In Praise of the Typewriter

A few months ago I bought a manual typewriter.  I remember my mother's enormous and frankly horrific electric Adler office machine way back, which shook the dining room with its carriage return - and a small blue manual in a grey hard case with gingham lining that I used to write spy codes on when I was very small... my sister had a Red Fox, a plastic-bodied model from W H Smith.  There was nothing majestic or mysterious about typewriters twenty or thirty years ago - there was nothing escapist about them, nothing obscure, nothing recherché, nothing deliberately aimed at removing oneself from the current trends in the technology of writing.  They were the current trend, though computers were beginning to appear on the home market and even the humble Sinclair ZX Spectrum pretended to the dizzy heights of professionalism:

Well, we got rid of those machines and I moved on to those all-in-one word-processor/printer units that looked like them, and then on to Windows and Word.  Progress?  Perhaps.

After a few upgrades, downgrades and side-grades (more on which in a later post), and copious amounts of hand-written drafts, I fancied a change.  Internet to the rescue - I snagged an Olivetti Lettera 35 for less than a tenner in excellent condition, loaded with a ribbon, and with its hard carry-case.  One trip to Halifax later, and here we are:

It's a nice machine.  I have very little to compare except memory, but it's easy to type on, makes all the right noises, and it's very satisfying indeed to pull a full sheet from the roller and lay it to one side, done.

To write this way is an interesting exercise in self-control.  Computers encourage an endlessly-rewritable text, one in a constant state of flux, one that is never even drafted so much as evolved in the same place constantly - every piece of work written on the computer is a palimpsest, but one with no inherent superiority over its predecessors.  There is no evolutionary evidence when working on a computer - no pile of erroneous cast-offs with which one can judge progress.  No map, only a present location.

Typing is different.  Typing is ever forwards.  There are no erase, undo, copy and paste - no corrective (let alone auto-corrective) behaviour without serious effort (Tipp-ex, anyone?).  To type is to engage fully with the act of writing - to type is to make writing.  To type is to see where you have been, from start to finish, and to know that whatever you write, it remains embedded in the archaeological srata of the work of its time.  To read a typed draft is to trace a journey, not just gaze at a space that may or may not be the desired one.

In this, typing shares something with handwriting.  Drafting in pencil or ink is to really forge something that is a kind of embodiment of the person writing it.  I have written about this before so will avoid repetition here - but the nature of physical contact with material and the ease of making adjustments, marginalia, and annotations gives writing greater freedom than when merely blackening pixels on a screen.

Even today, some well-known authors use typewriters.  To do so makes one not wilfully perverse, nor a neo-Luddite, nor a throwback.  To type need not be some faddish retro chic, some quirk of style that has no root cause beyond the desire to appear one way or another.  To type, for the best reasons, is to be, simply, a writer - and, simply, to write.

***

Recently the last British typewriter rolled out of the Brother factory - apparently they were selling around 30 per week by the end of 2012.  Still a respectable number, I think, given the way computers - desktops, laptops, tablets, smartphones - have swamped our lives and become absolutely normative in so many respects.

BBC News item
BBC News video item
BBC Radio interview with the writer Paul Bailey

And you can still get ribbons...

On the Writing Process

Ideas are easy to come by.  Any writer worth the name will have more ideas than they can ever hope to reasonably include in their work without shoe-horning them in at awkward angles, making the work ugly and difficult to pick up.  Writing short-form fiction is a very good way to hone a minimum or optimum quantity of ideas into a single, coherent and hopefully beautifiul object, which , regardless of the nature of those ideas, suggests something greater than itself without needing specific reference to it.

Throughout, it seems to me, the key elements of the process are a kind of naive intuition, and hard-nosed technical focus.  Perhaps a combination of the two seems odd to those who do not write, but I suspect those involved in other creative disciplines would recognise it.

Naivety and intuition are essential I think in generating material of interest.  Writing without passion, oddity or surprise is only going to leave readers cold; but no amount of passion can make a successful piece if it is badly shaped.  Technical strength is necessary, and that requires balancing the objective and subjective sides of one's reading of one's own work - an arm's length kind of proximity to both the guts and the mind of the piece.  Reading one's own work with the mindset of a reader, rather than a writer, is not easy, and takes patience and practice.  Often the first steps feel clumsy, as when one learns a new musical instrument - but over time those awkward gestures become second nature, and can be enjoyed rather than struggled against.

Having taught Creative Writing classes for several years, I have tried a number of ways of helping beginners begin and more advanced, practised writers to finish: in-class exercises like writing from a picture, stream-of-consciousness blasts, idea-pooling, field trips and freedom, all accompanied by analysis of published, sometimes well-known, text - and, of course, feedback between peers and myself as a group leader.

My own initial ideas and abandoned drafts are plenty.  Often I return to them years after they were started and make something new of them.  Often it takes me a year or two to really finish a piece of short fiction - I hesitate to use the word 'story' as the word almost predetermines expectations - but the purpose of writing is not to be quick.  It is to be right, to make something that, however long it takes and whatever form it takes, is the right thing in and for itself.

That sense of rightness uses some of the initial intuition I talk of above - and only comes from the relentless application of a technical understanding of the machinery of words and ideas.

Achieving these is the result of a good many years of reading creatively as well as writing; it is the result of letting your work out into the world when you fear it is unready, and being prepared for both the best and the worst news of its progress.  Feedback from trusted peers is essential - that is, those who you would want to sit with and discuss what it is you do.  They need not be writers, but should be readers.  Perhaps they should be your audience.

There is no magic in writing - just bravery, playfulness, a willingness to dive from things into places you would rather not, and a duty to the results that preculdes giving up or being satisfied for very long, if at all.

Writing is hard work.  I would not recommend it to those considering it as either a hobby or a career.

Still interested?

Then write.


(There are too many links of interest to add here, but for those in the early days or mid-life doldrums might like to look at The BBC's Writersroom, National Novel Writing Month, and Writers & Artists for advice, support, inspiration and other handy nuggets)