On writing(,) on paper
27 July 2026
Listen to my narration of this piece (7 min)
I am writing these words on paper. You’re probably reading them on a screen, but they initially manifested as ink bleeding from my pen.
Most of the writing on this website I typed. Some I dictated. And what’s left of the rest - not much - I wrote down like I am now. I’ve been wondering how the medium affects the form, so this is an experiment. One big difference is that here the bottle neck is the physical movement of my hand. I think of a sentence, or a clause, and then have to write it. While I’m going through the hallowed ritual of writing it, I can’t really even begin to think of the next sentence. It takes an enormous amount of attention. I find myself deliberating on words as my hand arcs its way round, producing the fairly irregular symbols of the corresponding constituent letters. When I type, it feels as though I can record my thoughts almost real-time. That is, my thoughts become the bottleneck. It’s a very different experience, for sure. But I wonder what difference this might make to the output: the writing. A classic problem, the question of how the inputs affect the output. I will reflect on this further, but one difference for which I can immediately see the downstream change is in the editing. It’s far harder to make significant edits as you go when writing by hand. At first consideration this feels like an inconvenience. But perhaps it’s a feature, not a bug. This difficulty in editing might mean the prose is more faithful to the original intent. There is more momentum, more investment.
That was written in Shrewsbury station, but I am now at my Granny’s house. This makes me think about the different role of location in digital versus analogue writing. Somehow a screen sucks you in. Looking at a screen is looking at a screen. But my notebook takes on the form of where I am. There is less rigidity, both physically and metaphorically. In the station I was sat on a bench, resting the 8’’x5’’ notepad on my lap. It moved with me, deforming each time I crossed and uncrossed my legs, got up to stretch, or slid across the bench to let someone else on. Now, I’m at a very sturdy table. I wonder to what extent this changes the words that come to mind, or the words that make it onto the page.
Perhaps it is precisely because my position is sturdier presently, that I am considering the wider view, but I think this abstracts to a relevant issue. We like to think we are independent of our surroundings, our inner truth shining out like a lighthouse, showing the way to all it comes into contact with. But perhaps our inner truth is just as much a product of outside variables as it is some divine-given objectivity. Maybe I’ll outline an example of this, to prevent it becoming too nebulous. There are certain things that I only know in certain contexts. Right now, sitting down, relaxing, I sort of know what it’s like to be exhausted. I’ve been exhausted enough times in my life. But somehow when I have been running all day, or have just done an intense training session, it’s always a bit surprising. There’s always a part of me which thinks: oh wow, this is what it’s like. To be crude, it is as if right now I only remember what it is like to know exhaustion. The more often you confront that experience the better and more ingrained it is in memory. The etching of that feeling on your consciousness is far clearer, and can be conjured up with greater ease. But it can never be perfectly so. You must continue to go back to the well, and draw up another bucket of water. I’m being very fast and loose with the term ‘know’ here. The example I have given is emotional rather than informational. But it’s unclear to me that anything can be purely informational. If this is true, or at least if many pieces of knowledge have a combination of such parts, then we ought to consider the impact of context on knowledge, since context certainly affects the emotional. This is not super clear in my mind, so let’s go through an example. I know that Sycamore trees are often subject to a specific aphid which itself releases a sticky sap. This is informational. It’s true. You can look it up. And I know it. But I really knew it after I had accidentally slept under a Sycamore tree and woke up covered in the stuff. Horrid. So that piece of information brings with it a lot of experiential context. I think that changes the form of the knowledge. It’s something like the difference between declarative and procedural knowledge, but not quite. That’s the difference between knowing what and knowing how. It’s often used when comparing the mathematician with the engineer, or the food critic and the chef, or the coach and the athlete. It’s more for doing things. But what I write here is still a distinction between theory and practice, same as that. Just in more generality than how to do things.
I don’t want to get bogged down on a theory of knowledge - there’s plenty of time for that - so let’s return finally to the subject of writing. If you accept that one’s thoughts are affected by context, then the way you write must be affected also. I just don’t know how.