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06/02/2012 • 1:15 AM 16

The Author Blog Challenge: My Earliest Memory of Writing is the Typebrighter

The “QWERTY” layout of typewriter keys became a de facto standard and continues to be used long after the reasons for its adoption (including reduction of key/lever entanglements) have ceased to apply. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve accepted Marcie Brock’s Author Blog Challenge to write a fresh post from now until the end of June. The first writing prompt asked what my earliest memory of writing was. It started with my sister’s manual typewriter, an old Underwood. When my sister Cathy went off to college, she left her typewriter behind. As a loner, I’d found something I could do besides playing with little green plastic army men, drawing superheroes and army men and reading books about army men. (How’d I turn out to be such a peacenik, anyway?)

I don’t remember a time when I couldn’t read, but I do remember spelling typewriter the same way I pronounced it:

T-Y-P-E-B-R-I-G-H-T-E-R

(You just said that out loud to test it out, didn’t you?)

I also had a fondness for cliches that would give me hives now. Check out this from when I first spidered my fingers across the Underwood’s keys:

“Meanwhile, back on the ranch, while searching for a needle in a haystack…”

(At least my comma placement was correct.)

I came up with my own system for typing that isn’t nearly as good as working from the home keys on the QWERTY keyboard and typing properly. Typing class would have been the single most useful thing I could have gotten out of high school, but I couldn’t take it because it wasn’t considered an academic credit (Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!). However, my crappy typing method got me through journalism school and didn’t deter me from working in newspapers, mags and publishing. The (somewhat) great Canadian journalist Pierre Berton was a two-finger, hunt and peck guy who could type pretty fast. Yes, that’s how I rationalized being lame. Still do.

I have taken keyboarding courses (online and in person). When I practice, I do speed up and get more accurate. However, in the heat of composition, I fall back on the habits of that little kid who discovered his sister’s typebrighter. The thing she left behind was her greatest gift to me.

Ode to manual typewriters (zdnet.com)

Filed under: publishing, Author Blog Challenge, Marcie Brock, QWERTY, Typewriter, Typing, Underwood, Underwood Typewriter Company, writer, writing

05/01/2011 • 5:12 AM 1

Drop the rose-colored glasses.Typewriters are gone.

The Underwood Touch-Master 5 was among the las...

Image via Wikipedia

The last typewriter manufacturer closed last week. Unless you’re Cormac McCarthy or Elmore Leonard, you’re not exactly at a loss. And yet…

Some people feel the pull of the past strongly. They are experiencing the past again, but this time without the White Out, carbon copies and numerous typos. It’s nostalgia for a time when newsrooms and typing class were full of the chatter of these wondrous machines. I miss that sound (although I’m sure you can download a program somewhere that will mimic that sound for your keyboard.)

But nostalgia is all it is. We fetishize the past, romanticizing earlier times and forgetting the problems and annoyances. The past wasn’t better because it was a better time. The past is better because you were younger and still had hope. (I kid! I kid! Your best times could still be ahead of you, but if that’s going to be true you better take your pace up from a walk to a jog.)

Typewriters were great. Are computers better? Yes. no. Maybe. Computers are different (and a different tool) and come with their own problems and advantages. But the medium is not the message. The device is beside the point. What matters is what is communicated, not how.

I can communicate much more with my keyboard than I ever could with a typewriter. So for me, typewriters suck and computers rule. (Look it just got meta because it’s happening right now.) However, for all the bellyaching over computers, there are other writers who never gave up on the warm flow of ink on the page, calligraphic pens and parchment. (Then they type it on a computer so someone will see it.)

Technology is always destines to become outmoded at least until technology outmodes us in a fiery ball or the last plague. I love ebooks, but ( paper book lovers brace yourselves) ebooks are transitional devices, too, and I’ll embrace the next wave of tech after they go. Tablets are next, better smart phones with expandable screens, contact lens screens and eventually chip implants as The Singularity makes us cyborgs.

I’m not looking back fondly at a past that never was.

I’m looking forward to an exciting future

that I hope won’t suck.