handwriting

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  • 05 Jan

    It Is (Being) Written

    For some reason when I promise to write about a certain subject “soon” or “next time” that post either never happens or takes weeks to actually appear.  This is one of them.

    I first mentioned at the end of January last year that my friend AV and I were going to each write a novel, projects we had picked up and put down many times with no real push to actually complete them.  Our goal was simple — to nag and support each other through the process in order to make this time different.

    She ended up diverting to another goal, but I kept writing, and while neither of us finished 2011 where we thought we would be, we still managed to accomplish things with our projects we never had before.  It wasn’t a perfect year, but I would definitely call it a success.

    At the time I wrote this post, Microsoft Word said my story had 52,546 words and the little blinking cursor sat near the top of page 88 (single-spaced).  When I work on my laptop I use OpenOffice instead, and oddly enough they disagree on what the meaning of “word” is, giving me numbers that are a few hundred apart.  I’ve always been obsessed with checking word counts, whether I was writing my sports column for the school paper, or a research assignment for a political science class.  Still, I find these number pretty staggering and borderline unreal.  Eventually I think I’m going to end up with around 90,000 words.  My characters still have a lot they need to do.

    Whenever anyone asks what the book is about I rarely have a good, concise answer.  The problem is partially that it’s not actually done yet, but with an entire outline in my head it’s hard to sum up all the major and minor pieces before losing the person’s attention.  But here goes.

    Caleb, the narrator, has a mind-numbing job he’s vastly overqualified for, yet can’t seem to find anything better.  He spends frustrating day after frustrating day wasting his life and knowing he’s wasting it.  He goes home to find a letter in his mailbox, one with an envelope covered in hand-drawn circles of different sizes.  It’s from Sophie, a girl he never expected to hear from after she moved away with her boyfriend, one who grew up on his street and occupied his idle thoughts while she dated guys he never thought were good enough for her.

    The story follows their reconnection and explores the ideas of how people respond when their lives aren’t going well, who we push away in the face of adversity and the battle between the urge to dream and the safety of chasing more realistic expectations.  Style-wise, think “High Fidelity” and “500 Days of Summer.”


    The notebook I use to write on the Metro

    As hard as it has been at times, I find this project fascinating.  Except for a few short pieces in a high school creative writing class I’ve never really written any fiction before.  My day (or night rather) job is exactly the opposite, so it’s fun to be able to completely control what happens in my little made-up town and have my characters say whatever I want them to say (within reason, or course).

    I hit a very rough portion late in the summer when it became clear that the first 50 pages or so needed a major overhaul.  Thanks to some excellent advice/cheerleading from AV, I slashed a bunch of stuff that wasn’t working and added back in new sections including two extra characters who have now become pretty vital parts of the story.  I’ll have to do a lot to what I’ve written since then, but at least this time I think I’m on a pretty good path already.

    Before this project the thing about fiction that scared me the most was the prospect of writing dialogue.  Now?  It’s my favorite.  I could literally write a conversation between Caleb and Sophie all day.  Hopefully that’s a good sign about them as characters, but I find myself in some sections telling the two of them to wrap it up so I can move on.  The people at Starbucks don’t find that weird at all.

    That’s another thing I’ve learned — I write in public places far better than I do at home.  I think there’s some aspect of social pressure at work, since if you have a laptop or notebook in front of you people think it’s odd if you just sit there.  So I write.

    Hopefully I’ll be done in the somewhat near future so I can move onto the editing stages and whatever comes after that.  I’ll keep you posted.  Though given my track record on this one, that may take a while.

    By cjhannas handwriting Uncategorized writing
  • 24 Feb

    Creative Confusion

    Have a room in your home in serious need of redecoration? Why not turn to the artwork of children to brighten those bare walls? Even better, dig up some of your own work if you still have it laying around.

    My parent’s basement is plastered in the artwork my siblings and I brought home during our elementary school days, mainly because my mother kept every single piece of school-related paper. Several years ago, we all started going through our boxes and boxes of material to try to pare down the gargantuan load. In doing so, we ended up with a pile of our artwork, and were sitting in a rather undecorated space.

    So this happened:


    In my case, it was clear that my artistic skills ceased at about the second grade. If I drew a flower today it would look quite a bit like one done by my 8-year-old self. But there is one piece that I find particularly entertaining. It’s hanging on the wall just above my computer screen. According to what’s written on the back, it was done in the sixth grade. The assignment was some sort of poster contest, though I’m not sure the exact theme.

    I went with “Save The World, Stop The Violence.” A worthy cause if I say so myself. I’ll point out the globe in the “O” of World. That’s probably my greatest artistic achievement. I remember tracing the gun from something, and my teacher not wanting to display my work because it had a gun. I can’t imagine what would have happened today. I probably would have been expelled for plotting to take down the school.

    Then of course, there is the stop sign. If you didn’t look closely before, I’ll wait while you give it another glance…….Ok, what’s wrong with this picture? That’s right, my sixth-grade self made a stop sign with only six sides. It’s not like I didn’t pass by at least three of them while I rode my bike to school every day and should have known better. Maybe that’s why I didn’t win the contest.

    One of the overall best works is courtesy of my sister. It makes me want to have a little card next to each piece explaining what the assignment was supposed to be. Check out this girl standing outside on a nice, sunny day:

    She certainly looks very happy. But what makes this picture curious is the text. It has apparently been translated by a teacher to read “Abraham Lincoln got shot.” Um, what? Why is the girl so happy, and what does Lincoln have to do with this outside scene? Obviously the assignment was completed, since we can see the teacher’s red smiley face in the upper right corner. Was this a depiction of Jefferson Davis’ granddaughter? A previously unidentified Booth co-conspirator? This is why we need time machines.

    The confusion brought to mind a casualty of my horrid handwriting from my Susquehanna days. My dorm room desk featured a pull-out keyboard tray that I used to store pens and an ongoing to-do list. My entire organization system depended on a single sheet of paper with a list of the item, a day I intended to complete it off to the left and the day it was due on the right. If I needed to scribble down a random piece of info, like a phone number or a message for my roommate, that made it onto an unused portion of the page.

    But my final list has an entry I cannot decipher. I had no clue what it said just days after I wrote it, and definitely don’t have a better idea today. Here’s the full sheet:

    Down in the bottom right corner is the boxed-in, questionable item:

    Any ideas? I think it’s a name since both words appear to be capitalized. That is of course if we assume it is two words. That would lead me to say it’s Lauren B—. I hope I wasn’t supposed to call her or provide any sort of vital assistance, since I can’t recall ever knowing a Lauren B—.

    Of course, it could just as easily be Carmen or Camera or Laven. If only I didn’t use the blue pen to write it, I’m sure this would have been no mystery. Despite my known poor handwriting, I still sometimes used a blue ballpoint pen that always added extra loops and confusion to my writing. Why didn’t I use the trusted set of black pens?!

    Lauren, if you’re out there, I’m sorry.

    By cjhannas family handwriting home nostalgia Uncategorized
  • 18 Oct

    It’s the End of Handwriting as We Know it

    The Washington Post recently reported that handwriting is declining. The quality of people’s penmanship is no longer what it used to be and schools are to blame.

    You see, when teachers are forced to prepare kids for standardized state tests there is not enough time left for a lesson in the curliness of the q, or the stately rise of the capital A.

    And I’m OK with that.

    The worse everyone else’s handwriting gets, the better mine looks. Just like if you have one of 10 limited-edition cars, and eight of them are destroyed, yours goes up in value. So I applaud any efforts to make me look better, especially since my handwriting is so atrocious that at an early age my teachers recognized there was little hope for improvement.

    No seriously. The day I read the Post article my mother, who has seen my handwriting all my life, had to ask me about something I had written. It was the word “apples.” After I explained that, she told me about my first grade teacher, Mrs. Omberg, who said of my penmanship, “It’s OK, that’s why they invented typewriters.”

    Thank you, Mrs. Omberg.

    Today it doesn’t really matter how eloquently you can compose script letters on paper. Not a bit. The majority of things that I write down are notes to myself. If I can read them, that’s all that matters.

    There are times, however, that I have been in such a rush to get something down that even I couldn’t decipher what I wrote.

    My last two years of undergrad I had a piece of paper in a desk drawer that I would pull out from time to time. On it was a list of things that I had to do over a few week period, with all of them crossed out, except one word in the bottom corner that was some sort of message to myself.

    I kept the paper hoping that one day I could figure out what I had written. It was not at all important by that point since any event or deadline associated with the word had long since passed, but for my own edification I wanted to know what it said.

    Maybe I should be a doctor.

    By cjhannas handwriting Uncategorized
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