On Typewriters
More fun rough-drafting than I've had in years!
Hello, friends!
Happy January! How are y’all’s New Year’s Resolutions going? Mine are going great – because I started a new job halfway through the month and immediately punted all of my resolutions to June, lol.
Which is good, because starting a new job swallows more energy than I frankly anticipated. I had initially planned to cover Felicia Rose Chavez’s The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop in this newsletter, but the book has been sitting on my desk for two and a half weeks and I haven’t had a chance to read it. So instead, y’all are getting a short, sweet newsletter about my new favorite thing: MY TYPEWRITER.
Of course, just because I’ve started a new job doesn’t mean I don’t have news:
News
My short story “St. Thomas Aquinas Administers the Turing Test” will be published in Diabolical Plots in 2024.
My essay “Nostalgia, but Make It Stressful: Fantasy Game as Pressure Valve” will be published in the British Fantasy Society Journal’s Special Issue on Fantasy and Gaming in 2024.
My essay “‘Selfish or Annoying’: Etiquette, Gender, and Race in Oops!: The Manners Guide for Girls” will be published in An American Girl Anthology (University Press of Mississippi) in late 2024 or early 2025.
Subscribe to get notified when these come out!
The Smith-Corona Galaxie XII
A.k.a, The Typewriter.
Morgan got it for me for Christmas. (I thought I had FINALLY scooped him with an out-of-print book about a dead Croatian sculptor, but no.) I’ve only had it for about a month, but a lot of people have already asked me about it. Do I actually write fiction on it? How fast is it to type? Is it heavy?
So far, I admit I’ve mostly used it as a brainstorming tool. I’ve re-written an old piece of sci-fi flash fiction on it, and I’ve also drafted four pages of Skyrim OC fanfiction (you heard me).
It goes without saying that the really fresh-feeling thing about the typewriter, at least in the year of our Lord 2024, is its physicality. It’s so fun to draft on, and incredibly freeing – it’s almost like a toy, by which I mean that it introduces a great sense of play into the act of writing. The Smith-Corona Galaxie XII is a manual typewriter, not an electric one. You gotta really whack those keys. The hammers are loud; I feel bad for my neighbor. But it’s so fun. I look for excuses to sit down and write something.
I’m also much less practiced at typing on it than I am at typing on a computer. I’m slower; I’m more focused. I make a ton of typos, which I never do normally. My drafts look like they were written by a dog. There’s no backspace button so sometimes I just mash over a word with a different word and then it’s unreadable. Sometimes the carriage skips an extra space for some reason. Who cares about any of it! What am I gonna do, submit my typewritten draft to a literary magazine in the mail??? And once you’ve written something, you can’t undo it. There’s no hesitation, no turning back. For me, like I said, this is so freeing, so playful. Writing often feels like work even when we want to be doing it, and using the typewriter has so far only felt like recreation.
The typewriter’s physicality has also had some impact on the mental act of writing that I didn’t anticipate. For example, because I can’t backspace, the writing process – which is also, in a way, indistinguishable from the thinking process – becomes more openly iterative. Drafting my aforementioned sci-fi flash fiction piece looked like this:
On a computer, I would have just backspaced the whole line and started over. So the typewriter lets me think out loud in a very obvious way.
And of course, I can’t go on the Internet.
That said, there are downsides. The typewriter is “portable” and comes in a suitcase, but it weighs like twenty-five pounds. I’m not taking it to the coffee shop. If I have an idea for a story or want to revise something when I’m away from home (or at all), too bad; it’s not like it syncs to the cloud. It’s expensive. And once I’m done the fun part of spilling words all over the place and going bang-bang-bang on those artillery keys, then the final product, if it’s a piece I’m serious about, still has to be retyped on a computer. (Personally I think this is actually another positive element of the typewriter, since it requires me to edit and think about the piece as I go, but your mileage may vary.)
But for me, I think it’s worth it. No matter what I write on it, it’s a hell of a lot of fun.
Have you ever used a typewriter? Do you think you would like it? Reply to this email or let me know in the comments!
Yes, I’m old enough to have used a typewriter. But I mostly remember frustration. No nostalgia.
Perhaps one loss with the widespread adoption of electronic devices for all forms of composition is the paper trail that earlier technologies left behind. And while that’s probably of interest chiefly to scholars and collectors (and requires a packrat author), those intermediate drafts can be fun to look at and speculate about.
For example, Bob Dylan, who apparently was a packrat, sometimes wrote by hand, sometimes with a typewriter. Look at the marginalia and doodles in this early draft of one of his songs:
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/06/24/325219536/draft-of-bob-dylans-like-a-rolling-stone-sells-for-2-million
And even though this is in pencil, he didn’t attempt to erase anything, just crossed things out like you would with ink. There must be something comforting, almost tactile, about those cross-outs, a visual sign that progress is being made. And the choice of paper, here simply hotel stationary.
When he used the typewriter, the same thing is evident: just X out and retype above or below:
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/exclusive-a-look-inside-bob-dylans-secret-archives-199434/
And while edits can be preserved in a word processor document (via track changes), and even doodles can be embedded on devices like the iPad, I don’t get the sense that writers use those in the same way.
So maybe with word processors it’s two or three steps forward, while one step back, as we’ve lost the physical connection to the page, although for a lot of writing there is no page, just the screen.