Tech, Old and New
Here’s a writing confession: I really like to write to music. Have ever since I started working on my first short stories in the last century. My wife, as a singer, has more sensitivity to sound than I do, so she finds doing creative work with music in the background maddening.
Me, I think it creates a kind of aural wall inside of which I huddle with the waking dreams. When I’m on a roll, I rarely hear the music, but sometimes, when I lift my head from the keyboard, it’s kind of a refreshing surprise to remember how much I like that soundtrack (can’t go wrong with “Last of the Mohicians”) or that old ballad that iTunes shuffled up for me.
Alas, this morning my PC speakers perished, and I lost some would-be novel-writing time troubleshooting that. After church, I was able to trot over to a local office supply store and pick up an inexpensive pair of speakers that are perfect for my desk.
Then, there’s this bit of old tech I recently acquired.
I’ve been wanting an old manual typewriter for years. When I was but a lad, the Western Union Office in Omaha, Nebraska was closing. I and two of my good creative friends (Will Schoech and Willie Wood, fine Nebraska boys every one) headed over to Telegraph Office. And we each picked up one of their spare office typewriters, with Willie scoring one with a red frame that type only in caps, for drafting out telegrams back in the day.
I had the Royal for a couple of years. It was built solid, out of heavy cast iron I’d swear, but it had beauty to go with its utility (check out the glass panes on the side…absolutely no function, but just Art Deco awesome). However, when it was time for me to initiate the real adventures of my life, it was too damn big and heavy to take with me to Coast Guard bootcamp. Its fate, like so many other important parts of my life, has been lost in the sands of regret and time.
If you zoom in on the image above, you’ll notice the typewriter I had then is very similar to the one that just joined my household, right down to the glass panels on the side.
That was all the typewriter I could afford at the time. I didn’t mind, in fact, I preferred it.
The novels and stories I loved as a young reader had been created on very similar machines. My writing heroes from Edgar Rice Burroughs (“Tarzan”) to H.P. Lovecraft (“Cthulhu” everything), to Ray Bradbury and Ernest Hemingway and Eugene O’Neill and Harlan Ellison had labored over typewriters much like it.
And here comes what might be too much of a True Confession, but I really wanted to have that model of typewriter in my life again to remind me that I’d never really given up on my dream. Through the miles and heartache and lack of “success” (whole ‘nother discussion there), on land and sea, days and nights and all the odd places in-between…I wrote.
I graduated to old portable typewriters, then to laptops and all the cool tech of today. But that tech doesn’t have the soul of one of these old beasts, the muscular virility of having to wrestle it into working position.
Finally, this 1929 Royal 10 typewriter reminds me how blessed I’ve been to have been possessed by an honorable dream that helped shape the course of my life.
Everyone should be that fortunate.