This weekend I'll be purchasing a typewriter. I've been wanting one again for years, actually, not much longer than I sold my old one to the English Department for use by the teaching assistants. Computers were the Big New Thing with the internet exploding all over the place and I just lost my head, I think. Plus I was trying to be helpful to the other T.A. who didn't want to use the ancient machine we'd been given. And I needed the money.
No more! I want a typewriter! I have a dream, and it's a good dream, of sitting at my kitchen table in the morning, a cup of coffee at hand, two stacks of paper to the side, one stack blank, the other my continuing rough draft, and my typewriter humming along with the birdsong until my clack clack clackety clack drives all the birds away from the back porch. No internet. No word program crashing half way through writing up my script synopsis (grrrrr), no sitting where I'm the first thing everybody in the house sees, where the TV can grab for my eyeballs and the clutter in the living room stabs at my sense of cleanliness.
Just me, my coffee (which I now have the ability to make!), my stacks of papers and my typewriter. And maybe a plate of madeleines. And my dictionary. And music on the cd player.
Ooo, I'm so looking forward to this weekend!
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5 comments:
How very awesome! I miss my typewriter too.
I wonder if my mom still has it.
Hmmm.
It's certainly feels different writing that way, just like handwriting is vastly different.
I don't miss retyping pages and white out, though. Heh. On ours we used an erase sheet, which was a little better, but still--on a rough draft, though, who cares if there are typos!
Kitchen table writing. How very kewl.
They are vastly different, aren't they? I still remember sheets of my very first novel attempt, way back in junior high. Full of white out and hand written in words and phrases and sentences.
I did get up this morning and sit at the kitchen table with a notebook and tea and madeleines. It felt great. Outlined a section of my script that way. But I can't wait to have a typewriter.
Mom said I could bring it along on our camping trip! We'll have electricity in the camper. Hee. I can sit at the little dining table there and tap tap tap away!
Ooo, writing while camping sounds like excellent fun!
I'd forgotten about the handwritten rewrites on the pages. Those feel and work so much differently than editing on the page, too. I remember adding whole sections by hand on the backs of the pages that sometimes went for several pages.
Hmm. Inspired to print out Masks now ...
Wait, are you talking about an electric typewriter? I thought you were talking about a real old fashioned typewriter, the no-electric kind.
I'd love to have a real old fashioned kind, but it would be more of a shrine than a tool for me. I love those old machines!
But now I am the proud new owner of a Brother GX 6750! And I love it! And I'm really very rusty at using a typewriter. You'd think for someone who types all the time, it wouldn't matter, but it is very different using a typewriter than a computer. No automatic return, no cut and paste, no global search and replace. And I couldn't be happier! I'm much more mindful of the words I'm putting on paper when they are more or less committed once they are typed. Sure, I can go back a few words, almost a whole line, and automatically correct it, but two or three paragraphs? Not going to happen without white out and a pencil.
Did I mention I couldn't be happier? Now to print out all my rough drafts and build folders and all that fun stuff!
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