Typewriters: Better than Computers (for writin' stuff)?

I just picked up an old electric typewriter, the Corona-Smith Coronet Super 12 to be exact, with a functioning ribbon cartridge already installed! Just by playing around with it today I have fallen in love with typing on it, and find that its a lot easier and faster to write on than with a word processor on my computer. Is this just due to me having fun with a new toy, and this - like all joys in life - will soon fade, or do typewriters just fuckin' rock? And if so, why did professional writers switch to word processors when you got to make it look like it was from a typewriter anyway when you send in a manuscript? I mean, aside from the obvious that with a WP one can make multiple copies (and edits) very easily.

Any writers here still type up the first draft on a typewriter?

I think that model or one very similar to it is the one my parents have - ours still works, I think...

the electric hum would drive me batty if I wrote daily using it...

I have a old, circa-50s or 60s typewriter that I use for writing letters. It can type in black or red ink & it has a tweed case!

I can remember my mum using her typewriter... it wasnt electric either and she'd bash at it really heavily so it was really quite noisy. I remember writing a (probably incredibly dreadful) short story on it when I was 13 or 14 that I sent to a women's magazine, which got promptly sent back with a "no thanks" form card attached, heh.

Admittedly, I do find computers slightly superior for internet-based functions... oh whoops, didn't see the parenthetical sorry.

Still prefer using a typewriter for anything but work stuff or admin. I type too quickly on a computer, there's not the space between thought and execution that you get most of all with pen and paper, but also to a degree on a typewriter. Words and phrases are too easily erased, which later I decide I prefer. You have an immediate hard copy and so can make pencil emendations as you go along.

There's also something about the tactile and rhythmic qualities of typewriter typing, more measured than its computer counterpart.

Composition would probably go something like - start off with pen and once I've got going carry on with typewriter, only going back to pen and paper for tricky bits. Emend with pen. Do fair copy on computer.

I've only got a crappy Olivetti. I'd love a really nice typewriter, but they just seem too hard to come by in the UK. There used to be a good shop on Turnpike Lane, but it shut down years ago. There's an excellent US website, but the whole postage thing is ridiculous for getting one sent over.

I sometimes think about getting a typewriter purely to give me a kick into writin' stuff - the lack of internet being the main attraction.

what was the writing thread that nabisco mentioned typewriters on the other day

one big difference is that typewriting is linear. since reading is also linear you could argue that writing on a typewriter is better than cut n paste craziness

and i might, but i'm not entirely convinced. i love the clackety clack though! typewriters rule for that alone. it's like yeah i'm makin a racket, i'm writin!

hmmm. i got one last year and it's nice in theory... but if writing and reading are linear, thought and composition are not. w/ me the plan document eventually becomes the actual thing, as it were.

I have a typewriter that I used to take out quite a bit until it ran out of ribbon and I never bothered replacing it. But yeah, it was a lot of fun for free writing -- the fact that I couldn't erase and move around what I wrote was actually a big part of what I liked about it, since it curbed my natural tendency to edit while writing. And it could keep up with my brain more quickly than longhand, which is what I usually use for that kind of writing.

I also understand this completely, from an old interview with Don DeLillo:

Q. Do you think you could get used to a computer?
A. No, I need the sound of the keys, the keys of a manual typewriter. The hammers striking the page. I like to see the words, the sentences, as they take shape. It's an aesthetic issue: when I work I have a sculptor's sense of the shape of the words I'm making. I use a machine with larger than average letters: the bigger the better.

I have a old, circa-50s or 60s typewriter that I use for writing letters.

― Pullman/Paxton Revolving Bills (Pillbox), maandag 14 september 2009 5:30 (9 hours ago) Bookmark

^^ This is beautiful, Pillbox

My friend has a semi-sincere plan to put a vintage typewriter in the corner of his room and have a piece of paper with 'Chapter 9:' perpetually in it, for the purpose of impressing girls should he entice any home with him

Bonus points if the chapter starts with "It was a dark and stormy night.."

thank you LBI :) Now, if my girlfriend reads this, she's going to expect me to get off my ass & write more letters!

Typewriters really do make writing – the getting words onto a page part – much much easier. You're not able to constantly revise.

That said I do not envy anyone who ever had to type, say, a grad thesis on one.

Use the typewriter to type the grad thesis, not to write a grad thesis about typewriters.

I've read more than one old fogey writer praising the miracles of modern word processing after a long career of using only typewriters, but I suspect if they'd started off using computers, they'd never have built up the discipline to avoid writing formless, endless crap that word processing enables.

Be careful, you guys, this thread is how things like steampunk happen.

Typewriters are good tools. I know that. I grew up with them. You just roll in a sheet of paper (be careful it is straight!) and away you go.

But, so long as I have a computer and a laser printer to work with I would never go back to one. Computers & printers are more versatile than typewriters, more forgiving, more efficient and produce a better-looking end result. No argument can change my mind.

typewriters don't steampunk people, people with false gears and hotglue guns steampunk people!

what was the writing thread that nabisco mentioned typewriters on the other day

Couldn't have been too recent of an "other day," but I've probably talked here a bunch of times about how I think prose styles in fiction are heavily affected by the technology writers use.

I guess I have a pretty word-processy style. My sense is that using a typewriter wouldn't force me into any precision or linearity, it'd just have me constantly and arduously retyping things to try out changes. But then I already do that on a computer anyway, so who knows.

http://www.medaillenews.com/i/2007/Kerouac_Back_Cover_350.jpg

it kind of looks like toilet paper there but i don't really want to make any kind of obvious gag following on from that

that image is usually the obvious response to this:

they'd never have built up the discipline to avoid writing formless, endless crap that word processing enables

... found it btw

Writing by hand

You see a lot of people who are so in love with the notion of The Writer that they buy crappy old typewriters; in my experience these people are seldom very good at actually writing.

The interesting bit is that the form of the method has profound effects on the style of the writing: I have this vague hope that someone will one day write a monograph that examines the whole history of literature this way. Hand-writing prose steers you toward clean, conventional sentences with well-chosen words. The age of newsrooms and typewriters gave us styles like Hemingway’s, where the prose has the same sparse, weighty quality of type on a blank page. And it’s impossible to imagine a style like David Foster Wallace’s without the personal computer: even leaving aside the footnotes, it takes a certain facility with typing to bother tracing thoughts out through long, winding, clause-heavy, speed-of-speech sentences.

i notice now that by "the other day" i mean "on a thread that was revived the other day that i didn't realise the posts were actually from four years ago"

aww man that first sentence is way uncharitable to people who like typewriters -- I slap my own wrist for that one

I want to point out though that I actually don't really go for this idea that word processing trends toward verbose/formless stuff and typewriters make everything stark and weighty -- I think sometimes those things are true in a micro sense, but not in a macro one? I mean, on a larger scale I would make the exact opposite argument: that word processing has brought a level of structural revision way more inside the purview of the writer, that organization is now way more of a task. Where in the midst of the typewriting era there was plenty of work that just sort of moved forward in its own way, sometimes loopily or messily or in this more vague and unstructured flow, which the author would presumably then mark up with some revisions and send along (leaving an editor to possibly try a little bit of structuring). You can see this just visually, really -- I think it'd be fair to say the average book nowadays includes a lot more of the writer's superstructure than it might have in midcentury, a lot more careful assembly of breaks and chapters and form, more symmetries and architecture, etc.

when my cohort were about to start their dissertations one of my professors claimed to us that writing with a word processor was 'more organic', which i found really odd: obviously he meant those sorts of processes, the ability to revise as you go, and so forth, but i don't know whether anything of the sort is credibly 'organic'

i've never actually felt quite comfortable writing any particular way. haha i am one of THOSE PEOPLE WHO BOUGHT A TYPEWRITER, which is probably why that post stuck in my mind. i actually put the thing away after writing two and a half letters. it's a pretty handsome piece of machinery, though, so i'm happy to own it at least in that sense. one thing i did notice is that the rhythm at which you typed just had to be physically different, more staccato: or else face the arms getting on each other and occasionally not hitting the keys hard enough to leave an impression

of course the age of newsrooms and typewriters also brought us, like, the later works of henry james so

i like this guy's attitude towards different writing tools--he switches back and forth. the quote's about handwriting but he also mentions that he recently bought a typewriter.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2009/04/the-tool-box-we.html

If I’m really stuck, I go back to longhand. There’s something about the privacy and the immediacy of it that seems to help. When you’re writing longhand, your attention is on the sentence—you’re not looking at the full page.

i think it's a good idea, if you're stuck with a paragraph or a sentence or even a whole page to try either writing it out longhand or typing it on a typewriter versus working on a computer. i dunno, switching tools like that seems to loosen the brain up

Writing people letters on a typewriter is somehow delightfully easy, and the recipient finds it invariably charming (if the recipient is of a post-typewriter era). I typed the word "banana" over & over on a typewriter until it filled an entire page, then mailed it to a friend. He framed it.

xpost - ^^ definitely so (to Que). I tend to use longhand for two things -- when stuck, since it feels low-pressure to scribble, and also when something's getting too wordy, because the amount of effort and the length of time involved really helps me pare down to essentials.

I always find it funny how, if you read far enough back into the 19th century, you can get to see the bits where someone got sleepy or had an appointment and the text just goes "and, thus saying, the washerwoman blew out the candle and promised to resume her tale on the morrow."

There's also this midcentury thing that makes sense to me with typewriters but irks me a little bit in the modern day (Lorrie Moore does it a lot, but she does it well, so I like it) where there's a scene happening and someone says, e.g., "didn't I know your father?" and then it spins out into like five pages on the father, complete with other scenes and dialogue and everything, as the author follows out that thought process, and then suddenly it goes "'Yes,' I said, 'you did know my father.'" and it's like ... word processing exists now, there is no structural impediment to organizing that better.

ugh yes i hate flashbacks like that

I recently heard a talk about how the printing press ruined visual thinking in philosophy (despite appearances to the contrary, and with a small number of exceptions - mainly people who handwrote with no interest in having what they were doing published) for centuries. Interesting if perhaps nonsense.

I think that the kind of precision I try to apply to my own writing would go completely out the window if it meant complete rewrite after complete rewrite. But then I'm a lazy guy.

The thing I like about word processing is how much it allows for continual rewriting in the moment, instead of whole bulky revisions. I used to write stories almost entirely with the split screen in Word -- write a paragraph or two, split the screen and retype them better, add a couple more graphs, go back and retype/reframe the whole thing, etc. etc., until a section was done, and every sentence in it had been retyped and refined a few dozen times. (I think that helped with the flow of it, going over and over everything that way, faster and lighter each time.)

. . . yeah that a good way of doing it. versus printing it out and scratching it all over it with your pen and rewriting that way--i find it hard sometimes to motivate myself to type in those changes, once i've edited the heck out of something with the pen, it always feels like such a slog, you know?

THAT'S

i've got in a hole with a LOT of things of having six iterations of print, scribble, type, print, scribble, type, etc., without really making any forward progress at all. like, since high school.

also: word processing means at the back of my mind i'm going "i can delete this": i now have this sort of pathological thing i wish i could conquer, in longhand, where i write a sentence and then write the next sentence i'm sure about, even if it's halfway down the page, because i don't want to write any of the in-between ones that i'm not sure about: because i know i can't delete them

"And it’s impossible to imagine a style like David Foster Wallace’s without the personal computer: even leaving aside the footnotes"
I thought DFW wrote everything longhand, and it's his poor book designer who had to work out how to fit the footnotes everywhere.

re: Kerouac's butcher paper roll, I imagine him whistling, "ain't nothing gonna breaka my stride ain't nothing gonna slow mee down oh no i got to keep on typin"

no, he definitely word processed or typed -- although I don't even know that that comment's directed all that much at his personal method so much as just the general modes of prose that word processing allows for! (I mean, writing longhand now is still writing longhand in a world where you know those modes, have read those modes, know their rhythms)

I'm picturing DFW writing longhand LOLspeak.
"Lobster: Do Not Want"