I’ve always considered writing to be one of my better skills. There are, after all, folks out there who pay me to do it. However, I have recently discovered that I’m a less-than-great typist. I never realized how reliant I have been on the backspace, on the delete key, on that annoying-but-sometimes-useful squiggly red line that shows up when I screw up a word.
Frankly, I’m about one pointy-bra away from Mr. Draper booting my ass to the curb.
On a whim, I bought a Smith Corona typewriter from Goodwill. I plugged it in and it worked so I gave it some space on my desk and began writing on it with some regularity.
Before this, in my 25 excruciatingly long years of existence, I’ve never before used a typewriter. In school, I learned to type on an Apple II. Green screens, thick keyboard, and I saved my work on a floppy. At school, I typed on Macintosh. At home, it was PC. Learning to type was still a part of my curriculum, it was just on computers, not typewriters.
It makes a racket. I love the way the words go down with the rat-at-tat-tat of machine-gun fire. After a while the ink on the page starts to bleed a little as my fingers fling sweat onto the page. On a computer, people might be able to deny what kind of work you’re getting done because your keyboard is so quiet. Not so with a typewriter.
RATATAT-TAT-at-TAT! It’s hard to deny when something is being produced with a typewriter. Push a key, get a character – keep doing it until something worthwhile surfaces.
RAT-At-ATTATA – all morning, all afternoon, in the big empty home office I’ve made for myself! RATATAT!
Then, there is a cease fire – I’ve made an error. Looking down through the little window at the line I just typed, noticing that “just” reads as “jst.” I scan up the page and see that every third word or so has some form of error.
I love writing. I love the process from concept to development to finished product. But only if there were a way to do it without typing! Just look at this page of typos! It’s as if the page stares back up at me, condescending, and asks “You don’t actually know what you’re doing? Do you?” or “You went to college for this?
Sure, I could backspace, throw another character over it. I could have sprung for the model with the corrective tape. Or maybe I should have just let this slip into obsolescence with the rest of the technology that only exists today in order to ironic.
Rat-at-tat-tat!
Still, I can’t deny the simplicity of this tool. Because, at it’s core, that’s the only thing it is – a tool. Unlike a computer, it wont run a million distractions in the background. It wont let me know when I have a new email, or when someone replies to something twitter-related.
It also won’t do any work for me. It wont auto adjust photos or suggest I write a sentence a certain way to make nouns and verbs agree. It will sit there, quiet, until I push a button. Words don’t produce until I push a button.
Ratatata!
