Try Typing – With a Typewriter!
I spent some time this past week going over a manuscript that I wrote last spring when I received a fellowship to a dune shack on Cape Cod – a shack that was equipped with neither electricity nor running water. So to write, I had to either work longhand – which has its physical limitations – or type. On a typewriter.
I chose to type.
I bought a wonderful little Smith-Corona Corsair on eBay, a small aqua machine that I remembered – very vaguely – from my undergraduate days. I took it with me to the dune shack and thought about what I was going to write and then started working.
And an amazing thing happened.
There is something intrinsically pure about a typewriter: you don’t use it to check email, or surf the Web, or create a spreadsheet. All you can do with a typewriter is WRITE. It has a smell that I had quite forgotten, but breathing it in was like coming home. I experienced something that I had also forgotten: the pleasure of actually seeing and holding what one has accomplished in a day, pulling one page after another out of the typewriter. Pages and pages of work that you can stack, touch, count – concrete evidence of time well spent.
They’re not expensive. Here’s my tip this week: try it. Buy yourself a typewriter and give it a try. Have your own small dune shack experience: stay away from the computer for a day. And write. Don’t stop to look anything up. Don’t stop to check your email. Just write.
You may be surprised at what you’ll find. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!
Posted in Books, Tools, Process Matters, The Writing Life, About Writing on November 26th, 2006