My Valuable Downgrade

— There’s more to life than upgrades —

Upon completion of the final draft of my most recent novel, I sent out an email to my family and closest friends. Subject heading: “What Has Mark Been Doing for the Last Six Years?” The message field was empty. The email contained nothing but the following image.

Those manuscript pages, towering at six inches, said it all. Though my book wouldn’t appear in hardcover for another year or so, it had already become gloriously material. (Actually, the book had started out materially, as I generated the first draft entirely by longhand, but there had been a long, sensory-deprived period of computer entry.)

I’ve always been somewhat uncomfortable with the term Word-processing. To me, its connotations are too industrial. I picture language mashed into paste, dunked in preservatives, and canned for a lengthy shelf-life.

(What term might we substitute? Anything measurably less utilitarian. Word-pruning? Word-arranging? Word-massaging?)

But my aversion, I suppose, extends beyond the jargon itself to the technology that spawned it. As noted in prior posts, I can take only so much of staring at a screen, watching the phantasmal flash of the cursor, straining to translate my inward human imaginings into ciphers of inhuman electronic light.

Paper is better. You can feel a clean white page. Each new leaf is cool to the touch. It crackles in the hands. It is of the body. On the page, the inwardly human becomes outwardly human — no cyber-middleman required. And for a novelist, a pile of papers is a thing of beauty, signifying a task slowly and inarguably surmounted, a vision taking physical form.

For these reasons I’ve recently invested in a technological downgrade of unparalleled value. Here’s a photo:

That’s right, a Royal H-H Typewriter, circa 1958.

While I am still working by longhand — and will eventually have to, ahem, word-process, the Royal allows me to get a clean (well, clean enough) printout without submitting to the numbing cursor.

Here, in summary, are a few valuable benefits — creative and I daresay spiritual — found in this “downgrade”:

1. Eschewing instantaneousness.
It’s a long, hard road one must walk when writing a novel. Patience becomes a most useful virtue. But instantaneousness, or a technology that predisposes you to it, is counterproductive. Spontaneity, okay. An adventuresome spirit, sure. But good books aren’t generally written quickly.

2. Producing hard copy as you go.
Typewritten pages provide a record of the creative process, a physical imprint direct from the imagination, a trail of decisions and revisions made along the way. This can be invaluable when it turns out that your inner editor has overstepped his bounds. Give him use of a computer’s Backspace key and that guy’ll expunge everything.

3. Avoiding repetitive-stress injury.
The Royal H-H is a twenty-pound hunk of metal with innards of good ol’ fashioned, elegantly designed moving parts. You’ve got to employ fingers and arms in a variety of interesting ways to work this machine. Every new page requires hand-loading, alignment, and knob-twisting advancement. The carriage return demands that you lift a hand from the keys after every line. The Royal keeps you limber.

4. Enjoying a festival of the senses.
Unlike staring at a screen, staring at a piece of paper rolled snugly against the platen threatens no deleterious effects upon your eyesight. What’s more, you can whiff the typewriter ribbon and the oiled key-hammers. You can delight in the rewarding chime at the end of each line, followed by the clickety-slide of the carriage return. (The whimsical musicality of the typewriter is celebrated delightfully here.)

5. Opportunity for further consideration, revision, refining.
Once the typewriter draft is done, I must re-type the entire manuscript into a computer document for ease of transmission, copy-edits, book design, etc. This provides further ample opportunity to review the work and weigh the choices I’ve made.

Well, enough hobby writing.

You might also enjoy:

“One Way to Protect Your Soul In a Wired Age”

“Is the Internet Dangerous?”

“The Lonely Novelist’s Five-Point Productivity Plan”

“Working Without Working”

“Unleashing Ideas: A Four-Fold Approach”