You have a nice pen but you write like a drunk badger. What now?

how to get better Write Now ugh sorry

Congratulations! Someone in your life has given you a Nice Pen.

Maybe it is a Cross or a Parker, or perhaps even a Mont Blanc—all classic “congratulations on that thing you did” gifts. Or maybe it is a Lamy Safari or a Kaweco Sport, something to help you try out writing with a fountain pen for the very first time.

Or maybe it is a special edition Montegrappa because you are a government official who is in charge of awarding infrastructure contracts and you can’t accept a bribe but, you know, a solid gold fountain pen that looks like a viking action figure is totally fine no worries.

just a normal $200,000 business gift totally legit (via Pianki)

No matter what it is, you know one thing for certain: you are now a Nice Pen person. You will now look down on peasants with their Uniballs and Pilot G2s and Papermate Flairs from the lofty heights of oh wait you write like a total idiot.

That’s right: although you love your Nice Pen, it does make you suddenly aware that you write like a third-grader, minus the part where the writing is legible. You once thought of your “handwriting” as perfectly acceptable, maybe even masculine in its incomprehensible scratches, but now you realize it is embarrassing trash.

What now?

Well, one way to tackle this is to go way overboard and decide you are going to get really into calligraphy. And as to that: calm down, Kevin. Someone gave you a pen; you have not been conscripted into writing invitations for a royal wedding.

Maybe one day you will get into calligraphy, and if that’s something that excites you that’s great. There are a lot of books and classes on that, none of which you should buy now because you will get frustrated and give up and put your Nice Pen away out of deep and abiding shame.

This is not because you are incapable of learning calligraphy but because you are trying to skip way too many steps. Writing is a fine motor skill and like any physical skill you have to train the movements. Trying to go directly from garbled chicken scratch to Copperplate is like taking 20 years off of going to the gym and then deciding you are going to focus on the technical olympic lifts straight away: in both cases you are going to pull something in your butt.

So: no calligraphy. What, then?

Well, forget having beautiful or elegant handwriting and focus instead on having handwriting that is simply legible and not embarrassing. And there is a book that does exactly that; it is called Write Now and it is written by these ladies.

from their Amazon page

I know that right now you are distracted with many questions.

• Is this picture for real or are these actresses hired from Central Casting, Good Hugs division?

• Are they best friends in real life? If so, do they solve cozy mysteries? If so, is it more of a Psych or a Rizzoli and Isles-type situation, tonally?

• Did they fight over who got to hold the bigger of the two gigantic pencils? Did the fight make them even better friends in the end?

FOCUS. You can come back to that later.

Among other things, these ladies taught seminars for doctors and nurses where their goal was to get them to write, you know, not like doctors.¹ That’s pretty much what this book does—it teaches you to go from incomprehensible gibberish to clear, easy-to-read writing that you can still do pretty quickly.

And as a Nice Pen recipient myself, I cannot recommend this book enough. Years ago my wife got me a Montegrappa Fortuna covered in skulls and I became determined to have handwriting that was worthy of it, and then shortly thereafter—once I realized that was impossible because of the excessive skullitude of that pen—I became determined to at least have handwriting that I could read a week later.

That is, not only could others not read my writing, but I couldn’t read my writing once I was removed from the context of what I was thinking when I originally wrote it. My journal from that time might have the formula for turning lead into gold in it. Or it might just be blank verse about farts. I have no clue.

This book teaches teaches the Italic style of handwriting, which basically looks like this:

from the book’s Amazon listing

That’s part of the book; the entire book is handwritten. This is a pretty clever way to showcase the end goal: writing in a way that you and others can easily read.

That is, while formal Italic writing can get fancy and turn into calligraphy, the version taught in the book doesn’t focus on that—instead, it’s just a basic, achievable method to make your handwriting look like it was made by an adult human for the purposes of communicating instead of something a murder victim scrawled on the floor as they were bleeding out in the opening act of an episode of Criminal Minds. And that is really all you need Write Now.²

The book is full of exercises and is paced well, meaning there’s never mindless grinding through basic stuff nor does it fall into this old trap:

via know your meme

You will not be a calligrapher coming out of this book, but who cares? I used the book and I’ve repeatedly had folks ask me “whoa is that actually your handwriting” when they see something I’ve done in my journal or whatever. This is not because I have great handwriting but because most people have extremely bad handwriting, and seeing someone who can just write legibly and clearly is surprisingly rare.³

After you finish the book, you might move on or you might decide that’s enough. It’ll get you to where you can functionally write well, and if the process of doing so is something you enjoy, then you can move on to stuff like Spencerian and Italic calligraphy or whatever. But first, you just gotta be able to communicate in writing, and that’s what this book will do for you.

You can buy Write Now on their Amazon page, here.

via the Amazon listing

1. Man what a great business idea.

2. he said the name of the book in the post whoooaaaaaaaa

3. You may be tempted to get a big head about this. Going to the handwriting subreddit is a pretty good way to remind yourself that you objectively have B- handwriting, but since pretty much everyone else has has F handwriting you are doing pretty good.