For my birthday a while back, my wise and thoughtful wife, Momo, gifted me a classic 1970 Underwood 310 manual typewriter. It is a wonderful present I would never have purchased, although I have yearned for one for a while now.
For some time, possibly five years or so, I have been whining and casually threatening to go “old school” with my writing and get away from this demon laptop. It’s too easy to keep on tapping and spit out a page or two of gibberish that has more words than needed and makes no sense. It’s not about speed and what your program does; it’s about the content. A typewriter makes you think before striking that key. The delete button does not exist.
Hemingway would tap for hours on end, and then if he wasn’t pleased with his effort, it went into the waste basket. Using a typewriter to transpose your thoughts to paper is a commitment, and not an easy one.
There was a typewriter in our household when I was a child. It was a large black beast of an Underwood, all pure American heavy metal, requiring a grown man and a hefty child to lift it. I would peck on it for hours and eventually come up with something legible. I never once saw my parents use it, so its presence in our home was a mystery. I heard from my older cousin, Cookie, that it was my grandmother’s when she lived in California, and she spent all of her waking hours tapping away letters and movie script ideas. It caused a good bit of drama and injury within the family, so it was banished to our household for safekeeping. My father wasn’t pleased when he would find me chicken pecking away.
My love of the machine started at an early age, and came into full blossom as a teenager in the 1960s, when I started to write stories. I took typing in high school to sharpen my skills and learn the keyboard. I studied two years of journalism, and learned to love the written word. My teacher was my mentor. She pushed me to excel. It all paid off well. When computers came about in the late 90s, I was a good typist and had no problem adapting.
I will keep you posted on how this “old school” project turns out. I typed a page on my Underwood, and my fingers are throbbing.
Notes From The Cactus Patch 