Doing It Old School (From "Newt Kincaid Blogspot" July 22, 2019)

Something about the light on my laptop makes me sleepy. I don't know what it is. I flick that bad boy on and it's like suddenly there's a guy swinging a stopwatch before my eyes. Once, when I felt drowsiness coming on while trying to make headway on my WIP, I tried to rest my eyes one at a time.

Of course it didn’t work, and I looked foolish with one eye closed and the other one in a perpetual state of surprise.

I switched to writing longhand. But my penmanship is an abomination. I’m sure somewhere among my scribblings there is brilliant prose worthy of a RITA. Unfortunately, I can’t decipher what I've written. I was stuck in an endless loop of turning on my computer, sitting down to write, and then dozing off.

Then one day I walked into a crafts store and saw a retro-looking typewriter sitting on the shelf. Surreptitiously, I started banging on its keys. I don't know why I did this surreptitiously. I assume they put it there so people would try it out. I loved the sound of the little metal thing hitting the paper. It was like pressing the keys was my way of communicating with the machine, and the clacking sound it made in response to my touch, was its way of communicating with me.

I realized that I would never get my WIP finished if I relied solely upon modern technology. I decided to go old school. I wanted a typewriter.

I soon discovered there is a whole typewriting community out there. Who knew? There are people who collect them, have type-ins and have entire Instagram pages devoted to them. So getting a typewriter of my own didn’t seem so crazy after all. I had one in college, back in the 80s. I used to write a lot back in the 80s. Poems, short stories, you name it. Was there a connection?

I bought an Olympia SM3 on Etsy. It’s an olive green German made tank with gleaming black keys. I fed it some paper and started typing. I loved typing on it: There was the instant gratification of seeing the words appear on the page, the zipping sound it made when you pulled the page out of the roller, the fact that I could actually “hear” my words being created. Oh, and editing on a typewriter turned out to be a pain, which is a good thing. It meant I could no longer keep writing and deleting the same paragraph over and over again in an effort to reach perfection in my draft.

I am now writing regularly on a typewriter. I have never submitted anything for publication. However, finishing this story in my head has been on my bucket list for a long time. I am also a very middle-aged woman and the bucket, I will eventually kick, is getting nearer. So I need to get on it.

I also bought a second, smaller, ultra-portable, Singer typewriter that I can carry from place to place. It is like the typewriter version of a laptop. The Singer doesn’t type as well as the Olympia, but she’s easy to travel with when I need a change of scenery.

So that brings me to the reason for this blog. I put away my laptop (except for posting these entries and doing actual work on the internet) and am typing my novel on a typewriter.

I will share this process and any personal discoveries I make. So far, writing my novel this way has been liberating. I still have to make time to write, of course. I know getting a typewriter is not a magic bullet. But at least now when I sit in front of a bunch of QWERTY keys, I'm able to stay awake long enough to get something on the page.