Writing–Writing Left-Handed

I do believe that I’ve mentioned before that I’m teaching myself to write left-handed. I’m weirdly ambidextrous to begin with, more comfortable doing things with my left hand and catching myself doing things with my left hand instead of my right, so teaching myself to write left-handed seemed like a good idea.

Lately, I’ve only been practicing a little bit and I decided that since I’m coming along well enough it was time to challenge myself.

I’ve decided to write a short story in longhand left-handed.

The short story I have in mind shouldn’t be very long, around 1,000 words, and I don’t imagine pushing myself more than half of a page written at a time because I would imagine the crippled-snail pace will frustrate me as I won’t be able to get the words out as fast as I want and I don’t want this to turn into an episode of The Incredible Hulk. I’m hard enough on my clothes without fits of Lou Ferrigno transformation.

Anyway.

This exercise will accomplish two things.

One, practice my left-handed writing skills, of course.

Two, writing in a different way.

I like to write my short stories in longhand. I don’t know why, but for me they just flow better on paper than on the computer (though I will write them on my laptop from time to time). I need to alter that flow a little bit. See if writing with my other hand switches anything up, makes me think differently.

Sometimes I think I get a little complacent with my writing. I have a routine to my work, of course, because that makes the daily grind of words less like work and more like habit. But I don’t want to get so predictable in my routine that I get boring. Setting my word goals, writing at a designated time each day, that all stays. But there’s nothing that says I HAVE to write a certain way. There’s no rule that says I must write this short story longhand with my right hand and then type it up on the laptop.

Hell, I can chisel it on a stone tablet if I want to, so long as I do it at the appointed time during my day.

I’m not breaking the rhythm. I’m just jazzing up the steps to the dance.

This is just a little experiment to see what, if anything, happens.

It keeps the whole mundane business of putting words down on paper interesting.