Visit theallusionist.org/scribe to listen to this episode and get more information about the topics therein
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, twirl language around my finger like a villain’s moustache.
Today’s episode is about the physical act of writing by hand, and one man’s journey from shame to…somewhere else.
It’s odd that shame has come up two episodes in a row. After the last episode, I received the following message from Henrik: “In the episode Disobedience you said that you can't imagine living without shame (slightly paraphrasing here, maybe), and that was the first time I heard that phrase out of another person's mouth. I felt seen! What a warm feeling that was. Thank you!” Thank you, Henrik! Now what do we actually do about it? I’ll let you know if I find out.
The gift guide industrial complex kicked in heavily this week, making me have queasy thoughts of landfill, so for the second year running, I offer the Allusioverse gift guide, with a difference: any member of the Allusioverse who makes something – paintings, zines, music, writing, podcasts, yarn crafts, fabric creations, hand-forged spoons, any kind of art or craft or creative output is welcome as long as you made it yourself, doesn’t have to be for sale, you’d just like more people to acquaint themselves with your oeuvre, you can post it. Everyone will be able to browse it, but only members of the Allusioverse can list themselves. Last year I got some lovely stuff, some great music, and I’m looking forward to this year’s. Want in? Sign up at theallusionist.org/donate for as little as $2 per month and you’re also helping this independent podcast exist, and you get extra written content and livestreams plus the company of your fellows in the Allusioverse Discord. It’s an alright deal, that! Get it at theallusionist.org/donate and you can also give a gift membership.
On with the show.
TIM BROOKES: I have the overhead light reflecting off my forehead, which makes me look significantly older than I actually am.
HZ: I was thinking it made you look more like a Rembrandt painting.
TIM BROOKES: Oh, I love it. My middle name is Chiaroscuro. It's from my Italian mother.
HZ: She saw everything in black and white… Sorry.
You can't really see from here, but we have these very messy bookshelves behind me, but there's birthday cards up. Neither of my husband nor I has had a birthday since the spring, but they're there because people have written a lot of things in in their own handwriting. If someone sends me something that they've written more than two words on, I can't throw it away. I have this big box of stuff that is just notes, letters from the 1990s before we had email – I can't get rid of it.
TIM BROOKES: I just got two envelopes from two different calligraphy guilds for whom I've done talks recently, and both of them had addressed the envelopes in, in florid and dramatic calligraphy, and it looks wonderful. I mean, talk about making you feel special.
HZ: This is Tim Brookes, who is the author of 22 books on a swathe of topics including driveways, guitars, asthma, hitchhiking, and in 2010 he began the Endangered Alphabets Project, researching writing systems around the world, making wood carvings of some, and working to raise awareness of how many of them are veering towards extinction. He has written books about them, too, including Writing Beyond Writing, and An Atlas of Endangered Alphabets, and books of puzzles like sudokus and word searches. Studying endangered alphabets has led Tim to so many different things.
TIM BROOKES: Most recently, that has led to an investigation of the significance and value of handwriting, which is the subject of my new book By Hand.
HZ: It made me reflect on how when I was growing up, everything was tangible, hand wrote everything, books were all holdable. And then as an adult, I make intangible products. And I thought, what happened? What are these choices that I've made?
TIM BROOKES: Not only you – and one of the ironies really is that I did everything by hand, until my 21st birthday when my parents bought me a typewriter. But the only thing I used the typewriter for was typing up poems that I was submitting to like literary magazines. And even then there was the sense that your own handwriting wasn't good enough. If you wanted to behave like a real writer, you had to do this thing which was essentially a mimicry of printing. And then of course, when I did become a real writer and it became my full-time job, I stopped using my handwriting altogether, with the exception of like scribbled notes taken when I was interviewing someone.
And so the beginning of the first sentence of By Hand is: "This story begins with two photos and with shame." And the two photos are my handwriting before I became a writer, a professional writer, and then my handwriting 20 years later after I've been working on a keyboard for all of those years, well, like a typewriter and then a keyboard. And the difference between the two is dramatic and disgusting.
HZ: “Disgusting” - that's a strong term.
TIM BROOKES: Well, that's why I use the word 'shame'. It's fascinating. People talk about their own handwriting in these extremely emotional terms, and shame is, is predominant as if either they once have beautiful handwriting and they no longer do, or they feel they ought to do better, that somehow they're letting themselves or the world down.
HZ: You also talked about how the teaching of handwriting was a very effective way to make young kids feel bad about themselves.
TIM BROOKES: Yeah, I have this saying, which is that you get a fact wrong once, but you can get a W wrong a hundred times. And it's quite possible that when they're learning to write, maybe the first time these kids receive repeated criticism. And I've interviewed dozens of people whose experience of being taught to write was, at best, tedious and perplexing, and at worst brutal.
So literally about six weeks ago, maybe, I asked myself the question: when did I first enjoy the act of writing? And I don't mean enjoy writing as in enjoy writing a piece of journalism or enjoy writing a short story - I mean the actual physical act of writing. And in my case, the answer is July.
HZ: July 2025?
TIM BROOKES: Exactly.
HZ: Gosh. So you were already deep into writing this very book, several books into your writing career. Wow.
TIM BROOKES: That's right. And in fact, when I then went and asked people that question, many of them just stared at me because it had never occurred to them that it was something you enjoy. Most people, it's at best something that is a kind of a useful labour.
HZ: Growing up in Britain in the 20th century and having to learn a particular way of handwriting – not just the fact of doing it, but quite a prescribed way, I suppose; like we had the paper with little lines that you had to get the body in between; it might be dots that you had to hit. Some of our teachers were like, "You have to loop your ‘g’s," some of them were like, "Never do that," so you think, "Well, what is right? I simply don't know."
TIM BROOKES: That's absolutely true. And there's several things in what you've just said. One is that each country tends to have a very clearly distinct style of what they feel is right. And secondly, even within a particular school, as you say, it would be quite common to start out at primary school being taught this is the right way and then being told later, no, it's the wrong way. But it was absolutely part of this notion that good handwriting is related to good behaviour. And the teaching of writing is related to the teaching of behaviour.
There is a great book by Ewan Clayton called The Golden Thread. He's a wonderful calligrapher, and it's the history of writing in English, pretty much, and in England and in the United States in particular, in the 18th century, children were tied to their chairs, or the books recommended they be tied to their chairs, and there would be kind of a board that would be tied with ribbons to the back of their hand, specifically to reduce the gross motor movements of the body; so that all you were left with were these tiny little motions, in the final joints of the fingers, which of course is exactly the opposite of what a kid wants to do. A kid wants to enjoy the act of moving, and instead they're punished for that. And by the way, this was - and still is - seen as a sign of growing up, that you put aside childish things and you write in this very precise script, which is of course why most children hated being taught writing.
My friend Olgierd, who is Polish, is a Sinologist; he teaches Chinese at the University of Warsaw. And one of the things that he does to get his students to understand what writing with a brush is like, and how dramatically different it is from writing either with a pen or a pencil or a keyboard, especially a keyboard: he has them go out into the courtyard with a mop and a bucket. So they dunk the mop in the bucket and they write the characters with water on the courtyard. And so what you see is where the mop splats against the courtyard, and how it moves and where it lifts off. Chinese and Japanese are wonderful to read - and also to carve, by the way - because you can see the act of writing.
And, in Chinese and Japanese calligraphy, you're working with a brush, so straight away - and also you're much more upright and you're working with a brush, not holding it down by the hairs but much higher up so that there is a sense that you are watching the dance of the brush and you are watching the flow of the hand. You are also not allowed to rest your hand on the table. So everything is really a motion that is incorporating the hand, the forearm, the upper arm, the shoulder, and all of that is part of this posture. You can see where the brush strikes the paper and what the motion is and where it lifts off and what the turn of the rest is. You really see writing as an act rather than writing as a product.
HZ: What, to you, are the problems with people seeing writing as just a chore or at best a means to an end?
TIM BROOKES: Yeah, there's really two sides to that, the kind of the dark side and the light side. So the dark side is that, yes, if you think of writing as a chore, even if you think of it as a communication technology, then you are gonna be really influenced by people who say, "Oh, well, here is this better technology that is going to enable you to do it faster and do more of it." And then of course the logical conclusion is AI, where you don't have to do anything, or you give it six keywords and it writes your report for you. The disadvantage of that, of course, is it raises the question: what do you actually want to do with your life? What are you actually going to enjoy? And it also takes away the element of challenge, so challenge gets redefined as a chore, whereas there's no doubt that challenge is what our brains thrive on. If, as you say, we regard writing as a chore and a technology, then we never actually discover the positive sides of it. And if you don't know that that's there, it's like thinking that cooking is all about opening a packet or a can and then cooking it and eating it, and you don't realize or you don't believe that you will ever get to the place where it's actually a pleasure and a discovery.
HZ: A very sort of basic comparison would be: why do you want to do a jigsaw puzzle? Why don't you just look at a picture and then you're done?
TIM BROOKES: I have never thought of that as an analogy. I think you need to write the second edition of my book.
HZ: I dunno - it looked really difficult, Tim.
Any advice for people for whom handwriting isn't something they can physically do, because of, say, hand arthritis? Is there some other way that they can reach some of the benefits of handwriting?
TIM BROOKES: I'm going to answer that question and another one, which is like halfway to that one, which is any advice for people who can write physically but have never enjoyed it, and they think their handwriting is awful: my advice for them is don't try and write the way you were taught in school. Try and have fun with it. There are some people I know who literally physically can't write, because it's painful, because the way they were taught to write is involves so much stress and so much pressure and whatever, that their hands are exhausted after like two minutes. So write in a way that is fun. Use colours, use brushes, use markers; do something where instead of trying to do the thing that you think you ought to do, do the thing that you want to do.
Graffiti is a wonderful exercise in this. I actually interviewed somebody for the book who tried to do calligraphy in school and was no good at it and hated it, and it was painful; and he became a graffiti artist. If anyone is enjoying writing, he is. And so when you get to the point where it's actually physically painful, for some people it's painful because they're holding the pen too tightly or incorrectly or whatever. So yeah, I would just use another medium.
HZ: Marion Richardson was a very important person in the development of handwriting education. She was an English artist and educator working from the early 1910s to the early 1940s. She taught art in schools and prisons, cultivating self-expression and self-guidance in learners. She also published in 1935 some booklets called Writing and Writing Patterns, which included exercises for young children: before learning to write letters practice drawing repeating patterns – zigzags, swirls, loops, curlicues, whatever they invented – the idea being they develop their motor control and shape-making and the rhythms of writing, in a way that is, in Marion Richardson’s words, “a source of delight”. Initially they should be making these gestures large, in coloured chalk, before working up to letter forms.
TIM BROOKES: There is a calligrapher from South Africa whose specialty is calligraphy in sand on the beach.
HZ: Andrew van de Merwe, who goes by the name Beachscriber.
TIM BROOKES: And he was talking about the value of learning the motion before learning the letters. Because if you are learning the motions, you're doing actions which come naturally to the body. And so straight away, you are not trying to force your hand or your arm or your entire posture into something that is unnatural just to make a certain shape of letter. And so what Marian Richardson was doing, and what he does, is start with the motions that come naturally; many of those shapes then wind up in the Latin alphabet. So a ‘d’ is like a straight line and then a swoosh, you know, a curve. And bam: those are both fun; those are both natural motions.
HZ: I suppose writing in the sand as well might also help one get over the problem that I often have, which is when using ink and paper, I think: this is wasting resources if I don't put down anything good. Whereas a Google Doc doesn't really feel as consequential. But sand is not meant to be permanent. So that's a release in a way.
TIM BROOKES: Yes. We talked a lot about his relationship with permanence and sand. I know somebody else whose handwriting is almost impossibly tiny and she was brought up in an extremely frugal household. And so for her, one of the primary motivations is: don't waste resources, don't waste paper.
HZ: That's thought-provoking, because I also wrote very small when I was young and grew up in a house where we didn't have any money. So I was probably like, better not waste this. Now it's a lot more expansive.
TIM BROOKES: And I guess it's a sign of what a privileged position I'm in where I can kind of go, "Damn, I want to enjoy writing. If it means I write on every other line so I can really do some great descenders, then I'm going to do that."
HZ: I feel the responsibility to approximately 10% of people listening to ask: are there any writing systems you know of that favour the left-hander?
TIM BROOKES: The ones that I think are fabulous are the vertical scripts, especially Mongolian, because although there are specific letters that are gonna be more attuned to the right hander, you can actually write Mongolian with either hand. And I would imagine that it would not pose as much of an issue as the Roman or Latin alphabet. Interesting.
HZ: The word ‘cursive’ is from the Latin word for running, and the style of handwriting developed for speed - it’s quicker when the brush or pen or quill does not break contact with the page as much as possible. This means that the characters aren’t the only part of the writing, there are also the ligatures, the strokes that connect one to the next. I’ll be honest, I had never paid them much attention as entities in themselves, but Tim tried an exercise to do exactly that.
TIM BROOKES: I was struggling with the word ‘cursive’. I was thinking: what exactly is it about writing that makes it cursive? Because the way we are shown writing is we're shown the alphabet: here are these symbols, and we are supposed to somehow put it together, as if writing was like Scrabble. But writing is nothing like Scrabble. It's a game of spatial manipulation that happens to involve things we call letters. But writing is something much more fluid.
And I started thinking: so we have these stationary individual things we call letters, but then writing is something quite different. And I thought: film; film is actually a series of still images, but when you run 'em together, they're transformed into motion. And I came up with this phrase "the wind through the wheat." I was imagining, you know, what is this force that blows through the letters and turns them into writing? I had this, this idea of an experiment of taking a piece of cursive writing, and then using Photoshop to take out all the letters. So what you are left with is the connectors that are called ligatures between one letter and the next. And when you look at them and you just see the ligatures, it really is like the wind blowing through the wheat. It's this graceful rising and falling, which is the unification of these letters into writing.
HZ: So it's the manifestation of the movement that produced it, rather than the information it's intended to convey.
TIM BROOKES: Ooh, I love that. Write that one down.
HZ: When he started writing his By Hand, in January this year, Tim thought he should write the whole thing by hand, and have it printed in handwriting too.
TIM BROOKES: Because I'm a great believer in participatory journalism. So many of the books that I've done, I've done by kind of actually getting involved in my subject. I did a book on the campaign to eradicate polio, and I went out with the polio teams on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, and I had breakfast with the Taliban. You know, interesting things like that, you really understand the subject when you're in the middle of it, you know? And I thought, “That's it; I'm gonna try writing this by hand to find out exactly what it is that we're in danger of losing.” And I had no idea either how difficult it would be or how much I would discover by doing that.
HZ: Did you manage to write the whole thing by hand?
TIM BROOKES: I originally wanted to do the whole thing as a photo-reproduced manuscript, and it nearly killed me because – I mean, I'm serious: I wound up in the hospital.
HZ: Oh God, Tim!
TIM BROOKES: Because the act of trying to write perfectly so that everybody could read it – I really fell into that trap which said writing is not about expression, it's about legibility. And I couldn't make it so legible that I thought everybody would be able to read it. And in trying, I started developing panic attacks and cardiac symptoms.
HZ: Oh no.
TIM BROOKES: Eventually, my art director Alex said, “You know what? One, your handwriting is never gonna be legible to everybody. And two, you should take the stress off your shoulders.” And so I continue to write it in my journal by hand and to enjoy it and to feel much less pressure, but then it got printed in the traditional typesetting fashion.
HZ: How did you feel about that when that happened? I mean, I'm glad you were out of hospital and alive.
TIM BROOKES: Yes. I take it all as a series of discoveries. And in fact, there are several instances of my handwriting in the book, so you can see how it actually does improve. The more I worked on this book and the more consciously I looked and thought about the act of writing, I've now got to the point where writing is a treat. And I sit down in cafes or in other kind of public places, and I get out my pen that I love and my Moleskine journal that I love. And it becomes the thing that I do; that is what I look forward to and the shaping of individual letters, I'm going like, "Whoa, look at that N! I'm not sure I've ever done an N like that before in my life, that is so graceful" or "That is so outrageous," or something like that.
HZ: Does it feel at all exposing to have your personal handwriting out there for people to see?
TIM BROOKES: Oh my God, yes. In fact, when I was at the bottom of the hole right over the lava in all of this, I started feeling as if everything I had written – and I've written 22 books and God knows how many articles and columns and all this kind of stuff – I began to feel as if every one of those was a fraud, and I had kind of written it as me, and then I had passed it over to somebody else who said, “Don't worry, we'll make it look good.” And they had kind of put it in type-setting and it came out, you know, looking like writing is supposed to look and that sense of broadness and of shame, as I mentioned, really just suggests so much about what we, what we think of writing and what we think of how we represent ourselves to the world.
HZ: So even you, after a career of self-expression and discovery, it's taken a long time to get to these things?
TIM BROOKES: Oh! Yeah! I have never felt so naked. That's how exposed I felt at the idea that my handwriting was going to be seen by the world.
HZ: Has anyone critiqued it?
TIM BROOKES: Yeah. People say, “You have lovely handwriting.”
HZ: Aw! That's nice.
TIM BROOKES: It was right towards the end of the book when my writing had really improved a lot, and I was sitting at a diner and the waitress came over and said, “You have such beautiful handwriting.” And I'm like, “My God, at last!”
HZ: Ah, it's like a scene in a romance.
TIM BROOKES: Yeah, exactly.
HZ: It's also just exciting to see someone's handwriting now because it just doesn't happen nearly as often.
TIM BROOKES: Well, actually what has what has started happening is that, as I say, I do a lot of my writing in public and people will come over and talk to me. Usually they are people over the age of, say, 50; but not always, by any means. People want to come over and somehow be involved in this act that I'm doing, which is the writing on the page.
HZ: As I mentioned earlier, Tim founded the Endangered Alphabets Project in 2010.
TIM BROOKES: Just as there are many cultures in the world that have their own language, which for various reasons, mostly involving that culture being suppressed or minoritized or marginalized by someone more powerful, they have either chosen to use a more widely used language, or they've been forced to. The same thing is also true of writing. And so that was my book, Endangered Alphabets, which came out in 2010. And ever since then I've been researching and trying to find these minority scripts from around the world. There's no telling how many there are because you don't know if anyone's still using one somewhere, and besides which new ones are being created; but I have identified about 300 scripts in use in the world.
HZ: That doesn’t sound like very many.
TIM BROOKES: Well, the, if you look at South America, for example: Latin alphabet, coast to coast. And the reason is because when the Spaniards arrived, they destroyed all evidence of other forms of writing. And they had such a hold over the continent through the Catholic church that that Latin alphabet became the de facto script.
HZ: A lot of indigenous languages in places that the British colonized didn't have what the British recognized as a writing system. They recorded information or displayed information in different ways.
TIM BROOKES: Exactly. And Australia, there are a variety of forms of visible communication used by the Aboriginal peoples, to represent not necessarily their spoken language, but certainly ideas or directions or whatever beliefs, narratives. But yeah, there's not an endangered Australian alphabet.
Essentially, we as European/North Americans have taken it upon ourselves to define writing as being the writing that we use. It's a circular definition. It means that we are the most evolved people because we use the most evolved form of writing, and we use the most evolved form of writing because we are the most evolved people. So as you say, when the Brits wind up, especially in Africa, where there are all kinds of graphic communication systems, they saw them as being epitomes of primitiveness. And so again, it was a circular definition: "You are a childish people, therefore you use childish writing, therefore, childish writing is a sign of a childish people." Essentially it was a way of us being self-congratulatory and saying "our form of writing is more evolved." As they used to say in the early 1980s, in London, it's all bollocks.
HZ: You cite the very sobering statistic: "Of the world's roughly 300 writing systems fully 90% are to some degree threatened, marginalized, or outright banned." Are there cultures in which the reverse is happening? That there's positive developments?
TIM BROOKES: Yes. When I started the endangered alphabets project in, roughly speaking, 2010, and I coined the phrase endangered alphabets, the world landscape was actually quite different to what it is now. There has been a kind of global self-determination movement taking place, which to be sure is absolutely opposed in certain specific places. But the number of cultures that where I would've said this script is outright endangered in 2010, and now I would say it is in revival, is actually quite encouraging. In general, it's part of an overall cultural sense of, self-determination and pride really.
There are various minority cultures around the world which are working on kind of cultural revitalization by teaching calligraphy and by taking their traditional script, which may have been, in one case in particular, outright banned for a century or more, and anybody who used it could be jailed and all of their property would be confiscated.
There was this wonderful organization that was doing these guerrilla calligraphy sessions where they would throw up a tent - this is in Kathmandu - and invite people who are walking by to come in and they would teach them how to write their own name in their traditional script, which many of them had seen and revered but couldn't write. And they took photographs and the looks on these people's faces: they were so proud and so delighted. I was really struck by the fact that in these cultures, they're using writing by hand as a means of connecting generations, and connecting generations with their ancestors and their traditions. In the United States, and to a lesser degree in Canada and in Europe, exactly the opposite is happening, where writing is being redefined in a way that is severing the connection between the future and the past.
HZ: Also something you said where they had to think about who they were past and present. And I suppose that is a conscious process that a lot of people in colonizer nations have not embarked upon, but would be quite useful for them.
TIM BROOKES: Yes. No kidding. Yes. We, the powerful are always the blind. We, we don't seed because we don't need to. And just like we can define writing the way we want to because no one is there to tell us we are wrong and spank us.
HZ: So maybe the solution is more spanking
TIM BROOKES: That's what I'm trying!
HZ: Tim Brookes is a writer of many books - the latest is By Hand: Can the Art of Writing Be Saved? - and he’s the founder of the Endangered Alphabets Project. You can find out about all of Tim’s projects, and buy some of his carvings, at endangeredalphabets.com, also contact him there if you would like to attend his fortnightly Sunday discussion group to enjoy interesting people talking about interesting things. And I’ll link to Tim at theallusionist.org/scribe.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
enfleurage, noun: the extraction of essential oils and perfumes from flowers.
Try using ‘enfleurage’ in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, on the unceded ancestral and traditional territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Music is by the singer and composer Martin Austwick;you can hear us on our long-running podcast Answer Me This, you have more than 400 episodes to dip into, so if you want a fact-packed low stress listen, go get Answer Me This in the podplaces and at answermethispodcast.com.
Our ad partner is Multitude. To sponsor this show, so I can talk winningly and admiringly about your product or thing, get in touch with them at multitude.productions/ads.
Upon gazing at the gallery of Zaltzworks - which is the wall above the toilet, that’s where I put up my paintings and stuff, where they deserve - I realised that a lot of the visual art I’ve made in the past year or so has revolved around hand lettering, so I’ll post some pictures of that on Instagram and Facebook. The handle on both is allusionistshow.
You can send in a request for an etymology or a different term for something where the existing terms don’t work for you, or a new term, or let me know if you’ve had any interesting handwriting experiences, or you want to share other experiences the show has prodded out of your memory.
And you can listen to or read every episode, get more information about the episode topics and people talking about them, and see the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words, and browse a lexicon of every word discussed in the show and click through to listen to the episode about it, and become a member of the Allusioverse to help fund the show and be part of a community of very fine people, all at the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
