the typewriter
I remember those first few weeks using WorkStar as if it were a new love affair. That winter I lived in a tiny fishing boat, writing term papers on dad's nineteen-forties Royal. Stiff fingers blunting through page after page under yellow forty watt light globe, winter gales singing in the rigging overhead.
Then one day I stumbled on a brightly lit room in the basement of the physics building filled with early eighties IBM personal computers. Show your student card and sign for a copy of WordStar on five and a half floppy, some even had spell check.
Never sat down to a typewriter keyboard again.
In the junk business, we stumble across typewriters from time to time. Good working machine is an easy sell in the flea markets. Been a while since we had one ourselves, but last week our neighbor at FSM, Jerry V had a clean looking portable for sale. Probably dated to the sixties.
In the junk business, we stumble across typewriters from time to time. Good working machine is an easy sell in the flea markets. Been a while since we had one ourselves, but last week our neighbor at FSM, Jerry V had a clean looking portable for sale. Probably dated to the sixties.
Guy looking at the machine says he's a writer. Working on a screenplay, and it "will be produced." From Iceland no less. Maybe Jerry will come down on the price because celeberity. Two degrees of separation between him and the next great film to come out of Rakivick.
I didn't follow all the conversation, but the writer did say something that has given me lots of thought. I've tried to write on a computer but you just keep going back and back.
Going back and back had felt like liberation in the winter of eighty-four, now I am wondering if constant micro editing isn't causing my work not to read as well as I would like.
To avoid the distractions of spell check and Grammarly, I do all early drafts in NotePad, but still go back and back, every sentence tapped out dozens of times. That worked for eBay ads, which by word count accounts for the vast majority of my writing experience. Trying to break the habit is not proving very successful, but it is fun to have a new project. Going to try blunting my way through a few pages without continual editing. Haven't figured out how to break the habit is the first assignment.
Irony is that one of the papers I was writing in eighty-four had to do with teaching writing to elementary age kids. First rule is to write through your idea before you go back to edit. Write first, edit later. Then I spend thirty-seven years writing nearly every day ignoring the rule.
I didn't follow all the conversation, but the writer did say something that has given me lots of thought. I've tried to write on a computer but you just keep going back and back.
Going back and back had felt like liberation in the winter of eighty-four, now I am wondering if constant micro editing isn't causing my work not to read as well as I would like.
To avoid the distractions of spell check and Grammarly, I do all early drafts in NotePad, but still go back and back, every sentence tapped out dozens of times. That worked for eBay ads, which by word count accounts for the vast majority of my writing experience. Trying to break the habit is not proving very successful, but it is fun to have a new project. Going to try blunting my way through a few pages without continual editing. Haven't figured out how to break the habit is the first assignment.
Irony is that one of the papers I was writing in eighty-four had to do with teaching writing to elementary age kids. First rule is to write through your idea before you go back to edit. Write first, edit later. Then I spend thirty-seven years writing nearly every day ignoring the rule.
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