#2: The Typewriter

I suppose you now have me down as a ‘pretentious hipster’ for owning a typewriter, but please, let me explain.

Hear that satisfying clunk as you hammer the keys; see your own words physically stamped onto paper; unroll the piece you have just created, mistakes and all.

The typewriter takes you back to the physicality of writing, back to the direct relationship between your brain, your fingertips, and the marks on the page. It returns a permanence and deliberation to the words: no longer are they prey for the hastily pressed backspace.

Writing this article on a laptop, I have already written and rewritten various phrases and words, already made and corrected countless mistakes. I suppose this will improve the quality of my writing, but there is something lazy about the ease of placing thoughts into pixels, about the reliance on red wiggly lines to correct me, and there is certainly something distracting about the ability of my chosen medium to also load Facebook.

Typing onto a virtual document evokes hastily written Facebook messages, where grammar and punctuation are secondary to the speed at which a conversation develops, where you may use a word simply because it is pre-selected for you in predictive text. The words are no longer correct nor your own.

We consume so much media as we scroll down our social media feeds, media that, could we hold it in our hands in physical, printed form, we would immediately dismiss. It is refreshing to look at typewritten words and know that they required effort, that they hold significance.

When writing On the Road, Jack Kerouac taped together rolls of architect’s paper so that his flow would not be disturbed by the need to change paper. Truman Capote famously dismissed the novel:

‘That’s not writing; that’s typing.’

But the 120-foot long manuscript remains legendary.

Since the day he stood in an antique store and spontaneously typed a poem, Tyler Knott Gregson has been writing poetry on typewriters:

‘I loved the urgency; the particular inability to erase, edit, and alter that came with using a typewriter; the uninterrupted stream of thoughts. I loved the way the pages reflected my mind: unfiltered and imperfect and honest’.

In 2014, when The Times moved to its new London Bridge offices, the sound of typewriters could be heard clattering through the building. Typewriters were heard but not seen, the sound drifting from a large speaker. Beginning slowly, the tapping gradually became more frantic as the day went on. The idea was to energise journalists into meeting their deadlines.

Thus typewriters hold a kind of mythic power over us.

They are not merely bought from vintage shops by men with beards and topknots to improve their aesthetic.

They represent a specific kind of writing. Writing on a typewriter is the immediate creation of an object we can hold, tangible words that are an entity in themselves, rather than a pixel on a screen that might one minute be part of the letter ‘p’ and the next part of an antelope’s foot.

So, instead of being pretentious perhaps I just like objects I can hold.

Perhaps that is why I am writing on this blog.