Friday, March 20, 2015

On Hand-writing ~

"The handwriting of Robertson Davies, the Canadian whose magical novels moved an American critic to call him 'the white-bearded magus of the North,' was neat, elegant, and supremely legible but, while composing fiction, he used a typewriter.  'I type because writing by hand I find to be a very great betrayer,' he said in 1989.  'If you try to write [by hand] legibly, as I do, you finish a page and think, That's a handsome page.  This absolutely wrong.  Also, you can only write so long with a pen before your hand becomes tired, and then your invention begins to tire.  If you type. . .you have what you've written there before you--cold and bare.  Then you can go over it, and it is as though someone else had written it and you can edit it with great severity."


~ Harry Bruce, Page Fright, Foibles and Fetishes of Famous Writers, McClelland & Stewart Ltd., 2009.