I haven't had a typewriter in ages. If I had one, my daily consumption of Wite-Out would run into the gallons.
Nonetheless, typewriters are very cool because they are so cinematic. Or, at any rate, they are more cinematic than anything else writers do (apart from getting druink and falling over at parties). Movie directors still invariably have writers banging away on typewriters. You can 1) zoom in close on each letter as it embosses onto the paper; 2) amplify the hammering sounds; 3) have the loose sheets of the manuscript fly away--out the window, or under a car, or into a pond. (This latter movie cliche was used as recently as Love Actually.)What we do is about the dullest thing in the world to film, which is why they usually show the writer sitting down to write and then cut to the writer sitting back and wiping sweat from the forehead, a stack of finished manuscript pages beside the typewriter. Very seldom so they do more because, well, a story about someone making up a story turns out to be a bit dull.
Two movies have fine openings with the writer working at the typewriter. The first is Romancing the Stone, which opens in the romance-novel ending being written by Kathleen Turner's character, complete with her cheesy prose as voice-over. The scene then cuts to her teary-eyed face at her typewriter, as she says, "Oh, God, that's good...The...End."
The other, and my favorite, is the beginning of Throw Momma From the Train. The movie opens close in on the page as the typewriter stamps out "T...h...e... ...n...i...g..h...t... ...w...a...s..." and then switches to the face of Billy Crystal's character, who for almost the rest of the film is stuck on his novel's opening line, "The night was..." For the next few minutes of screen time, Crystal moves in and out of the frame (which stays fixed on his typewriter), doing all those things writers do, and a few I've never thought of, when we are stuck and pretending we are working. Nice scene.
No typewriter for me, though. I probably delete twenty words for every one I write and keep. Typewriters may be more cinematic, but if you're anything like me, avoiding typewriters keeps innumerable acres of trees thriving.
Though I have to admit that it would sometimes be satisfying to crumple up what I had just written and hurl it into the trash. Not only is that cinematic, but cathartic as well.
11 comments:
My wife jokes that she knows when I'm writing because she hears my backspace key rattling off my keyboard...
Typewriters are highly kinaesthetic which makes them ideal for cinema. Computer keyboards are too smooth and quiet. But I know which I'd rather use.
The very odd thing is that there are still writers who actually write straight onto typewriters - all that stuff with ribbons and Tipex and carbon paper (remember carbon paper?) and throwing pieces of paper 'into the trash' (I just love the word trash - so much more dismissive and, well, trashy than 'rubbish'). I did it for years, but I think I'd rather give up altogether than go back to all that.
None of which, of course, has got anything whatsoever to do with the cinema...
I'm like you David, and Nevets evidently, because the key I probably hit most often is the backspace. I learned to type on a typewriter but was very grateful, a year or so later, to move to our first wp package (I use the term word processing loosely - it basically turned your computer into a typewriter, complete with carriage return!) on our BBCb computer. I know people say that they think harder when they know they can't just hit 'delete' but my writing process is so grooved now into just being able to splurge and delete, splurge and delete that it's how I think.
If the apocalypse comes soon and there's no more electricity for computers, my writing days will probably be numbered. (But then so will publishers' days...)
Mr Nevets, Mr Stretton, you both raise a practical question, to wit: how long would our housemates tolerate us if we in fact hammered away on a typewriter for hours?
I can tell you a typewriter wouldn't be too popular if, like me, you often decide you need to write at 3 am...
Hi, Frances--
I like the word "trash" too. It also makes a nice verb--"I worked on it for a couple of hours, but then trashed everything I'd written." Or "The last tenants trashed the place before they moved out."
In the US, "trashed" is also used for inebriated ("We all got completely trashed last night"). Much as British English used "pissed" (which in the US means angry or quite irritated).
Above all, "trash" is just a fun word to say aloud.
Hi, Alis--
I know that conventional wisdom has people on computers simply dashing off any old thing and then revising. But even though I hit the delete key often, I couldn't write much more deliberately if I were impressing every word onto clay tablets and drying them in the sun. I hesistate, mumble, eventually add a few words, read it out to myself, delete it all, type the supposedly improved version...
I'm not sure where this image of people rattling off endless pages of stream-of-consciousness and then heavily revising comes from. I'm assured that such people exist, but I don't seem to know any.
Or if I do, I don't know I know them. Maybe I should ask around a bit.
A friend of mine, who also writes, got ahold of an old keyboard to replace her shiny new keyboard. The reason: Because the old keyboard makes clacking noises when one types.
Perhaps she should've gone for a typewriter. Then again, I've never used a typewriter in my short life, and I'm sure that neither has she.
Typewriting… cinema…
Wanted to dribble around the dance of typewriting a while back when you brought this up contrasting the 2-3 fingered attack vs the two-fisted/ten fingered (could this be called stereo-typing?) but I had too much to say so I didn’t, and have even more to say now, so be forewarned (and fivearmed)…
Having learned the ten fingered keydancing back in high school, I always had a staunch appreciation for the cinematic typists who could pound the stuff out as fast as talking while not making mistakes (face it, using white-out or tipex or korecktape would completely disrupt the whole flow of verbiage, voiced over or otherwise). Usually it was journalists with the fastest and most impressive unblemished flow. Most notably I note His Girl Friday, where the spectacular fireworks trainride of spoken verbiage from the great Cary Grant and the probably even greater Rosalind Russell (wonder if she was related to Jane?) dare not be slowed down to accommodate realism. Certainly not when she is dictating copy to him and he’s plunking away, nor when she’s tapping off her own, just before ripping it out of the platen to take straight down to the waiting presses.
But the foremost cinematic portrayal sticking out mindwise of relation between writer and typing mechanism would of course have to be Barton Fink. What a great depiction of constipated creativity imprisoned before the silently mocking machinery and blankened page threatening annihilation of self concept. The typically excellent Coen Bros embellishments of simple sounds almost gives the machine a whole character to itself.
I quite identified with such a device from experience with one of those old immense double-decker Underwoods often portrayed. It had a truly profound-for-it’s-simplicity working mechanism that was not only as interesting to watch as one of those old multi-instrumented banging calliopes in the middle of a carousel, but was also amazingly easy to fix. (It was so immense you could imagine archy the cockroach leaping off the top in his herculean wordsmithery.) I picked this beauty up in 1988 at an estate auction in Nottingham with Snowwhite Jung. For 3 quid! Who could resist? It would make a most impressive doorstop or planter if nothing else.
But I set that leviathan atop this old wood desktop in the small spare second floor room, no carpet, unvarnished wood floors, I sitting on rickety wood chair; and when that sucker pounded a well struck key you could feel the vibration from all that wood going into the chair as if it were a soundboard on a guitar or some percussive instrument with many parts passing the thump from one piece to the next just like the wondrous anatomy of the inner ear. [I know, too many analogies in too long a sentence, but it was just that cool… and I ain’t started).
to be continued...
(warned you)
Your aforementioned topic of two-handed typing brought back physical/emotional memory of working/dancing/playing with this contraption. The keys were so cumbersome that they often got all stuck together if you pushed them too close in sequence, so it required developing familiarity with the rhythm of how the machine preferred (nay, demanded!) to be plied in order to avoid having to stop and unjam all the furshlugginer glommed up keys. Adapting to this slowed rhythm was almost like learning a dance, and when the wordflow struck, I could feel my body adapting a responsive movement almost in between each key: each finger-pressing combination connected with a different body part, slightly moving feet, shoulders, hips, as each lettered thunk against that also wooden platen ticked and tocked into the desk, which rattled the floor, which rattled the chair... and "I was in the milk, and the milk was in me". I often listened to the Bangra radio station from Leicester while so enraptured in such wondrous and subtle dance.
What this great dance reminded of most at the time was some now forgotten poem by Bukowski, where he mentions the immense sound of the typer on his wooden desk. Did he compare his dance to a boxing match? Or did I just embellish that?
Needles to say, the words that spewed forth seemed to have more than mere cerebral expansiveness, creating even more ignited ecstacy for muse to be amused with through me(?). When I read your piece describing being limited to two (or three?) digited typing, I was quite saddened to consider the loss to those unable to feel the flow from all ten of our little friendlies (Like man! That’s what they were made for!). Sometimes it can feel like there is no real distance or difference between the fingers tapping and the words flowing through mind. This was most ingeniously (especially for one “stereotypically” challenged?) extended in your novel (unpublished?) Tomorrowville, wherein you replace tapping on computer keyboard with tapping fingers and thumbs in a pair of gloves. Quite elegant that. Less than the ten-tap almost seems like a disability in comparison, like not being able to dance… which I haven’t done in a long time… Nor do I really get much “real” writing together these days… not much.
So I’ll close with one of the first pieces I enjoyed spontaneaouslly spanking out while given free time to practice in typing class soul ong ago, if you will (or not):
“For snore and semen yawn ablow, our fivebothers snot fifth upon this consonant a blew equation deceived inebriation and eddificated to the prostitution fat tall men are abbreviated equal.”
Ok. I’ll stop now.
Nevets Eleets
Hey, Steve--
As far a cinematic typewriters go, let us not forget the mushy-mouthed maw of a typewriter in the film adaptation of "The Naked Lunch"...
Even as sluggish a typist as Yours Truly was capable of jamming the hammers together by hitting too many keys too soon. The crazy layout of the keyboard was designed to minimize this by slowing down talented typists.
The Dvorak keyboard for computers supposedly features the optimum layout for ultrahigh-speed typists, but for some reason it has never caught on (except with a few uber-geeks). As for writer like me, I could go at a bout the same speed with a calligraphy brush. Or hammer and chisel.
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