Typewriter Dreams

Mary Emerick is a monthly columnist for Cheek Teeth. She blogs at Inside the Mountain's Skin.

Hunter S Thompson shooting a typewriter. 

I know this dates me, but when I first started writing it was on a typewriter. Imagine this for a minute, if you are not old enough to remember. First there was the crank of paper being rolled into the machine, the crisp white sheet waiting for the punch of keys. You had to be careful to keep the paper in alignment or else your whole story would slant, the mark of an amateur. Then there were the inevitable errors, not as easy as hitting a delete button. Instead you hauled out a small bottle of syrupy white fluid and dabbed it on the errant word, waited for it to dry and then hoped for the best as you typed over it. Usually I never waited long enough and a telltale smear remained. I remember being delirious with excitement over a new typewriter that had a button on it that would backspace and type over a mistake.

In junior high school I took Typing I with Mr. Smith, whom we called Chicken Man behind his back because of his spindly legs. He roamed the aisles, administering the dreaded typing tests, a pencil tucked behind one ear.  Instead of passing notes (no texting back then) we industriously pounded the keys, typing being the key to success if we landed office jobs. The room resounded with the clattering of a dozen typewriters. We waited impatiently for the bell to release us from the torture. Typing was just another one of those things we had to learn to reluctantly enter the grown-up world. There wasn’t anything fun about it.

The words had finality to them once they were typed.  You couldn’t take them back. Instead, you could hold up the paper and look through it from the back side, seeing the firm black outlines of each sentence. A sheaf of paper, readied carefully for submission, was a heavy and ponderous thing. It was something to hold on to, something substantial.

Using a typewriter to write stories almost always dictated either a longhand version first or careful consideration of each word. Typing paper was expensive, saved for final thoughts. It is so easy now to erase, start over, and leap in. You can scroll back, search, cut and paste, things we could never do on a typewriter.

Naturally there was no Internet, with its endless opportunities and support. I often wonder if I had graduated with my optimistic writing degree ten years later, would I have stayed with it to make a living as a writer? It seemed nearly impossible back then. You ordered a Writer's Market and hoped for the best, but you knew that writing would always be a hobby. There were other writers out there, I knew, but the gulf between them and me was too wide to cross. I had no idea where to begin.

I wonder how many aspiring writers’ dreams began and ended with the typewriter? Mine very nearly did. It was just such a solitary pursuit that I did give up for a few years. Then with blazing speed things changed. I could look up agents and publishers online. I could even send submissions electronically. I could take tutorials on anything from turning out a good query letter to formatting a manuscript. I could visit writers’ forums. I could journal in a blog and get real comments back, just like that.

One could argue that with progress comes problems, and no doubt it is harder to stand out from the crowd now. Anyone can punch a button, anyone can start a blog. Anyone can publish their own books on e-readers. Back in the old days, your typed submission was breathlessly slid over the post office counter and it disappeared. Weeks later a letter of regret or acceptance arrived. There was always the possibility of your package becoming lost, your typing paper glued together by Florida humidity, or plain running out of white-out, thirty miles from the nearest store.

I wonder what Mr. Smith did, replaced by computers. Did he retire? I left the classroom and never looked back. Now eight-year-old use iPads. No typing class for them, no quick brown foxes jumping over lazy dogs. I’m like one of those old-timers sitting on the porch of the general store, telling all the young writers that they don’t know real adversity. Not until they try to type a 300-page manuscript on a typewriter, at least.