Typewriter Love

I started writing when I was still in elementary school, on a manual typewriter that weighed more than I did and had been bought for me by my mother at a garage sale.  I think she paid five dollars for it.  I know she regretted her purchase after I finished teaching myself to type and started writing stories at three o’clock in the morning.  Maybe that doesn’t sound like a big deal in our modern world of nearly silent keyboards and computers, but a manual typewriter is LOUD.  Especially when it’s being used by a seven-year-old whose mode of typing is better described as “hunt and peck assault at ninety words a minute.”  It was like gunfire in my bedroom every night, and it’s probably a miracle that my mother didn’t smash either me or my typewriter with a hammer.

(I still hunt and peck, just like I did back then.  Only now I hunt and peck at a hundred and twenty words a minute, once I really get going.  This is because practice makes perfect, and I practice a LOT.)

Starting on a typewriter meant that when I made changes, I had to re-type the entire page.  Since I’m a compulsive reviser, I got into the habit of typing everything out three or four times before it could be called “finished.”  It was time-consuming and probably killed a lot of trees, but it was also very useful, because it taught me about discipline.  If I was going to write, I needed to approach it seriously and with the understanding that even a sentence could be an hour-long commitment.  I wrote light, silly, frivolous things, just like any kid, but I did it understanding that I was going to do a lot of work before I was finished.

These days, I write on a laptop computer more powerful than anything NASA owned the year I got my first typewriter (and no, I’m not that old; I grew up in the 1980s).  My keystrokes are still a little harder than they need to be, which I find comforting, even as I wear out a lot of keyboards; somewhere in my head, there is the quiet knowledge that typing should always sound like fighting a battle against the whiteness of the page.  Totally silent keyboards creep me out a little bit.  And I’m still deeply disciplined about it.  I re-type sentences and paragraphs and pages and chapters until they begin falling together the way that I want them to.  I write out timelines and scribble connection charts on sheets of notebook paper, making notes that mean absolutely no one to anyone who isn’t me.  And it all falls together.

I think I was always going to be a research nerd and a rewriter, but the typewriter solidified it.  The typewriter made me become the kind of writer I am today.  I wish I still had it.  I would give it a place of honor on a desk of its own.

And maybe a hug.

Seanan

http://www.seananmcguire.com/