My interest in writing really began with an interest in the typewriter. My mother is an expert typist (I think she can do about eighty words a minute), and there was always a typewriter in our house. There were a few college students who would drop by now and then offering a little money to have their papers typed up, and for the next few days it would be "tick tick tick" all through the house, along with that hum and even that smell that the typewriter had. The rest of the time the typewriter sat in its case on a high shelf in the closet. It wasn’t long before my curiosity made me climb a chair and drag it down to see what I could do with it.
I love the look of a nice, cleanly typed page; so I began to write out of necessity. If I were to fill pages of my own with nicely typed paragraphs, then I would have to find something to say. It was a simple motivation really, and its still basically the same one that drives me today, even right now as write this. Maybe it’s not profound. Maybe it’s a little strange; although I guarantee that I’m not the first writer who’s felt this way. All artists, on some basic level, must be drawn to their field just from a simple love for the medium. The painter is seduced by the canvas; the piano-player is seduced by the piano; I was seduced by a typewriter. It’s as simple as that. When I hear how writers like John Steinbeck wrote with a pencil, or when I read classics like Dickens or Tolstoy and think about how they scribbled everything with a quill in elaborate cursive, it's just not the same When I open a book, I like to think of the writer punching out the text on their typewriter. The typewritten word carries a certain weight with me; it has a certain beauty that the hand written word doesn’t. My rough drafts aren’t usually even in pencil. I head straight for the keyboard.
Unlike my mother I have never developed into an expert typist. (But then my mother has never developed into a writer either.) I took a typing class in my junior year of high school, learning the hand positions and the keyboard layout and all that. But I never really caught on. It was easier to just keep hunting and pecking. For one thing I make less mistakes that way. In the typing class it always seemed like my hands were in the way of the keys. In a way I have all the keys memorized, but it’s a memory that resides solely in my fingers. If I had to sit down and list the letters in order as they appear on the keyboard I’d be lost, but when I’m pecking along my finger always seems to automatically find the right key. I can type up to thirty or forty words a minute with my inefficient methods. Considering that I write my first draft at the keyboard and that I’m just making the words up as I go along, that’s really as fast as I need to go. My brain can’t come up with the words any faster than that. I have to pause every few sentences just to think anyway. What good would eighty or ninety words a minute do me?
Of course, I use a word processing program now. Although I realize that it’s easier to use and has all kinds of advantages over the typewriter, I still can’t quite bring myself to accept it as a substitute. I’m not one of these conservative types suspicious of new technologies (At least I try not to be), but I can’t help feeling that the typewriter has a certain charm to it that a word processor can’t replace. I don’t even like that name “word processor”. It doesn’t make any sense. It sounds like a machine designed to grind the English language into a revolting grey paste. I guess I just don’t understand where processing is involved. On the other hand, the typewriter has a name perfectly suited to it, in both meaning and effect.
To me the typewriter is a relic from a time when machines weren’t made by other machines but by people and with a certain craftsmanship. Look at old sewing machines and automobiles. They look as though they’ve been formed by human hands with all their curves and contours molded with a perfect instinct. They look sturdy and solid. Their artistry was built into their very foundations. The people who made these things, they hardly gave it a thought. They had something they had never lost, and so had never noticed. They set out to make good machines, not good looking machines, and that was precisely why they looked good. They hit the ball without even trying. They just happened to be swinging in that direction. Today people try desperately to give things an attractive design and the result is just a bunch of cheap plastic junk, aerodynamic stereos that sit on your living room shelf cutting down wind resistance, and kitchen utensils that look like children’s toys.
As much of a pain as it is to set your tabs and your margins, roll in your paper, change your ink ribbon, white-out your mistakes, make sure you don’t type all the way off the bottom of the page, check your own spelling, run out of ink in the middle of typing something, and finish a whole page just to read back over it and see one teeny tiny mistake and realize that now you’re going to have to type the whole damn thing over again, I’d go back to the typewriter in a minute. Or...maybe not.
