Jerry Seinfeld’s anti-establishment view about writing with pen and paper

Jerry Seinfeld recently had interesting things to say about the virtues of writing by hand versus typing:

I think pens are a very important creative tool. Keyboards really crush your freedom. And it's too corporate to be creative. You wanna feel like you're getting away with something.

His whole interview with GQ is worth watching, but his brief comments on writing longhand stood out.

I never thought about writing in this way: No matter what we’re writing, when we type, we’re confined to lines, letters and punctuations. It is rigid, when you think of it like that.

It’s true, but creativity flourishes in constraints, so typing can keep us focused on words we’re using to describe them, but I’ve seen the benefits of pen and paper.

I’ve recently spent more time writing with pen and paper for meeting notes and getting ideas down. Partly as a way to be less distracted by my computer and to switch things up. I’ve found having the notes in front of me as a physical object, and not an app on the screen, has changed my relationship with and the flow of ideas.

What does writing freehand look like for a post like this? Most all of my writing and communication is done through typing. But it’s just not getting words “down on the page,” but the constant editing, copying and pasting. In a lot of ways, the way I think about ideas and explore them is tied to typing on digital devices.

Yet when I go back to something I’ve written on paper with pen, I see what I’ve been crossed off, where I’ve moved sentences with arrows. It’s a document of my thought process at the time. It’s not clean, but neither is the process.

Seinfeld’s comedy makes and question the very core of why we do things, and this YouTube video sheds light on his process of exploring those ideas.

(I also recommend checking out his critique of the designated hitter in baseball – totally changed the mind of this American League boy).