The artistry of word-processing
The artistry of word-processing
Mark Russell
In the past few years, I’ve embraced a reverence for the object as artefact. Fears that digitisation would render print books obsolete were unwarranted. Vinyl records, nearly extinct in the early 2000s, are making a comeback. It’s in the weight of the thing, in seeing the physicality of pages, grooves and keys.
I recently found myself the proud owner of an electric typewriter. The body is heavy and late century—plastic and bulky and beige. Its insides are filled with dust and the ink tape’s so frayed I can read its history in the imprints. There are switches and levers I can’t explain. I remove a page and feel embossed Ts and Vs stamped into the paper. On the front there are broken letters and countless typos, that Word would automatically correct. There is an N that has inexplicably fallen halfway down the line, and an A that ignored the margins I’d mechanically set.
There are writers who swear by only working on such machines, or by longhand writing. It is no small challenge to write a story in order, word following word, beginning to end. I have made it my dreadful practice to begin any piece of writing in ten places at once. My essays form not as a linear thread, but as a patchwork stitched together. Sitting down at a typewriter with one page—one story—at a time to focus on, is at once daunting and exciting. When I write on a laptop, able to skip through the pages, I find myself writing the parts I am interested in writing, and getting bored with the story in between. Such narrative negligence is not possible on a typewriter. You want to keep writing to keep the story alive.
My mother was taught to type on a typewriter, in a room filled with tables and machines, each heavy and metallic and mechanical. Her typing teacher had a favourite joke, ‘How do you make a typewriter lighter?’ He’d answer by pulling out a cigarette lighter and placing it on top of the nearest typewriter, and laughing his head off. Every time. For an hour each week, he stood at the head of the class, or otherwise swung from one end of the room to the other from the exposed metal rafters, shouting letters at the students. ‘A A A space S S S space D D D space F F F space,’ and so on. Mad as a hatter and frightful of temper, he’d go into screaming rages only resurfacing to catch his breath.
When my mother was in Year Ten, the school got its first electric typewriters. These were a treat reserved for the best typists, who had achieved a certain word count. One girl in my mother’s class was so skilled, she was offered a job at a solicitor’s firm—and left school to be a professional typist. She was one of the students allowed to use electric typewriters.
Later, the first computers arrived at the school. They were simple word processors, typewriters glorified by the ability to rearrange text and undo errors. If you wanted to use them, you had to bring your own floppy disk.
Once, the internet was a foreign country. They spoke another language there, filled with inconceivable things. Webpages and browsers and emails and dial-up. Now, our computers are hand-held unions of nations. In this application-conglomeration the word processor is a footnote.
It has been said that no good writing is ever done by someone with internet access. The distractions are infinite, the research efforts insipid. Ironically, for all its functions, a laptop feels more limiting than a typewriter. It stifles imagination with cold reality.
There is a nice sense of quiet focus in using a typewriter. The mechanical clatter of the keys, the rustling paper across the barrel, the ding of the sliding bar—this is the orchestra of the writer. It is a machine that does only one thing. You cannot flick between practically infinite songs on a vinyl, nor on a typewriter wander into ‘internet research’. When you come to a tricky part of writing—choosing a character’s name, remembering the capital of Spain—you’re bound to your imagination or the books within arm’s reach. To this limitation there is an infinite grace—it is a prosthetic of the imagination, not a window into the universe. When we play a vinyl, we are playing only that vinyl. When we read a book, we are reading only that book, and when we use a typewriter, there is only one thing we can be typing. It awaits, manifest, even when the power is off and the keys are silent. There is the reverence for the object as artefact.