Writing Books On A Typewriter
Posted: September 24, 2025, 09:47
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It’s no secret to regular readers of Escape Hatch that I’m in some kind of managed retreat from the 21st Century. I try to keep the median temperature in my office set to about 1976. I mostly skip streaming my music and opt for vinyl. I don’t bring the cell phone in the office, if I can help it. And I wrote all of The Fireman longhand in a bunch of massive ledgers.But I don’t know if I can work that way and get a novel done every year. So, just in the last couple months, I’ve shifted over to writing my first drafts on the typewriter instead of the computer. It’s the happy spot halfway between scrawling a story on parchment with a raven’s feather and using some bloated piece of word processing software.
If you even want to call working on the typewriter “writing” at all. In the time since I’ve shifted over, I’ve hardly felt like I was writing at all. It’s more like driving nails—or squeezing the trigger on a nail-gun. The steel keys on my Olivetti go chomp-chomp-chomp and eat up the page and a while later I’ve got another 1600 words. No going back to fix things. No second thoughts.
I’ve got a whole stack of functioning typewriters, and I thought I’d rotate them between pieces, see how it goes. I’ve got a frail Selectric III (with a fancy-pants innovation: Correct-Tape!), a robust olive-colored Selectric II, and the one I’m using currently, my blood-red Olivetti, a 60-year-old manual. So far it seems like there might still be some good words left in this antique. Whether I refer here to the machine or the man sitting behind it, I leave you to decide.
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