Hello.
Today I’m going to be talking about typewriters and electric typewriters.
But first, I had a realisation after putting up the Notes on Notebooks post. This was thanks to some comments and feedback that I got from people. I’d say it was a bit livelier over on Facebook than in the comments on Substack.
But it made me realise that I need to rewrite the notebooks section and divide the kinds of notebooks into pocketbooks, scrapbooks and workbooks.
That’s what I’ve got so far. I will bring that to you soon.
Thanks for your help.
Typewriters.
The great advantage with typewriters can be the sense they give of being a real writer, getting the real physical labour of writing done. For some, a pencil just isn’t challenging enough.
Typewriters bring with them a lovely sense of bravery and decisiveness. They can make you feel you’re stamping your authority on the page, pressing home your point, making a firm impression on the reader.
(This, of course, can be a bit macho.)
At the same time, typewriters give you the sensation of fully committing to this version of the sentence, whilst also knowing that you will need to rewrite it — probably by hand — in future.
A mechanical typewriter enforces, in this way, an extra draft, during which you transfer your typewritten and probably hand-corrected pages onto some form of computer. You can retype them, but equally you might dictate them to some form of dictation software.
I’ll talk about dictation software in a couple of days.
Typing and then correcting by hand in pencil or pen, as, say, J.G. Ballard does, is a reversal of the usual flip that I would recommend — that is, taking the more intimate, personal handwritten draft and making it public by putting it onto the page in an impersonal letter font.
I’ll also speak about this later — about that particular stage in drafting, that useful transition between one page-look and another.
To anticipate a bit, though, a similar step-change can sometimes be created by putting your text in either a drafty kind of font, such as Courier, or a bookish one, like Times Roman or Didot.
One last advantage of mechanical typewriters is that there’s no boot-up. There’s no delay at the start of the day if you’ve left the paper in and you just resume where the sentence continues.
Some models of typewriter are fetishised and lusted over by beginning writers. You could call this a form of Tom Hanks Syndrome. There’s Ernest Hemingway’s Remington Portable or Joan Didion’s Olivetti Lettera 22 — Oli-vetti Le-ttera 22, probably said that wrong.
If you’re too in love with an antiquated image of the writer, I would say you’re likely to produce outdated writing. If you’re vain about your means of production, a trace of that vanity will come across into your prose. There have been many performative Hemingways and Didions — and some have even been published.
I tried going back to a typewriter a couple of years ago for a specific novel. I only managed four or five pages before I gave up.
What I realised was I didn’t like to advertise so loudly that I was writing. Even if people around me in the house know what I’m up to, I prefer that they can ignore it.
A typewriter in a front bedroom can probably be heard out on the street when the traffic isn’t too loud. This may be exciting for passers-by. You may want them to know this is where a real writer lives.
I certainly don’t.
Is it worth saying anything about electric typewriters? Do you use one, or are you likely to? I don’t know.
Some of these, though, were vast, chuntering beasts which seemed, if possible, to make striking the letter against the page even more dramatic and macho than a mechanical typewriter.
I remember seeing a glorious interview with Bruce Robinson — who wrote Withnail & I and many other things — sitting with a glass of plonk alongside his half-ton word-monster. He couldn’t work without it, he said. Each letter was like hammering a nail into a billy can.
When they first came in, electric typewriters often brought a very slight delay between hitting the key and the message getting through to hit the page. Some writers loved this tiny slackness. Others wanted the almost immediate transmission of an Olivetti.
Thought/Letter.
Like a pianist, a typist has control over their keystrokes — the letter’s darkness and crispness. This might actually be part of the draft. (It’s information sent from you to a future-you.)
Other, later electric typewriters had a small screen on which a line of text could be stored, amended, amended again, before the special key was hit and sent it all to be typed out in one five-second clack of machine-gun fire.
Would be lovely, wouldn’t it?
Good luck in maintaining and buying replacement ribbon cartridges for such a weapon of the 1980s — though I’m sure there are specialists.
If you know of one, or you use a mechanical typewriter or an electric typewriter, please let me know in the comments.
Like, share and subscribe, and I hope to see you soon.
