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Typewriter

I'm guessing this thread won't get too many responses, but I'll give it a shot nonetheless.

Do any of the writers out there use a typewriter as part of their writing process? I've begun to draft my articles, etc. by hand--and it's made the whole writing process a lot less stressful. (With a word processor, I struggled with perfectionism: I used to write a first paragraph, delete it, write it again, polish it, delete it, and so on, until an imminent deadline forced me to pull an all-nighter and pound the whole thing out.)

The advantage of the typewriter, of course, is that it forces you to write from begining to end before revising. You can only go forward--this would seem to take away of the urge to tinker with what already been written--it would also seem to raise one's comfort with a sh*tty first draft.

I know that I would eventually enter the end product into a computer. But what particularly draws me to the typewriter is the idea of producing one physical page at a time. There's something balanced, measured, and satisfying in this approach.

Any one had any success in using a typewriter? If not, does anyone no how to achieve a similar writing process on a computer--i.e., how to enforce the discipline of going forward one page at a time, and not going back until you're done with the whole first draft?

Thanks in advance for the advice.

TOPICS: Lofi
terceiro's picture

Re: Typewriter

Though I do actually collect typewriters, I don't do any writing with them. (My kids used to call them "old computers.") Since all my typewriters are manual, I found that the work of pressing the keys was more than my lazy fingers were used to, and so I reverted to a cheapo composition book and a pencil.

Programs like WriteRoom or BlockWriter tend to leave me too open to distraction, which then draws me out of my writing and pretty soon I'm back with a full-blown word processor and into the perfectionist mode that was the OP's concern.

Stay true to your vision, but find a nice quiet, lightweight, electric typewriter and take it to town, baby. The small processes that writing with a physical medium (sharpening a pencil, turning a page, inserting more paper into the typewriter, refilling the ink in the pen) I find make my writing go more slowly, but also more thoughtfully and more polished from the get-go (refering to structural polish, not stylistic polish, which is never present in first drafts). Writing outside of a computer also removes the temptation to recycle writing that's "kinda good enough" rather than subject it to scrutiny and real editing. Kinda like this writing here.

 
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