The Typewriter — The Perfect Tool to Tackle Your Frist Draft
As the analog aficionado, I have become over the past years, I seek comfort if the focussed work with intentional limitation. This limitation — let’s call this overtly meaningful a quest — led me amongst other things eventually to the only tool that has one singular purpose when it was invented, designed, built and perfected: The Typewriter.
Only a few things that resurfaced along with the analog movement today brought me such productive moments as a 1953 manufactured Smith-Corona Sterling, although many other machines followed in my collection. A Skywriter, the famous Olympia SM3 as well as Olympia Splendid, and boy, she is splendid. The valuable principle of inherent undistracatibitly (somewhat) stayed and granted me a hundred pf pages that otherwise would have been not written and their content lost between Youtube and Amazon shopping-sprees.
The typewriter is not the holy grail of writing.
Okay, I must admit that. But it helps a lot — but only for one reason. At least until you emotionally dedicated your laptop of PC, Macbook or iMac, as a writing device and nothing else. And for me, this point is still figuratively lightyears away.
So why is that? Especially since the typewriter does not offer any advantages as a writing software or any word processor might do. No deleting on such an old machine, no autocorrect or highlighting the spelling mistakes, no fancy text formatting options — instant revision of whole paragraphs or the undo of such.
Because the first draft is a tale of ignorance and denial. (I already wrote about that in length.)
And that is the imperative of the whole process. At least for me, when I was starting out and got too easy distracted by … well, literary everything. To easy got lost in research, the shopping list or Youtube marathons of the Critical Role-Streams.
I let my talent for procrastination work for me. With the uneasy accessibility of distracting things, it is easier for me to stay put at my desk that has nothing on it, but that typewriter and is even in another room than my iMac. And when I am sitting there and have nothing else to do well, then why not write?
Most times, it does work perfectly. Only the choice to go there and not actively to avoid the „writing room“ — to be honest — is a different struggle.
So what about the undeniable advantages of modern word processing — and this sentence makes me feel so old as I have seen all iterations of that in my lifetime. Well back to denial and ignorance.
What’s on the page will stay after that it is imprinted with ink on the piece of paper. (If you have a typewriter that has past already sixty years of its existence, there is a good chance that the roller platten — you know, the rubber role in the center that is transporting the paper — like my Olympic SM3, it has gotten so hard that it is not really dampening the thingy with the letter on it, so them and any inter-punctuation is getting literarily imprinted — and sometime through — the page.)
The words of a typewriter are meant to be rewritten
So it stays there until you either re-write the whole page — and trust me, that is not a desirable option — or you re-write it in the second draft.
And there is the other valuable plus of the first draft on a typewriter.
So when I talk to people about my writing and the subject comes up — the on of writing on a typewriter — the usual follow up question is: What do you do when you are finished? Do you scan it and use some OCR (short for Optical Character Recognition) software and turn it into a Word document?
Well, that is an excellent question. I do actually scan it. But that is merely for backup reasons. So far, when reaching the end of the first draft, all of it does not exist outside of the tangible reality of the typed paper stack next to the typewriter. If that would be gone, destroyed, or shredded to pieces by any of the cats, well, it’s gone. So yeah, as usual, backup is essential.
But other than that, no. No OCR software. The whole first draft is getting re-typed with a word processor, going through that piece all over again. I can always see it in the eyes of that one that raised the question about scanning. Some of it is disbelief and immediate discouragement of the idea of using a typewriter. Why the heck would someone write a 400-page piece again if you have already done it?
Your first draft will be sh**, get used to it, no one will ever see it
First ugly truth for non-writers: There is never only one draft. And that is for a good reason. Writing down again, every single word disconnects you from your previous efforts in a healthy way.
You don’t have in mind what efforts it already took you to write your first draft. And you have not the feeling of doing unnecessary work since you already did the hard work of writing. Naturally, you want to protect your first draft. It’s your little mind-child, it is beautiful the way you brought it to the world, you love it as it is. So why starting to correct it, why changing words or worse, cutting out whole paragraphs. Well, sorry to be blunt, but your mind-child is ugly as hell, and no, that is not okay. All that is there is comparatively shit to what could be there after a second draft … and maybe a third or a fourth. Not perhaps, but most probably. Second ugly truth for nonwriters.
The “what if”-thought is not a story idea
So every time I move to a second draft, I have the same feeling for it an have to relearn that it is not that much effort at all — compared to the first draft and everything before that. And the joy of already seeing all that has already been written getting polished and trimmed to a delightful story — that is the real joy of writing — believe me. And by the way, no, coming up with a story idea is far from enjoyable. Third ugly truth for non-writers: Coming up with a story idea is some horrible and painful limbo. And no, a story idea is not merely having a „what if“ in your mind. That is a fragment that can be developed into a real thing if you are lucky.
So don’t deny yourself the pure joy of writing and get yourself a typewriter. Type away without the fear that what is written, there will be the final product and does have to be perfect. That pressure is what writer’s block means. Get a typewriter and fire away. No one will care. You can even do the liberating act of burning it all afterward, as the famous late Discworld-Author Terry Prattchet did — along with all other notes. (Although he did it for mere ghastly reasons).
And yes, pen and paper do the trick as well, as long you have readable handwriting. Mine is pretty borderline on that. And to be honest, it is not remotely as cool as sitting in front of a typewriter.
