As a visible language, writing involves making permanent or semi-permanent marks on a surface or screen. It requires technology to do this – tools for making those marks, as well as ways of producing or preparing surfaces for those marks to be displayed upon. I refer to this as the display principle. Human involvement is as necessary for this work as it is for the act of writing itself. Fashioning wax tablets, stretching animal skins to make vellum and filling ink cartridges are all examples of this ‘hidden’ human labour of writing. Writers, working with these human and material resources, must be competent at using the technology before anything else. As well as knowing how writing works as a linguistic system, they must also know how to hold, direct, manipulate or operate particular mark making tools. Because of this, the technology of writing has an important somatic component – it depends on the work of the hand and eye, not just in the act of writing, but also in arranging and coordinating all the supplementary artefacts that support the writing task, including such things as lighted tables and desks to work on, materials for preparing, correcting and printing and so on.¹ The bodily actions involved require some precision and must be well-practised in order to produce the visual marks of a particular writing system, whether these are the result of the imprint of a stylus on clay, the combinations of keystrokes on a keyboard, or brush and ink strokes on paper or silk. Each writing act involves quite specific motor skills and levels of control. Because of all this, any history of writing has to take account of the technologies it has used. Writers make use of the tools to hand, and this often demands a high degree of manual dexterity,² training and practice. Thinking about writing in this way includes both conventional and creative or improvisational practices such as tags spray-painted on railway bridges, lovers’ initials carved on a park bench or a playful message written on the wet sand. These appearances of writing are not what you might call official, nor are they formally taught, but they constitute a writing technology through the physical action of leaving a message on a legible surface. They are all examples of the material dimension of writing. In what follows, I explore this material dimension in more depth, in what I call the matter of writing. This involves looking at the history of different writing technologies and techniques, the more recent mechanization of writing and its effects. And, because writing is both physical and material, I conclude with a look at the physical demands that writing makes on the body.

2.1 Uncovering Old Material

When the financial and media giant Bloomberg began to work on laying the foundations to their new headquarters in London, archaeologists recovered over four hundred Roman tablets preserved in the thick wet mud underground. Some of these tablets were recycled barrel staves that had been carefully coated with soot-stained beeswax. By the time of their excavation, between 2010 and 2014, the wax had leached away, but stylus scratches on the soft wood underneath were enough for experts to piece together what are thought to be the earliest examples of writing to be found in England³ dating back to the first century CE. These wax tablets were meant to be held, they were meant to display the scratch-marked impressions left by an iron stylus. They are an early example of a portable writing device, roughly the size of a modern iPad. The similarities are instructive – a tablet can be easily held in the hand, it can be moved around, picked up or put down and it can be easily stowed away. Like an iPad the surface of a wax tablet can be worked on within optimal focal range, and the marks on it can be preserved or erased. Such a writing device is certainly handy and lends itself to many uses. Scholarly work on the Bloomberg finds and other Roman wax tablets of a similar age shows how they were used in day-to-day life to settle legal matters, to make party invitations and to negotiate the exchange of slaves. The durability of the written material, so necessary at the time, meant that some of the messages far outlived their immediate purpose. This is one of the happy accidents of writing. Because writing technologies are designed to leave a lasting impression, texts may hold the traces of past lives, giving us precious insights into the everyday experiences and the social and cultural conditions of our forebears.

Clay, like wax, has a particular quality to it. Soft enough to handle, it can easily be moulded, marked or imprinted and, under the right conditions, that mark will be preserved. Whereas beeswax was plentiful in Roman times and used for a whole variety of purposes, the clay used for writing in Mesopotamia was river mud washed down by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers each springtime. The distinctive vertical, horizontal and oblique wedge-shaped marks of Cuneiform were made by using a reed stylus pressed into rolled out clay. The physical work is quite distinctive, and ideally matched to the material. Cuneiform script is the result of pressing, not the dragging of a stylus or pencil – that was to come later. Cuneiform may have started off as a simple book-keeping device, to keep a tally of rations and livestock, but as it developed it was used to record myths, epic poems and to store medical and scientific knowledge. All this was impressed on clay.

The rich historical record, from Mesopotamia and elsewhere, draws attention to the material qualities of writing as well as to the physical activity of mark making itself. This takes us closer to the invention of writing techniques, and it also tells a fascinating story of innovation and experimentation as these techniques were developed. But there is one kind of writing that is thought to preserve an unbroken connection to the past, and that is Chinese. Its distinctive script has remained fairly stable since it was standardized some 2,200 years ago.⁴ Many Chinese still value brush stroke characters and their varied calligraphic form has deep cultural significance. The characters themselves are formed out of continuous lines and dots combining as distinctive patterns that would typically be scaled to fit into an imagined square shape or Hanzi grid (see Figure 2.1). Traditionally written on bamboo or bark, a Chinese scribe would need an assortment of animal hair brushes, an inkstone and a bowl of water. Originally, the ink would have been made from animal glue, soot and plant dye.

Figure 2.1 The Chinese character mù (wood; wooden; tree; timber) placed in a Hanzi grid.

By the first century CE, silk had become a fashionable writing surface, but because of its expense, alternatives were used, and these sometimes involved the use of cloth or vegetable matter. This experimentation eventually led to the invention of paper. For the following five hundred years, the Chinese held what amounted to a state monopoly on paper. Paper production and manufacturing techniques were a closely guarded secret.

Practical knowledge on paper-making subsequently travelled in two different directions. West along the silk route into Central Asia and East towards Japan and Korea. As the contemporary expert on paper production, Nicholas Basbanes⁵ observes ‘In both movements, the earliest purveyors were Buddhist monks, who used the material to propagate sacred sutras’. In the following section, I trace the history of paper to show the spread and refinement of its material form. Paper is an essential part of print-based writing practices, and even if we’re writing on-screen, the idea of the page and its layout lies behind what we see.

2.2 On Paper

Paper first arrived in England in the thirteenth century.⁶ As we have seen, it was developed in China around 100 CE, and its use then spread through the Islamic world. Italian paper makers later discovered that they could pulp vegetable material together with rags and old ropes and were mass producing it by the mid twelfth century. These manufacturers watermarked their paper by using wire shapes in the drying process, creating an early instance of product branding. Paper had important material characteristics that were invaluable to writers. Its surface was even and had a glowing plain white colour, it could easily be cut into sheets of standard dimensions, and because of its fibrous quality, it absorbed ink well and this meant that writers could work quickly.

In the West, the transition from parchment to paper was gradual. Parchment was initially the more familiar writing surface, it was readily available and it had its advantages. It was stronger, thicker and harder to tear. Parchment could easily be stored or rolled up to carry. So initially, paper was seen as an exotic commodity for writing on – although the cheaper kinds were still used for decoration and protecting food. Parchment, usually made from sheep skins, continued to be produced. Skins were washed and stretched on a wooden frame; hair was scraped off and it was cut into rectangles. This process was labour intensive and involved its fair share of slicing, scraping and stitching and as one contemporary commentator suggests, its manufacture would have been accompanied by ‘the smell and taste of guts and wood, fire and melting wax.’⁷ The parchment writing surface needed to be repeatedly polished by scribes to hold ink. Although this all seems quite laborious, parchment continued to be used alongside paper and sometimes they were used in combination. As paper became cheaper though, its use became more widespread. The earliest surviving texts written on paper in England are town records from the beginning of the fourteenth century, but some official documents such as Acts of Parliament and property deeds continued to be written on parchment until quite recently.

Before the advent of texting and word processing, most texts were written on paper by hand, either in pen or pencil. We may live to look back, with nostalgia, to the hey-day of stationery, with its fascinating array of notebooks, pads, jotters and post-its; its abundance of ballpoints, felt-tips, coloured pencils and fountain pens. And that’s before we consider all those handy supplementary tools such as pencil sharpeners, erasers, blotting paper and correcting fluids. Writing by hand has a distinctive feel to it, and sometimes we find that we prefer it.

The Uruguayan writer, Mario Levrero, often concerned himself with the material processes of writing. In The Luminous Novel⁸ his narrator, a frustrated writer, tells us:

Later on, he reflects on what it’s like to write with the Rotring:

Here, there’s something of the aesthetic quality of writing by hand, and the subtle tactility of the experience. Although Levrero’s narrator is almost certainly playing with words when he says he wants something to hold him back, it works because we can easily recall the physicality of writing, and the finely balanced trade-off between the flow of the pen and the resistance of the paper. Just as ink pens, in their various forms, can combine so easily with paper, so can printing ink. And although ink itself wasn’t developed overnight, printers soon found ways of mass-producing legible copy.

The refinement of printing ink and paper coincided with the rise of mass literacy – texts could be quickly and cheaply produced for a growing market of readers. New kinds of expendable and ephemeral print texts flourished – pamphlets, posters and handbills became popular in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and paper was the ideal medium for these. Of course, these sorts of paper-based texts continue to be used, despite the rise of digital media. The circulation of different kinds of advertising is often now thought of as junk mail. Pamphlets, political campaigns, pizza promotions and advertising for vitamin supplements compete for space in the letter box. Still, there is a wealth of printed material in circulation, on food packaging, cosmetics and detergent as well as in the form of journals, books and instructional material. We still consume vast amounts of paper and much of this is produced from organic material.

Wood is still used extensively in paper production. UPM, one of the largest paper manufacturers in Europe uses wood from its own forests in Finland, supplementing this with imports from the United States and Uruguay. Although changing patterns of publishing and growing awareness of sustainability are now having an impact on the paper industry, paper use remains high. We take it for granted as a writing material – paper stationery is big business, but its widespread use in Europe is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the Early Modern period, the dominant writing surface was still parchment or vellum. Of course, parchment and paper weren’t the only surfaces for writing, but thinking about their development and overlapping use draws our attention to the importance of mark making and display in the history of writing. Despite the move to digital communication and ideas like the paperless office, the printed and handwritten text is still very much in evidence. Some people prefer to read a printout, to hold and fold a sheet of paper and, of course, the book – that old-fashioned printed object, is still held in very high esteem.

2.3 On Screen

The history of the screen as a display space for writing is a much shorter one, beginning with cathode ray tube (CRT) development. The CRT was invented towards the end of the nineteenth century, but it wasn’t used to display writing until the early days of computing. These quite bulky CRT screens were superseded by flat-panel monitors in the 1990s, some of which now include touchscreen technology. The texts they display are made up of pixels activated by varying electric currents. Highly sophisticated screen technology involves the use of rare minerals like indium (China is the leading producer), combined with silicon which is sandwiched between thin sheets of glass. This is all part of the display of pin-sharp letters and images on our computer screens. But screen manufacture has a significant environmental cost, too. Not only does it depend upon the use of rare minerals, manufacture also involves processes that make a substantial contribution to global warming. Screens are difficult to dispose of – LCDs are classed as hazardous material. And, of course, it’s also the case that there is an energy cost in running them, particularly, on a scale that we now do. Although there are moves to make new technologies ‘greener’, it does feel that we are at a very early stage in doing this.

This very brief overview of display screens serves to illustrate a fundamental shift in the materiality of writing. It is quite remarkable to consider how quickly we have adapted to using screens. A large part of this must be attributed to the appearance of similarity. By this I mean the repurposing of keyboards as input devices, and the ways in which letters and words appear on screen as if they were ink freshly printed on a paper. Just as we took pen and paper for granted, we now take keyboards and screens for granted. They become the means for writing rather than objects themselves. As writing tools they ‘withdraw’ from our direct experience, unless, or until they break down.⁹

What can this focus on the materiality of writing tells us about contemporary practices? What can we learn from the study of mark making tools and writing surfaces that is applicable to the current context? Technology, always central to the business of writing, now makes it possible to communicate rapidly across great distances and yet we are still concerned with producing and distributing neatly constructed linguistic symbols. Even contemporary writing practices depend upon tools or devices, the act of writing still involves the work of the hand and the eye, and what has been written must appear on a surface or screen in order to be read – the display principle is still very much in evidence.

People still argue that in moving to word processing we have lost our intimate connection with the materials we use. The hand of the writer is, in a sense, hidden from us. That close relationship between the person who writes the message and the message itself, discernable through the subtle movements of the hand, the choice of pen and ink and the quality of the paper, has become less relevant in an age of digital communication. In the eyes of graphologists and handwriting experts, this is a loss. In all probability, it is a loss that is outweighed by gains in speed and connectivity, and perhaps in some cases in legibility, too. Although there is undoubtedly an art in producing a flowing cursive hand, or a regimented gothic script, it is important to distinguish aesthetic appreciation from romantic nostalgia. In the end, it might be better to turn away from simple comparisons and accept that when it comes to writing, the old can happily co-exist with the new. Beautiful handwriting can still be appreciated even if keyboard skills are in ascendency. As we shall see, the gradual mechanization of writing has in fact taken place alongside traditional methods, and whilst this mechanization has introduced new possibilities they haven’t always displaced older practices.

2.4 The Hand and the Body

All acts of writing have a physical dimension. In one way, the writer has to be able to manipulate or operate the tools of mark making, and this involves particular orientations of the body and a degree of manual dexterity. There are relatively few exceptions, and these are mostly in the realm of assistive technology, which often involves ingenious adaptations that make writing available to people with disabilities. Writing always requires some sort of physical movement; we have yet to invent a system for writing that doesn’t. The closest we get is with speech-to-writing software – although, of course, even then we are dependent on the physical side of vocality.

Writers may work sitting cross-legged on the floor (as in depictions of Mayan scribes), on chairs, at tables or desks, or in a standing position. Part of this is dependent upon how the writing is displayed, but it also involves some consideration of the secondary or supplementary materials required and the availability of rests, tables or special desks to stand at. More portable writing technologies are by nature less constrained, we can text whilst standing or walking, or scribble in a notebook balanced on our knees. More than anything else though, writing involves the co-ordinated work of hand and eye. The neurologist Frank Wilson¹⁰ shows how the bone structures and muscular attachments used to grip, hold and rotate need the eye to guide them. He describes the ‘writing/drawing cluster’ associated with precision grips and focused, repetitive tapping. Often, both hands are implicated – on a keyboard the left and the right do similar sorts of things, whereas writing with pen and paper involves a distribution of labour. The dominant hand may wield the pen or pencil whilst the non-dominant hand steadies and repositions the page.

Thinking about the materiality of writing involves consideration of some of the supplementary activities involved. In his memoir Speak, Memory, Nabokov¹¹ offers some finely tuned recollections of learning to write, focusing on the materiality and affect of observing the work of his adult tutors. For example, here is the quite, bearded Mr Cummings.

And ‘Mademoiselle’, who has a very particular way of preparing a new copybook.

These are not just the finely tuned observations of an accomplished writer, they are celebratory descriptions of the materiality of writing.

Newer technologies require different sorts of manual dexterity. Here, the physical aspect of texting is worth some consideration. Those less familiar or less experienced in using smartphones may prefer to steady the device in their non-dominant hand and prod away at the virtual keyboard, as in one-finger typing, whereas more experienced (often younger users) may cradle the phone in both hands, typing with their thumbs. We’re now seeing how very young children pick up and hold smartphones and toy phones in characteristic fashion, often imitating texting with their thumbs. It’s surprising to recall how we once found this practice so unusual. Literature of that time described the emergence of ‘thumb tribes’ – groups of people who seemed to be writing with their thumbs all the time! It’s become so unremarkable now, that we rarely comment on it, but it is another example of a writing practice with distinctive orientations of the hand and body and its own requirements of grip and precision.

Precision grips have often been a bit of an obsession of handwriting teachers, although it should be acknowledged that getting a comfortable grip that allows for a smooth and legible written script is important. Levrero’s narrator, distracted once again from his story, this time by the appearance of his own handwriting, writes:

The narrator’s struggle to write The Luminous Novel, which is always threatening to escape from his grip is figuratively shadowed by the struggle involved in holding the pen. But if we are all obliged to find some sort of comfortable pencil grip, we also have to work out how to type – and there is ongoing debate about the importance of touch-typing and its relevance in word processing.

2.5 Reproducing Writing

Once a writing system has become standardized, a word or message can be reproduced time and time again, and the meaning will remain relatively stable. This is, of course, central to the use of seals and signatures, as well as to the effectiveness of the logos and trademarks used in marketing products.¹² If such mark making is to be regularly repeated, a word-by-word or letter-by-letter transcription can be time consuming. Since the early appearance of writing, techniques for speeding up the reproduction of regularly used words and phrases have been deployed. Four and half thousand years ago, the Akkadians of Mesopotamia were using inscribed nails and stamps to identify property ownership and to mark clay building bricks. Developing a specialized technology for reproducing a name or a message could be seen as the origin of printing, and this suggests a much longer history than is usually acknowledged. The European school system with its celebration of Gutenburg’s Bible, printed in 1454, has sometimes worked to obscure the fuller story. It’s well worth dwelling here on the invention and development of printing technique by placing it in the wider context of the reproduction and mechanisation of writing. As we have seen, the use of seals and signets are the clearest successor to the Akkadian stamping technique and the use of such devices on property markings and legal agreements stretches back to about 500 BCE in China.

In China, the history of printing most likely began with making patterns on textiles. The use of woodblocks for reproducing written text may have built on this, and dates back to the seventh century CE Tang Dynasty. The oldest block print book bearing a clear publication date is a Chinese imprint of The Diamond Sutra discovered in the Dunhuang cave complex. It gives the date of publication as 11 May 868. The earliest printing techniques developed in China involved chiselling out woodblocks, usually a page at a time, and this process was adapted by the Koreans in first century BCE, who were by then also using the Chinese script. By the early thirteenth century CE, an alternative method was devised which involved a process originally used for minting bronze coins. Individual characters, cast in metal were arranged in a wooden frame and then coated with ink. In other words, moveable type was being used – and what’s more it was being used in Korea two hundred years before Gutenberg. The Anthology of Great Buddhist Priests’ Zen Teachings was printed in 1377 and can legitimately lay claim to being the oldest extant book printed with movable type.¹³

Although the history of printing processes followed a number of different trajectories, one thing that has intrigued scholars is the way in which the development of European printing presses led to rapid growth in book production whereas in China (and elsewhere) the invention of printing had less of an impact. Linguistic and technological challenges can only partly account for this. Comparatively lower rates of literacy in China may also have contributed – and it was certainly the case that the pattern of demand was different. For example, well-established processes of block printing were able to satisfy the demand for Buddhist texts without the need of movable type. But it also seems that the entrepreneurial spirit of Gutenburg and his contemporaries combined forces with a range of social and cultural changes in contributing to the transformative effect of the printing presses of Europe. Given this chapter’s focus on materiality, this comparison is useful because it serves to remind us that despite the importance of materials and technological development, wider forces are always at work in the development and spread of new ways of writing.

2.6 The Mechanization of Writing

A step change in writing technology accompanied the industrial revolution as it spread across Europe and through America. The possibility of rapid message exchange across large distances accompanied the new sense of connection associated with the developing transport infrastructure. The idea of communicating ‘down the line’ about the arrival and departure of trains led to the early development of the telegraph.¹⁴ And when William Cooke first introduced the electric telegraph in the UK it was essentially a signalling system for the railways. The messaging system that Cooke developed with Charles Wheatstone was soon superseded by the more reliable Morse code – and this, in turn, led to a growth of interest and use. Initially though, the cost of transmission and the location of telegraph offices was an obstacle – telegraph offices at railway stations weren’t always easily accessible and the postal service was cheaper, more efficient and, of course, familiar. But by the 1870s, telegraph distribution had become transcontinental, resulting in a quick and reliable way of transmitting written messages over long distances. The telegraph quickly became important in developing new commercial markets and worked together with an expanding trade network. However, it’s important at this point to underline that the Morse code it depended on is not writing in and of itself: it is a way of encoding messages that can be directly transferred into written text. Morse code employs combinations of dots and dashes to represent letters of the alphabet. It could be thought of as a meta-alphabet.¹⁵ This worked to the advantage of its English language users and was easily adaptable to languages that used the same script, but it proved to be an obstacle to users of other writing systems.

A further layer of complexity was required to send telegrams in a character-based language like Chinese. Characters had to be transmitted as strings of numbers, and numbers cost more than letters. Operators needed to use a complex codebook which meant that a simple message, that in English might take two minutes to read, could take half an hour to read in Chinese. Add to this the fact that foreign owners of telegraph lines in mainline China were able to set their own tariffs and it’s easy to see why the cost and efficiency benefits of telegraphy were unevenly distributed, working to the distinct disadvantage of users of non-alphabetic scripts. A reasonable concession to this alphabetic bias was only agreed in 1925 – but it was just that – a concession, a kind of linguistic domination was written into the design of Morse code.

Another highly significant contribution to the mechanization of writing was the typewriter. In all probability, the idea of a mechanical writing machine had its origins in the design of a prosthetic device for the visually impaired¹⁶ and there were a number of failed attempts along the way. The first commercially available typewriter, the Remington No.1 was available in 1874. It had forty-four keys and could reproduce all the capital letters of the alphabet, numbers and punctuation. It used a foot pedal to return the carriage for starting a new line, probably adapting the idea from treadle sewing machines. The Remington company were originally gunsmiths, but by the time they released the Remington No.2 they were riding the crest of a new wave, and demand for the typewriter was exceeding supply. And, as with the development of telegraphy, the invention of the typewriter worked to the distinct advantage of its first English language users. The challenge of designing a Chinese typewriter was taken up by numerous students and amateur engineers who faced the formidable task of making a machine that could mechanically reproduce several thousand different characters. Zhou Houkun’s typewriter, first exhibited in 1926, was able to reproduce 4,000 characters, but the basic operation was always going to be more time consuming.¹⁷

In industrial and post-industrial societies, the typewriter became an integral part of a burgeoning office culture, and secretarial work was often conducted on a massive scale (see Figure 2.2). Typists were knitted into new social and cultural arrangements which thrived on lightweight, semi-skilled and often casual labour. These new arrangements worked alongside changing conceptions of gender roles to open employment opportunities for women. However, as Figure 2.2 graphically illustrates, this resulted in new gendered hierarchies in the workplace – and these cast a long shadow. In many contexts, the idea that some kinds of work, and indeed some kinds of writing are ideally suited to women, persist. I pick up this theme of power relations in writing in Chapter 5.

Figure 2.2 The typing pool – bureaucracy on an industrial scale.

Although the offices of countless businesses and organisations once rang out with the clacking of typewriters, and employed armies of female typists,¹⁸ the rapid adoption of word processing changed all this in a relatively short period of time. The QWERTY keyboard, originally a quick fix to prevent typewriter keys from jamming, was simply repurposed for the computer keyboard. Many of the textual forms associated with typing became digital in the early stages of word processing, and much of the language we still use holds the memory of the recent past – our documents and files are stored in folders, and we bring those up on a virtual desktop. Emails, originally a sort of electronic memo, may be the most common official form of communication now, but formal letters, perhaps saved and sent as PDFs, still retain page designs inherited from their typewritten forebears.

The invention of the keyboard eventually led to a radical transformation of the way in which we write. Keyboards require us to choose and combine the letters we write from the labelled keys in front of us – our machines do the rest. With a stylus or a pen, we make and combine the letter forms. The logic of formation is replaced by the logic of selection. This requires a different skill set, different kinds of manual dexterity and, arguably, a different kind of cognitive operation. Our relationship with the text we have written is changed as a result. The development of predictive text pushes this transformation further. When we use predictive text an initial attempt to combine letters generates several possible words, which we can then choose from. Accurately spelling the whole word, if it is presented to us, depends on reading, recognition and selection rather than unprompted recall. Considered together, these are radical changes in how we write. Personally, I don’t think there’s much to be gained by worrying over what may be lost as a result because there is a sense in which these changes are unstoppable – they have already happened. However, they may prompt debates about how we teach writing and I will return to a consideration of this later in the book.

2.7 Eyestrain, Backache and Sore Fingers

Given the materiality of writing, the lack of scholarship on its physical effects is quite surprising. Many writers complain of back pain, aching wrists and eye strain, but probably most of us have forgotten the struggles of finding a comfortable pencil grip and the challenge of getting our pen to travel in the intended direction on the page. Inevitably, the technology we write with places particular demands on our body. For example, when we use pen and paper not only do we need a pincer grip to hold the pen, but we also use the other hand to steady and align the paper. The head is often bent over the page we write on. In contrast, the keyboard is usually operated with both hands, and the display (at least on a desktop computer) is in front of us. Our body positioning is quite different – particularly if we stand up, as I am doing as I write these words. Contemporary complaints about writing tend to focus on the amount of screen time and the deleterious effects of screen glare as opposed to writer’s cramp and the eyestrain of peering too closely at the page as they did in the not too distant past. Many employers now provide guidelines and support to help their workforce guard against the effects of bad posture, frozen shoulders and repetitive strain injury, often the result of too much time spent in front of a computer screen.

The most interesting insights on this topic often come from professional writers. In an essay called A Passage of the Hands,¹⁹ the late Barry Lopez reflected on his life through the work of his own hands, their memory of sensations, what they express, the objects they have held and the scars they bear. With respect to writing, he recalls how the ‘pressure and friction of a pencil as I labored down the spelling of words right-handed raised the oldest permanent mark, a callus on the third joint of the middle finger’ (p. 213). And then later, by the end of his teenage years, when he was developing an ambition to write he draws our attention to his experience of the physicality of writing.

Doubtless, the physical effects of writing are most keenly felt by those who make their living by it. We know, for example, that the chronic wrist pain experienced by Henry James motivated him to invest in a typewriter and to hire a stenographer, and perhaps this contributed to the particular style he then developed. Even medieval scribes complained and the evidence is found in the marginalia they left. One commented that: ‘It is a painful task. It extinguishes the light from the eyes, it bends the back, it crushes the viscera and the ribs, it brings forth pain to the kidneys, and weariness to the whole body’.²⁰ For most contemporary writers, the physical effects are less extreme and the conditions they work under are less demanding. But writing is still a physical act, and the body needs to be trained to work in particular ways as it learns to control the tools of the trade. Learning to write, and learning to write well can sometimes be hard graft.²¹