Typing Up a Storm

I miss my IBM Selectric--an electric typewriter for anyone unfamiliar with the name. It was a birthday present, as I recall. A grey, heavy, seemingly bulletproof machine with a platen that rotated but no carriage to return.

Not like that Remington hidden in the roll top desk. Not only did you have to hit a lever and force the Remington's carriage back, you had to make sure your pinkies were strong because the clarity of the letter and darkness of the ink was directly proportional. If you'd hit two keys simultaneously, the strikers would get tangled like coat hangers in a closet and you could lose your thought while you untangled them.

I loved the Remington, too.

But the Selectric...inside, a little ball with all the characters on it that rotated ever-so quickly in response to a key touch. Change fonts? Change the ball. Easy as that.

It hummed, a motor I suppose, but it felt like more, as though it were waiting, excited, waiting to fulfill its destiny, and then with a finger press, the ball would spin, the ribbon would rise, and to pound into the typewriter ribbon and leave a crisp, black letter on the page, along with a satisfying clack.

There was a feeling of permanence that accompanied the clack—a sense of import. Touch type a whole word clack, clack, clack like a machine gun and there it would be, forever impressed into the fibers of whatever paper was handy. Then the machine would go back to humming, waiting for you to gather yourself together and type another line.

I know that what was typed wasn't truly permanent. If for some reason, you didn't care for the character you typed--or maybe the word, but not much more than a word--you could:

• Get an eraser, which had a brush on the other end, and use that to try to erase the offending characters(s). This, in the history of written words, has never ever worked, except to make the paper in that area dangerously thin. Occasionally, there'd just be a hole there, and you were left with some choices, depending on how far down the page you were. Ignore the hole and hope it went unnoticed, or start typing over from the top and hope you don't hit another wrong character.

• You could use correct tape, which had white ink on it. You would go to where the wrong characters were typed, put the tape over it, hope the keys still lined up, and type the mistake again, hoping the white ink would cover the black ink. Usually the net effect was to create an incomprehensible character that the reader would have to guess from context.

• Or you could use Liquid Paper, which I've heard Mike Nesmith's (of Monkees' fame) mother invented when she put white latex house paint into little tubes and charged $3 a drop for. You could brush it on as though it were house paint, and in some cases that's what I did. hoping to surreptitiously replace entire sentences without the reader knowing I had second thoughts, or more likely, thought to check spelling. And if you didn't care for the correction, put on another coat. Eventually the buildup would be too much for the high-horsepowered Selectric to deal with and I'd have to retype that page...carefully. Some of the papers I handed in to my professors had so much Liquid Paper on them they could no longer be folded.

But it was the state of the times. Liquid Paper showed you cared enough to try to cover it up and not just xxxxxxxxx over whatever you meant to obscure.

And it was better than my handwriting, which, to this day, looks random, like a Spirograph (look it up) that went out of control.

I had taught myself to type in a weekend, with a stolen 21st Century Typing Course (circa 1965) book, although what made it 21st Century still remains a mystery. I was driven to do this, when an English teacher made me practice writing on the wide-lined paper reserved for first graders to practice their letters on, only to discover that when written larger my handwriting was exactly the same. But the book taught to alternately type two characters, then two other characters, then words. I'd say it was easy, but the copious amount of liquid paper I've used subsequently may be an indication I should have taken an actual typewriting course.

And even though I am typing this now on a computer, I miss the Selectric. I miss what it felt like. I miss what it represented. I miss its difficulty.

Not only did it feel and sound substantial and wait expectantly with an electric "I'm waiting for you" hum, it created something that felt permanent. Oh, sure it was on paper, but it was forever on paper.

You could pull it out of the typewriter in a fit of anger or a exaltation of genius and look at what you had written. You could crumple it up and throw it in the general direction of a garbage can or lay it neatly on your desk, where another would soon join it, then others, until you could have a bird's eye view of your latest story, let your eye follow the flow, pull in, pull out, write in the margins, cross things out.

Then put in new pristine, expectant paper, and take another shot at it.

I've cut apart pages into paragraphs, then taped them back together in different orders to rearrange flow, then I could stand back and see the effect of the changes.

While that may seem messy to those who haven't done it, it's clarifying.

Writing is thinking solidified. Once a thought, whatever that may be--some arrangement of symbols and feelings--is committed to paper, it's frozen in time.

Then you can sit back and see if that's really what you meant to say. Wrong word? Cross it out and write in a better one. Went down a blind alley? Put a line through it, but make sure you can still read it, so you can refer back to it. Would this paragraph serve better there, provide a more logical build up to a conclusion? Cut it out and tape it where it belongs.

This isn't a rejection of computers or modern technology. But they don't provide the same function, even though they put dark symbols on a white background. They're transitory, changeable-- a power flicker can lose a story. But it's not just that. It focuses you on about half a page at a time. Yes, you can zoom out, zoom in. Look at outlines. But it's not the same. You, or rather I, tend to look at paragraphs not chapters on a computer. You get no sense of how the idea evolved because a backspace key has erased all previous permutations of a thought.

When you type on paper, you chose your words carefully, lest you'd have to break out the Liquid Paper.

When I wrote on a typewriter, I felt like Melville, Poe, or Twain, producing something substantial. Now, it just feels like another voice added to a din.

My father was a typesetter, as was my grandfather. On a Linotype, when you typed, little brass things with letters etched in them came down mechanically perfect rails to be held tightly with others while molten lead was injected to form words of type. No Liquid Paper there. Every word had to be correct, which meant every copy editor had to be on his or her toes. The layout people were artists as well, everything had to be perfect, thoughtful—thoughtful in that there was a solid reason for every decision.

Then computers came along, and everyone thought they could do it. No need for a graphic/typesetting department. And every desktop publisher used the same dingbats (#$%^&*@! and other characters), had no sense of the art of headline writing, relied on spellcheck....or not. And the artistry behind what the craftsmen knew started to go away.

It happens that way with writing too.