on his writing.

From Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows:

But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”

“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler, Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

Though I certainly don’t think we can entirely draw conclusions from this alone, personal experience suggests to me that I write quite differently, and that I enjoy writing more, by hand instead of computer. Like Nietzsche, and I don’t mean that in the sense that we’re on the same level, I’ve found that the medium affects my message.

Writing an outline or part of an essay by hand first produces much better writing for me than does writing in a WordPress text editor. I focus better with a pen and paper, I take bigger risks with my writing, and the style and content flow more naturally.

And more and more I’ve found myself carrying a Moleskine and a Pilot G2 everywhere and using them to draft by hand all the essays I publish later online.

Teachers

I don’t blame all teachers for the horrible state of education today. I know many teachers who had good intentions coming into their job but who quickly realized they need to follow the party line in teaching their students if they want to keep that job.

My high school track coach Chris Ruff used to tell me “Derek, it’s all smoke and mirrors. You’ve figured it out earlier than most. But you’ve got to play along now.” My English teacher Mrs. Schelhorse tried her best to give me leniency to do my own things but she was limited by the standards set in place by the district.

I was reading Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, and Dostoevsky but when the school said “put those down and read this instead” my teacher didn’t have much room to argue. I asked myself then, “when everyone is doing one thing and getting mediocre results, what’s the harm in trying to do something totally different?”

Of course, some teachers are just nasty charlatans who don’t care for their students one bit and exist to perpetuate the system. I had more of these than not growing up.