Tick-Tick-Tick-DING!

On typewriters and finishing something during hard times.

I didn't write the first draft of this on my typewriter. That would've been cool, wouldn't it? But I'm sick of that thing. I just had a happy moment where I locked it away in my closet, hopefully for the next few years. I have a beautiful typewriter, an Olympia De Luxe. Before that I had a little Smith-Corona, and before that a... something else. This one's definitely the best, even though I can't load the ribbon right for the fucking life of me. My De Luxe has been my constant companion since September, because embarrassingly that's how long it's taken me to hand-type a 30,000 word novella. But it's finally done, and I can hold this piece of work in my hands and it feels great. I am never going to do it again.

It's not that I exactly regret typing a book on my typewriter, but it does get old real fast. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-DING! Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-DING! And it's hard to write quietly in this little bungalow at 2am with this mechanical symphony going on.

This is probably a "No duh," but it was interesting to notice how my writing was affected by the medium of clack-clack-clack. Paper vs. digital is the usual face-off during these types of comparisons. Writing on paper can be laborious but less distracting. You spend thirty minutes on a page and may have written half as much as you would on a computer. While a screen is speedy, it comes with the caveat of usually being chained to the internet. YouTube's always so much more fun than writing that stupid novel, isn't it? I find my style of writing more bare bones when I write on paper. I don't take the time to expand on scenes I might have otherwise onscreen. But I often do it anyway because I think of paper writing as a good first draft to just get the shit out. Barf on the page. The expanding will naturally come later as I transcribe it to Word. The typewriter was a nice middle man between paper and screen. A little faster than the pen, but still barebones in the end. If I wanted to I could scan the pages and use AI to convert the images to text, but that would be the easy way out. Better to revise the organic way and manually type out the pages onto the computer. I find the second draft flows better that way.

I don't really know if I have any takeaways to share from completing this thing. It was originally a short story that I decided to expand into a novella. I first set out to complete one page per day, and to never post about it on social media or talk to others about it. I'm pretty sure I broke both rules, especially the first. But I am not a fast writer, I am ashamed to say. One page per day sometimes became one page per week. But I had a rough outline that I kept flexible in case I thought of something better as I went--and there were definitely a few instances where I surprised myself. (Or "the characters surprised me," as the annoying writers would say.)

I didn't really plan out a three-act structure or logged my protagonist's character arc or anything like that. And maybe that will show. It's not that these things aren't important, but I've studied the shapes of these stories for years now. I felt confident enough in myself to get the story right on my own. Instead of character dossiers and writing exercises to get me in the right headspace, I kept a piece of construction paper in a folder along with my pages. On the paper was each character's name, with space for me to fill out details the more I found out about them as I wrote. Charlotte Greenspan - 34; Shelley Duvall type. Straight long brown hair, often in a ponytail. Met Gerald at a liberal arts college. Terrified of fucking her son up. Hates bugs. And so on.

The pages themselves were kept in reverse order, numbered on the top right. I was only allowed to read back one page before starting the next one. I would make all my corrections in a red pen, sometimes while the page was still in the typewriter. I only had two beta readers as I wrote--my husband Austin and a close friend, Millie. Austin would have to be careful with the pages whenever he read, having to flip through them in reverse order. For Millie I would scan my finished pages every few weeks and email them. This also functioned nicely as a way to back them up, should the house ever set on fire.

Can I boast here a minute? Not that talking about hand-typing a novella isn't a boast, but indulge me. My life turned upside down recently. Again. For like the fiftieth time. And I finished this thing in the middle of it. Made myself redo the parts that were fucking trash and kept on going, even on the bad days. Doesn't mean there were a few times here and there where I slacked off, but I got the job done, didn't I?

I shouldn't be writing this when I'm a tad emotionally numb from the past week, but I wanted to mark the occasion of finishing this thing with something. When I worked for toxic jobs I started noticing myself read a large number of books; it'd become a coping mechanism to escape my life. I cannot help but wonder if I'm now using writing the same way. I cranked out like twenty pages the week my dog died. And now, in the midst of this emergency, I've finally finished my book. I think it's always good to create something, to have something on the back burner that you can turn to when life's a bit too much. I can't really rise and grind like other writers--I have so much admiration for those who can. But I am slow, I am writing for myself, and I can only crank out 30,000 words in so many months.