Let’s Talk Process #3: The Typewriter
This is my 1940’s Royal Black Typewriter:
Her keys stick. Her spacing is weird. Her roller has odd splodges of correction fluid on them which seem to appear and disappear at will. Her ding comes a bit too early and I either waste inches of space or run out entirely.
I love her anyway. She is, in the immortal words of Jay and Silent Bob, my hetero-life partner. Now that I have her, I will never let her go.
Why? If you’re back for the third installment, you know I’m going to tell you.
I have a new MacBook Pro with bells and whistles and Scrivner and Pages. Its keys are quiet and they don’t stick (yet). When I’m using the computer, I can set the formatting up at the beginning and the microchips remember and do things like go to the next line automatically. I don’t have to rethread a ribbon every couple of weeks (or days). The computer weighs a couple of pounds tops. It fits into a variety of my bags. It sends my data to the ineffable “cloud,” hypothetically saving it from my tendency to decorate my machines with liquids of various sorts (-ish. I’m watching you cloud). The Mac is shiny and silver and I have some stickers on it that once made a TSA guy laugh (the kids did the skulls and crossbones).
I like my computer. I am grateful for it. And when final draft time comes, the thing is essential.
The computer though, it ain’t got no soul. It’s a nameless MX to Dorian’s DRM.
The computer is an it. The typewriter is a she. I’m not anthropomorphizing or having a psychotic break in which I’ve become convinced my typewriter is possessed (I don’t think). But there is something individual about the typewriter, something special, that a computer doesn’t, and can’t, have. She belonged to someone else before she belonged to me and you can see it in her tiny imperfections. She has had a long, productive life and she wasn’t sterilized before resale, wiped clean and loaded fresh. She came to me as she was and I embrace her as she is.
This Royal Black makes me one with a long tradition. I’m hacking away on the same model Hemmingway used. I don’t smoke like him. I don’t drink like him. I usually wear a shirt when I’m writing. But you get my drift. This machine is our kinship. The basis (albeit a shaky one) for the belief that if someone else made it happen using one of these, maybe this very machine, I can to.
I can get a cadence going to the typewriter I can’t muster on a computer, one punctuated, as only a musician can appreciate, with *thunks* and *dings* and *tap tap taps.*
This girl knows how to sing.
There’s also the matter of unplugging. Yes, I usually have my computer nearby, often open for ease of listening to whatever I’m listening to or consulting with writing buddies. I am, however, far less likely to wander off into Tweetland or Facebookville or the blogosphere if my fingers are hitting those sticky keys and I have to pay attention to where my line ends. For some reason, the words just go brain to fingers when I have the typewriter out which makes her the ultimate first draft creation aid. She doesn’t stop me with wavy red lines or weird tones or grammar warnings. She lets me let go.
I have a lot of work to do when I’m done with her version, sure. But it’s a version I didn’t have before and wouldn’t if not for my Royal Black. I live in fear of something happening to my pages, but I take pictures of them and keep them in dropbox with a hard copy punched and safe in my notebook. And that ink, once it’s dry, isn’t going anywhere.
This is how I do it, baby. Your turn.
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