On Handwriting Analysis

Conversations that pop up in a hotel lobby.

Hi friends.

In Nashville, this weekend I lingered in the hotel lobby for a while after breakfast. I am usually the one who grabs a quick breakfast and returns to their room. But it was nice to be in a functioning building with proper heat after all the cold weather in New Orleans last week, not to mention living in a house-in-progress for the past month or so. And the hotel was small, not bustling in the slightest, just eight rooms in a restored Victorian house, beautiful wood throughout. And I was the first to breakfast, and it was quiet and empty, so I just let myself breathe for a second.

The night before, at the event, I had talked for a long time. I do this eagerly—I love these speaking engagements—but lately I have begun to lose my voice a bit afterward. An actress friend of mine told me that I’m probably speaking from the wrong place in my body. That morning I was hazily thinking about taking a class or training to correct that. (Don’t worry, not like an improv class or anything.) Anyway, I did not want to stop talking to people, I knew that much.

Eventually two women showed up, one of them a silent partner in the hotel, the other a friend of hers who used to live in Nashville and was visiting from out of town. They were so friendly and smart that I rustled up my voice one more time.

We talked about whether or not the building was haunted. (I had heard from a friend who used to live in Nashville that it was.) The silent partner shared one small story, a tease of a confirmation, and then she had to leave. Her friend decided to stay behind while she had some tea. She sat and talked with me for a while, and we talked easily, and eventually she asked me questions about being a writer.

People always want to know how you write, if you use some sort of interesting technology or if some magical shortcut exists. (THERE ARE NO SHORTCUTS.) But, as I have written about to you all before, I handwrite first usually and type later and it is just the most basic of a process. This answer intrigued her, however, and she asked a question I had never been asked before, which was, “Can I see your handwriting?”

She had me write with a stylus on her phone. I wrote, “Here in Nashville.” I wrote it in a mix of print and cursive, which I usually do. My handwriting is broken into stops and starts, where sometimes the flow of the cursive ends and the printed letters start again. A merger of the two styles has formed over the years.

With the stylus, my new friend also wrote “Here in Nashville” above my handwriting in perfect linked, looped cursive. She talked about how her children had never learned cursive—they didn’t teach it in schools anymore, a fact I faintly knew but had never actively considered. She told me that her children couldn’t read her handwriting. Then we gossiped about Blake Lively and Colleen Hoover for a while. A satisfying finish.

Eventually I excused myself to go back to my room and pack for my trip home. And when I left forty-five minutes later she was still in the lobby, chatting with a new woman. She reminded me of all my cool mom friends who always tell me how happy they are just to be on their own in a hotel. They never waste a second of their time away from home.

I also thought briefly of her as a friendly ghost, haunting a hotel lobby with good questions.

Later it got me thinking about how and why I use a particular mix of letters when I write. Sometimes I’ll even use both the print and cursive version of a letter in the same sentence, if not the same word. I thought perhaps it could be any of these three reasons:

1. Some letters look better or more appealing to me in cursive than in print (and vice versa) and perhaps I lean toward aesthetics sometimes. (I am thinking of the letter “s” for example, which looks so different between the two styles.)

2. Sometimes using one letter over the other might be faster in a certain scenario, depending on what letter becomes before or after it, and if I’m really on a roll my creative self might not want anything slowing me down.

3. Maybe some letters feel more serious to me (or funny, or whatever) in one style versus another, and if I’m writing a certain kind of scene I might switch.

My brain works as it does and I don’t want to question it too much. I know that when I handwrite I feel at my freest, and I’m unafraid to make mistakes and also be as honest as I can. It is pure process, and also pure joy. I don’t think I could actively alter my script, my patterns, my rituals. Not if I want to be genuine on the page.

What it also made me wonder if any of the personal mail I’ve written and sent in the last decade or so was unreadable to some people. All the birthday cards and anniversary cards and postcards from abroad and notes of encouragement and letters of condolence—were they only half legible?

Now I’m afraid to ask my friends. But hopefully when these people get letters from me they appreciate at the very least that I am thinking of them. That I am trying to reach out and connect. One messy letter at a time.

How’s your handwriting?

Jami

You are reading Craft Talk, the home of #1000wordsofsummer and also a weekly newsletter about writing from Jami Attenberg. I’m also on bluesky and instagram.