Back in August I decided to buy a typewriter. I’ve never really used one — I learned typing in “Informatique” class in French immersion in 1989, a class that, as I recall, spent a great deal of time on teaching us how to plug our monitors in, when it wasn’t teaching us hands on home row. But I wanted one for a few reasons.

First, because I’m sick (literally) of spending so much time staring into a computer screen. I am starting to feel like Jimmy Jet and His TV Set, that soon my eyes will turn into LEDs and my hands into wireless mice.

Second, relatedly, because over the past few years I’ve found it increasingly challenging to ignore all the other possible things one can do on a computer, and just write. Yes, there are ways to discipline oneself — apps that force you to do nothing else and even punish you when you don’t, wifi that can be turned off, friends who can hold one to account, egg timers, etc. But for various reasons, the struggle has been getting harder rather than easier for me as life fills with more books to promote, more emails to reply to, yada yada. Exacerbating the problem, I have been self-judgmental lately — one effect of having more books out in the world and getting constant feedback on them, I suppose, and I’ve also found the last two books I worked on really challenging, so the inner voice that crops up whenever I hit a challenging scene, telling me to just chuck it and go look at Youtube videos, is getting louder. (What it boils down to is that the more success I have in writing, the harder I find it to write. One has to create a private space for the art to happen in, and that part used to be easier, when I knew the likelihood of it being published was small.)

Some writers have had great success with electronic word processors that only show you a few lines of text, but I am the sort of writer who wants to see the whole page around the sentence, so that didn’t really appeal to me. And why buy a device that has more power than it needs? After all, isn’t “just type” something we already had machines for?

I’ve also been feeling a real pull toward the mechnical, the tangible, the real. The more capitalism wants me to believe that algorithms are indistinguishable from the human experience, the less I want algorithms in my human experience. (See my previous posts on predictive text “AI” and on the book as machine.) Typewriters are a beautiful, efficient, elegant invention. They were perfected midway through the 20th century and never improved upon since — and in many cases, they still work perfectly after 50, 60, 70 years and require very little maintenance to do so. Remarkable, really.

I happen to have some friends who’ve built a large collection of typewriters over the course of the pandemic, so I took advantage of their generosity and went out to spend a day with them and their machines. I’m very glad I did, because it turns out that what drew my eye aesthetically was not what felt best for me to type on. Sure, I loved the look of the old Underwoods, but I enjoyed typing on the Smith Coronas and especially on the Facits, which are Swedish typewriters.

There happened to be a Facit 1620 for sale here in Ottawa for $150 CAD, and I went to try it out, and bought it. It was made in 1974, a few years before I was born, and it is great condition. I’m very happy with it. About a week into using it, I have already encountered the one problem Facits are known to have (the “frozen Facit” problem, in which a lubricant used decades ago effectively turns into glue on the escapement over that length of time), and I fixed it, thanks to the advice of my friends and the internet, which is full of friendly typewriter people. (The fix is just to clean off the old lubricant.)

Maintenance and repair was one of the things I was a bit worried about, as I am not at all handy (despite being descended from mechanics on both sides of my family.) But it turns out typewriters are so intuitively put together than even I am comfortable opening them up and tinkering with them.

The other worry I had was that I wouldn’t be able to compose fiction on them at all, because I am the sort of writer who backspaces and retypes as I go. I revise and revise and revise, word by word, sentence by sentence. This seemed antithetical to working with ink and paper. I have very little experience writing fiction by hand. I can’t write with a pen, because my brain and my hands work at different speeds so I transpose my letters too much and my handwriting is absolutely illegible and my hand cramps up. Yes, I could probably train myself out of all these things, but at 46, I have no interest in doing so, even as I gaze wistfully at the fountain pen inks my friends use. I wondered whether I’d have the same issues with a typewriter. But I took the plunge, figuring for $150 at least I’d have a fun object in the house, even if it was no good for me for fiction.

Happily, it turns out that I don’t have the same issues when I type as when I write by hand. And as for the typos and backspacing, it turns out I make fewer typos on a typewriter than I do on a light, shallow laptop keyboard. I do make some typos, but I am able to just clackity clack along and ignore them.

So far, I still need to be in Scrivener to think out my plots and stitch everything together — that’s just what my brain is used to. But I’ve been using the typewriter to draft scenes, a page or two or three at time, when I know what happens next and I just have to get it down. It helps a lot not having my laptop anywhere nearby, not even having my phone next to me. For some reason, my inner critic is less concerned about what shows up in ink on paper — I would have thought it would be the opposite, but I find it really freeing. It’s messy, and when I need to shift horses mid-sentence, I just type a / and keep going. You can see some of my typo-ridden happy output in the picture to the right. It’s a close-up on purpose because I hate showing anyone my work in progress, so I didn’t want to show too much, haha. The unevenness of the imprint is not anything to do with my machine — it’s because I’m still getting used to typing on it, and I tend to be too light, especially as I get roaring.

Then I go retype it into Scrivener and fix it up as I go. This is not at all a hardship, as I am such a reviser anyway, so it’s not adding any steps, and in fact it seems to be more productive, as I get some words to work with for “free” during my “fun” typewriter sessions, that I can then use as raw material during my “work” laptop sessions.

I’m sure that my brain (and my brain hacks) will continue to change, but for now, this is working for me. So the answer to “how’s the new typewriter?” is “great, thanks!”