The “how” of writing is almost always mysterious to the reader and sometimes equally opaque to the writer herself. In this essay, The Masters Review Assistant Editor Jen Dupree discusses one way she’s found to get words on the page.
Writers are often asked about their writing practice and, because my writing practice is pretty boring (couch, no plotting, a million drafts), I often mention that I write all my first drafts longhand. The inevitable astonishment that follows reflects the fact that handwriting has become something of a relic. “Doesn’t that take forever?” people ask. To which I reply that all writing takes forever. “Doesn’t your hand cramp up?” Indeed, it does. “Don’t your thoughts come faster than your hand can move?” I wish. Writing longhand is not efficient, but when I put actual pen to paper, I feel a change in my writing—a release of whatever holds me back.
This change is not entirely in my imagination. There is scientific evidence that handwriting lights up parts of the brain not engaged by typing or even writing with a stylus. According to an article published in 2025 in the scientific journal Life, “handwriting engages brain regions responsible for motor planning…as well as areas involved in visual and language processing.” The article goes on to say that the increased brain effort used to manipulate a pen and form letters “has been shown to facilitate deeper engagement with the material and enhance memory retention.”
Often, I write five or ten pages by hand and then, the next day or several days later, I sit on my couch with my laptop and open a Word document. Very rarely do I look at my handwritten pages again. This is in part because I’ve often written so wildly, I can’t read my handwriting. And a lot of what I’ve written is just gibberish—bits of thoughts, sentence fragments, possible character names and descriptions. Because the point of my longhand writing is not to actually come away with a solid paragraph or page of whatever I’m working on. The point is to solve a problem by forcing my mind in a new direction.
My writing happens like this: From somewhere—a dream, a story someone tells me, a conversation I overhear—I get a flicker of an idea. I try to immediately (unless I’m driving) write down a few words that will remind me of the idea. I keep a small notebook nearby to help me catch fleeting ideas. When I get somewhere I can write for at least five minutes uninterrupted, I get out a notebook, open it to a random blank page, and write. Longhand. Until my mind is empty or my hand cramps up.
I started writing longhand after I took a workshop with a woman who taught a version of proprioceptive writing. Proprioceptive writing was developed in the 1970s by Linda Trichter Metcalf, who went on to found the Proprioceptive Writing Center. The practice involves writing for twenty-five minutes with Baroque music in the background. The PW website states that the “magic of a PW practice happens because of the insights and feelings we uncover through our writing while we are completely focused on and attentive to our thoughts.” The idea is to focus on the position of the hand, the arm, the shoulder, the way the hand feels as it moves across the page, the way fingers feel gripping the pen. At the same time, the practice encourages examination of thoughts as they emerge. It’s not about editing the ideas, just asking questions of them. If you write, “I hate my mother,” your next sentence might be, “Why do I hate my mother?” or, “Since when?” In my workshop, the technique was tweaked to focus on story development with prompts designed to draw out the parts of our stories that had the most energy, then spending ten or twenty minutes asking our own questions to ourselves while we explored (on the page) the answers to questions subsequent to whatever sparked us.
The power of handwriting is in its ability to break through wherever I’m stuck. A 2024 NPR story asserts that “gripping a pen nimbly enough to write is a complicated task, as it requires your brain to continuously monitor the pressure that each finger exerts on the pen. Then, your motor system has to delicately modify that pressure to re-create each letter of the words in your head on the page.” In short, handwriting is a complex brain and that complexity engages many parts of the brain and those engaged parts of the brain create more neural pathways that lead to new ideas or new ways of thinking about old ideas.
Longhand writing isn’t something I do just to get started. Throughout my writing process, I return to the page with questions: But why does she make that decision? What about him does she even like? Why would he agree to go with them? And so on. At that point in my process, I often write the most banal sentences to get myself unstuck: “This story is about…” or, more often, “I have no idea what I’m doing here and I hope if I keep writing something will come to me.” There are no rules to this writing, no direction, and no stopping. I write until I get some kind of breakthrough and feel sure enough of the story to return to my computer. Or until I realize I don’t have a story after all and I leave the Word document to languish in a file with its peers.
What I really love about writing by hand is that it’s low commitment. I only use lined dollar store notebooks, usually the ones with unicorns on them. I open to random pages when I sit down to write. I’m just playing here. I’m just trying things out. None of this is meant to be good. Bad writing here does not make me a bad writer. Essentially, I’m tricking myself into believing that what I’m writing in these cheap, disorganized notebooks doesn’t matter. And that psychology—that mind trick—allows me to keep going.
The next time you’re stuck, try this: take out a piece of paper, find a pen, and, at the top of the page, write “who wants what?” Let your hand lead and your brain follow. Then see what happens!
by Jen Dupree
Jen Dupree is the award-winning author of two novels, The Miraculous Flight of Owen Leach (2022) and What Do You Want from Me? (2025). Slow Motion: A Memoir of Friendship, Disability, and Advocacy, her first full-length work of nonfiction, was published in 2026. She is an assistant editor for The Masters Review, a library director, and a former bookstore owner. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from USM’s Stonecoast program. Her work has appeared in Slippery Elm, December, Solstice, The Masters Review, and other notable places. She is the winner of the Writer’s Digest Fiction Contest, a Pushcart nominee, and a two-time winner of a Maine Literary Award. She lives in Maine with her husband and Portuguese Water Dog (Pink) Floyd. Find her at www.JenniferDupree.com.