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  • Writer's pictureEmmalia Harrington

Writing with Dysgraphia

When I was nine or so, I read the commentary of a kid who won a fiction contest. She happily chatted how much more fun writing was over talking. You get to redo your words until they're just right!


This line of thought was alien to me. Storytelling was the much more logical way to get ideas across. Yes, it would be fun to make books once I was grown up, but writing equals physical pain.



A shadow of a hand, photographed at a Dutch angle.
A void of ouch

I wasn't diagnosed with dysgraphia until middle school, and grownups were not good at explaining it to me, I thought it meant illegible handwriting and aching hands. Dysgraphia also includeas great difficulty taking raw, barely articulated thoughts, and converting them into understandable text. Even if I type, the mental struggle remains.


How I wrote fiction in my younger days was not fun. I used lined paper a lot, since it helped my sentences and paragraphs stay level. No matter my ambitions, my pieces stayed short, and often incomplete. Typing was little better, as most of the adult around me pushed touch typing. I used as much, if not more, brain power remembering where every button than in creating narrative.


Sometime during high school, I stopped caring about touch typing and let me fingers fly as I looked down. After I graduated college, schoolwork was no longer a priority. I found writing advice podcasts, and experimented with short stories. I even found a way to make handwriting work for me (letters under 0.5 centimeters don't hurt.)


I'm not the writer I thought I'd be, but I'm satisfied with where I am now.

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