I was doing a post on writing for my author blog, and I wanted an image for it, so off to the Flickr Creative Commons search I went. I searched the “writing’ keyword. Almost all of what I got back was some version of the above. Almost all of the rest of it was just random stuff. There were a few shots of laptops or computers but they nearly always also prominantly included notebooks and pens/pencils. Do a Google image search for “writing” and you get the same damn thing. All very attractive photos of pens and hands and often lovely, swooping script.

I do not write that way.

I can’t write that way.

I have a disability called dysgraphia, which manifests – among other ways – as severe difficulty in writing on paper. It involves both impaired motor function/coordination and a form of dyslexia in terms of the production of words. It’s impossible for me to hold a writing implement “correctly”. I get horrible hand cramps. My handwriting itself is illegible. I often get letters or words in the wrong order. Consistent use of capital letters? Hahaha no.

When I write on a keyboard all of that goes away and everything flows wonderfully. I couldn’t write without a keyboard. Without a keyboard, I am probably not a writer at all.

Why does this matter? It matters because we aestheticize the visual process and tools of writing as a part of the process of romanticizing it (which is sorta bullshit anyway). In so doing, we legitimize certain kinds of writing while at the same time delegitimizing others and even rendering them invisible. Most of the time I don’t think we intend to do that, just like we don’t intend to do most things like that. We just have a fixed idea of what Writing is and everything we attach to that idea reinforces it.

Okay, but why does it matter? Well, to start with, it’s at least vaguely ableist simply because it ignores the existence of people like me, and others who for one reason or another can’t depend on physical handwriting to produce words, and that’s already a toxic cultural process. Not a fan of anything which contributes to it.

But it also matters, I think, because it’s yet another symptom of our general tendency to (still) privilege the non-digital over the digital. There’s something about words produced on paper (preferably attractive paper with an attractive fountain pen, or even a quill for God’s sake and I’m not really kidding about that last) which is more real because of where it is and how it’s being done. My kind of writing? Unreal, and not just because of the aesthetic. And in fact, the aesthetic is part of what reinforces the idea of what’s real in this case. It’s also associated with the ways in which a tremendous amount of people still seem to feel that paper books are more real and more legitimate than ebooks, despite ebooks being enormously popular.

And I think a huge number of us now write on keyboards.

Is this really harmful to me? Immediately, no. More than anything it’s annoying. But looking at that stream of images, it was difficult to miss, and it was also difficult to miss what it meant.

Sarah writes on Twitter – @dynamicsymmetry