typing about typing
Last week, I stayed at a beautiful Airbnb with a few friends (and a dog) in the Catskills. From the living and dining rooms, you could stare out big windows and watch the clouds moving over the hills; watch the day turn into night. It was a truly relaxing time away, which can be hard to capture sometimes. I credit our complete lack of plans for the sense of calm we felt there. All we did was eat, drink, lay around, and play games.
The house had many decorative objects—it was a renovated barn, and the owners were clearly trying to create a “luxury” kind of vibe—but one object in particular invited more interaction. On a small table in the hall there was an orange typewriter, supplied with paper.
Despite my love of writing instruments, I had never actually used a working typewriter before. So of course I gave it a try.
I was struck immediately by the manual nature of the task. You can’t really do anything else while you’re typing on a typewriter. All of your hands’ functionality is involved. You have to strike the keys quite hard, with intention, to create a readable letter. At the end of a line, the carriage has to be moved to the beginning of the next line. To create a line break, you have to rotate another mechanism (I don’t know the name of this one) to move further down the page. The creation of a text on a typewriter requires the combination of many different movements before you even consider what the words are.
I don’t imagine sitting down at a typewriter would have been a task done thoughtlessly. It is time-consuming and physical. My fingers had to act in a wider range of motion than typing on my MacBook requires. It would take a lot of practice before this machine could be used quickly.
I have questions. Was a typewriter considered more of a transcription tool, not a composition tool? This seems like a critical difference in how people use typing tools today. Even though I only used the typewriter for a short time, it seems like it would be very difficult to compose words and use the machine simultaneously. The typewriter’s function would be to copy down what has already been written, not to create writing.
The computers we have now gloss over all the movements of typing, and touchscreen phones further erode the physical relationship between your hands and your words. This gives the illusion of being able to type forever, ceaselessly, and that typing is a simple, seamless gesture.
Maybe this illusion also creates some sense that because typing is easy, writing could be easy too. This reminds me of a sort of fantasy I’ve had for much of my life: being able to open a word processing document and just write, endlessly, without stopping, and say everything I want to say. I wonder if typing as a method—a movement—created this fantasy, and alters how people conceptualize their writing. Perhaps it explains the popularity of something like NaNoWriMo. Maybe typing should be harder. At the least, I think you must break the illusion somehow.
For me, typing induces a mental state for stream-of-consciousness free writing that gets me into a good headspace for writing in general. This is especially true if I’m trying to write something in a longer form, like a novel. It allows me to not think as much when I’m getting first thoughts down (otherwise, my critical inner voice will intervene). While I do hand write some portions while drafting, the main documents of my first drafts are digital documents. Because typing is so essential to my process, I have gone to great lengths to remove the less comfortable parts of it, namely, the computer’s backlit screen. First, I used an AlphaSmart Neo 2. Then, I bought this strange (expensive!) device called a FreeWrite. It’s worth noting that other writers who buy the AlphaSmart or the FreeWrite cite distraction as the primary reason for purchasing the tool. The actual method by which writing is done—typing—seems to be completely taken for granted.
But the method you use to do something affects what you make. The separation between my words and my hands changes what I write. I found this out over the last six months while revising a novel. I could not capture the rhythm, or properly rewrite, without copying down the words by hand. While hand-writing, I discovered many embarrassing cliches and non sequiturs in my prose that I simply hadn’t noticed in the previous five versions, which were mostly digital. My eyes can pass over typed text on a screen in a way that my hands cannot.
So I wonder if computers and easy typing has necessitated a flip in how we use our tools? In a self-conscious, distracted, mediated age, typing allows a writer to feel-not-think while drafting. Importantly, the focus is on getting something done. But, for the writing to evolve into what it could be, the best version of itself, I need to at some stage transcribe it by hand. I have to feel present inside the words to get the rhythm and sound that I want. Now, the transcription stage is a handwriting stage, not a typing stage.
Maybe it’s also interesting to note that these Escape Velocity entries (with the exception of the ones that aren’t text-based) begin as handwritten drafts. Then I type them, usually making significant changes during the transcription. Paragraphs are almost never in the right order in my handwritten versions. Starting with a typed first draft doesn’t make this any less true—at some point, you must rewrite.
I’m not really trying to say that typing is inferior. I’m sure there are some forms of writing that are better suited to a typed composition. The possibilities can expand if you consider what you’re trying to say, and experiment with various ways of saying it.
One final, interesting moment I’ll keep in my mind for a long time: my friend, sitting at the orange Vendex 500T, copying tweets from his phone onto the paper. Tweets—being rewritten in this noisy, mechanical, manual way.