Write and oh so wrong

By Virginia Heffernan

I’m back to handwriting. I can’t believe it. It’s not my fault. First, the Bamboo Paper – Notebook app invaded my iPad. And then it forced me to revisit the peculiar practice of making words with my bare hands.

But I have to back up. What happened is that Garance Doré, the glamorous French fashion blogger and illustrator, recommended the Bamboo stylus for iPad as a great holiday gift, so I bought one. (If I can afford it, which is almost never, I buy whatever Doré’s blog recommends.) Three gift styluses ($16.50 each) arrived by mail, two for gifts and one for me.

Now I needed an app to test mine out. So I bought the go-to app for stylus writing on the iPad: Bamboo Paper. On some level it seems I was longing to do more to my oleophobic multitouch iPad screen than pinch, jab and flick it. Those gestures seem fussy, meager, outdated and somehow gross—like “poking” on Facebook.

I wanted to write loopily and boldly like John Hancock or a calligraphy student. Funny that Steve Jobs was a calligraphy student, and such a gung-ho one, when Apple’s apps and devices sometimes seem designed entirely to push pens into obsolescence.

The app opened on the cover of a boring-looking notebook: that’s the whole Bamboo Paper interface. Even the paid version of Bamboo Paper ($1.99) is barebones. At a stretch you could say it’s minimalist. You first spend some time choosing the color of the “cover” of a “notebook.” That was too bad; I care more about the color of the “paper” inside, and there you’re stuck with light cream. I chose gray for the cover and got to a page.

Then came the good part. The stylus feels right—not just the circumference and weight of the implement, which has a stocky, artsy quality, but also its tip on the iPad glass. The problem with my irregular handwriting seems to lie in how my pen meets the page, which determines my grip and flow. There’s often too little friction or too much. Bamboo Paper’s stylus-to-glass, I thought, might fix this and make a calligrapher of me yet.

The stylus and the glass were initially a terrific match—and the penmanship sailed along. It looked less like Charles Manson’s and more like the sinuous letters of a well-adjusted teenaged diarist who wields a sparkly pen. I started to think of gliding, inspirational things to write. And in lavender—the ink color I chose, of the few colors on offer. I also chose a medium-thickness pen, but found its line too spray-painty. I went back to the ballpoint type.

What I wrote was a letter of apology, one of those “sorry I acted weird this morning” ones. It was short because I could hardly fit 15 words on an iPad-size page. That was a blessing: I didn’t overexplain. I then emailed the pixilated handwritten missive to my friend—Bamboo Paper allows sharing through email but not Facebook or Twitter—and my friend was generously forgiving. So maybe the handwriting had been a nice touch, or maybe I hadn’t acted as weird as I had thought.

To make the words right, I had clicked on an icon that turned the stylus into an eraser, and deleted and deleted until the note fit and made sense. The profligate habit of cutting and pasting from a lifetime of word processing dies hard. I wasn’t about to pretend I couldn’t “waste paper” or whatever pen-and-paper types used to think about.

In spite of the good stylus-glass groove, however, I didn’t nail the yin and yang of handwriting with this app. It could have been me: My cursive looks either too scrawly and boyish or too fake and girlish. And the app and stylus didn’t magically teach me how to include those rococo loops on my capital cursive D and S. If Mrs. Brown, my patient second-grade teacher, couldn’t teach me to write in a beautiful hand, then this app certainly couldn’t.

And speaking of second grade, today I was sharpening Dixon Ticonderoga #2 pencils for my second-grader, using a brand new, ultra-quiet electric sharpener, when the whole culture of pencils came flooding back. I realized that it’s not a stylus I need. It’s pencil and paper!

It’s the reusability, for one. Pencils belong to a far-off economy before disposability, when stuff like jackknives and shaving strops might stay in your possession forever. The wood. The “lead”—as pencil graphite is, pleasingly, still called by kids. The scent.

But writing in pencil was grueling, whirring work. “I didn’t start word processing in Geneva font on MacWrite in 1984 only to go back to pencils,” I thought. “Why do they even still teach schoolchildren to use them?”

And then I remembered that years ago, while I (ever the tech cheerleader) was still jumping up and down about 3G networks, David Rees—the cartoonist-author of ace satire like “My New Fighting Technique Is Unstoppable,” who is pretty much the coolest cat around—had hung out a shingle as an artisanal pencil sharpener. Literally. Rees, who had been early to the now-pervasive analog backlash, had brought to DIY and the return-to-3D-materials the sly, understated style of a deadpan satirist. The result was a book, “How to Sharpen Pencils.” It’s so funny (and, in parts, persuasive) that I don’t want to summarize it and kill the joke. Buy it for someone for Christmas, and read it before you wrap it.

So, skip the Bamboo Paper app. Buy Rees’s book and add a pack of Dixon Ticonderoga #2s to someone’s stocking, too. At $15, 96 pencils are cheaper than a single stylus. And, unlike a stylus, even the fanciest one, #2 pencils actually make a mark. It’ll blow your mind.