I recently searched online for memoir writing tips to see how often handwriting might be suggested. To my surprise I found little mention of what had been most helpful in starting my memoir, Whispers from the Valley of the Yak.

In the beginning I wrote by hand to figure out the best entry point into a complicated story.

Luckily, I had an abundance of primary materials: my parents’ voluminous records of their time in China as medical missionaries. Even so, as I delved deeper into my childhood, I encountered hazy memories and struggled with writing from the heart.

Writing had been integral to my environmental career, which culminated in a series of cooperative projects with the National Park Service. I managed a dozen such projects over a decade. Among other things, I drafted the reports, incorporated NPS colleagues’ comments, and shepherded the final reports through publication.

Writing for a government agency is considered “institutional” writing. In my case, a report was usually intended for both agency personnel and the general public. It needed to reflect NPS policy and be well written, with active voice, relatively simple sentence structure, and accessible language.

The writing and editing skills I honed during those years served me well when I began my memoir. However, regarding emotional content, memoir and institutional writing are polar opposites.

I struggled initially with writing my memoir because I lacked experience expressing emotions on the page. Having had a difficult childhood, I’d suppressed my feelings and my memories were hazy at best. My writing group kept pressing me for more emotional content – otherwise, they said, it was just “reportage.”

The best way I found to access childhood memories was to first write by hand. Even today in starting something new, like this blog post, I sit down with a notebook and pencil and begin writing my thoughts.

But why is writing by hand more successful at accessing memories?

I recently came across two articles that helped me understand the power of handwriting.

The first, “The Benefits of Handwriting: 10 Amazing Truths about Writing by Hand” says handwriting strengthens our memory. Unlike writing on a computer, it demands all our attention and focus. Handwriting “slows down our memory and its capability of concentration, allowing us to remember and build something specific on paper.”

The second, “Why Writing by Hand is Better for Memory and Learning,” highlights a study comparing handwriting to writing on a computer. It found that “writing by hand had higher levels of electrical activity across a wide range of interconnected brain regions responsible for movement, vision, sensory processing, and memory.”

I wanted more specificity to understand how this happens.So, I turned to Bessel van der Kolk’s book, The Body Keeps the Score. On page 83, an image depicts the many branches of the vagus nerve, the longest of the cranial nerves. This nerve connects to the throat, chest, and abdomen and all the organs located there.

As the title of van der Kolk’s book implies, our bodies are a storehouse of our emotions. The neural pathways to childhood experiences may lie buried under more recent experiences, but they’re still there. Putting this information together, I find it logical that the slower processing when writing by hand enables our sensory memories and associated emotions to resurface.   

Here’s another tip for writers seeking assistance in naming emotions and how they manifest themselves in the body. I highly recommend The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expression (2^nd Edition).

Happy writing!