It's surprising to recall that in college, in the late 1980s, I still owned a typewriter, along with my standard-issue Mac Classic. I must have lugged it with me from dorm room to dorm room each year--and to and from different apartments each summer--but I can only remember using it in one context, a poetry writing course my junior year. Typing my poems made me feel more like part of an ongoing tradition (itself relatively recent, of course), and it called for a precision and a decisiveness in the act of composition that were bracing. It pleased my senses, and bolstered my sense of making something real and substantial, to see and hear the keys strike the page with a physical, really a violent impact. My longest poem ran only a page and a half, so I wasn't exactly suffering for my art. Anything longer I wrote on the Mac, but it felt like a more evanescent affair.
It's this feature I like best about writing letters (well, it's one of the things I like about them): the act of writing becomes something different because every revision is noticeable. Consequently, one chooses one's words more carefully, or accepts that the end product of writing has a physicality and an imperfection that one wouldn't get from Microsoft Word.
Elizabeth Taylor talks a little about this in the autobiography she wrote to be included at the beginning of her books:
I usually write sitting on the floor by the fire--a pencil in school exercise books. As I rewrite a great deal, so that sometimes a sentence takes a whole page of scratching out, I copy the penciled version in pen into the beautiful stiff-boarded marbled books I coveted as a child. This is a peaceful occupation--the only part of writing which is not a despairing struggle. Then, when I am alone in the house I read it all aloud. This often reveals repetitions I had not observed, or monotony in the construction of sentences, or improbabilities of dialogue.
I'm fascinated to read writers I admire talk about writing, both their technique and what it is they believe themselves to be doing. That Taylor refers to writing as a 'despairing struggle' makes my struggles easier to handle than they would be otherwise. But her idea of a sentence as something that requires tremendous work--and revision, in the way it sprawls out over a page, is appealing. Before I switched to Scrivener, every paper used to have two Word files: one containing the paper and one with notes (which was invariably twice as long as the paper), with each iteration of the paper saved with a different name, should I ever want to see how my argument had progressed. Now, when I write a paragraph or a passage I dislike, I don't delete it (I don't even edit in this manner), I just hit the return key twice and start writing again, leaving the earlier version complete.
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