Omit Needless Words

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February 22, 2004

The million and first monkey

I’m all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let’s start with typewriters.
— Solomon Short

This weekend, I’ve been writing on my old portable Underwood. Although the fingers may wear out rather quickly after so many years used to the soft touch of a laptop keyboard, and one has to revert to missile typing to stop the hammers from jamming, there’s nothing better than a bit of old-school typewriter work to slow you down and get real words out, not manic cut + paste digital ephemera.

I’d forgotten that feeling of knowing that every word you put on the paper was a commitment; that you needed to know its spelling and its meaning before you flagrantly created it from letters. On the typewriter, I find myself actually stopping to ask myself whether a word is perfect, before even beginning to type it. And to know that, you have to know the sentence ahead. It is writing as discipline, and it’s tough for the techno-fried fractured thought processes of kids like me. But I love it. Writing without fingertip access to the net and instantaneous red squiggly underlines forces one to rely on what’s inside, rather than what’s given to you.

And besides, I love that cliched feeling of sitting at the Underwood, scotch (on the rocks) at my side, with that bashing noise as the carriage shuffles along, the bell ring at the end of every line, the smell of the 1930s finish. It’s the romantic dream of being a writer, much more alluring than the glow of an LCD screen. Each and every one of us wannabe Kerouacs knows the secret that the great novel will never be written in Microsoft Word. I’ve recently taken to using a text editor that turns the entire screen black with the text glowing a soft yellow in the middle, no toolbars, no icons, no menus, nothing, not even bold and italic, just yellow writing on a black screen — it’s the most comfortable I’ve felt writing on a computer screen in years, maybe ever — for the first time the words have been more important than the eye candy.

I wonder if Roboceptionist would prefer to work on an Underwood? Apparently, almost 500,000 typewriters were sold in America last year — I wonder if they were all to overly romantic writers looking for new leases as luddites?

Posted by patrick at February 22, 2004 08:12 AM

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