Today, I’m thinking about my instrument. The QWERTY keyboard, that is. I don’t know if there are still people hammering away on manual Remingtons these days, but I always thought of writing on a typewriter as a pose, an affectation. A writing hat you put on. One with tassels and a bunch of mismatched buttons. Maybe with stripes.
I suppose those writers who used to irritate coffee house patrons by pounding out their latest opuses on typewriters—besides wanting people to look at their ridiculous hats—had an idea that what was committed to paper via ink ribbon was somehow more true than something committed to screen via pixel. And wouldn’t you know it? Darren Wershler-Henry wrote a book about just that. And The New Yorker read it (so you don’t have to):
First, he says, in the age of the typewriter—the twentieth century, more or less—there was a mythology that what was typewritten was true, that the machine somehow caused writers to bare their souls. This is a central idea of The Iron Whim, and it calls forth some of Wershler-Henry’s most atmospheric prose: “The typewriter has become the symbol of a non-existent sepia-toned era when people typed passionately late into the night under the flickering light of a single naked bulb, sleeves rolled up, suspenders hanging down, lighting each new cigarette off the smouldering butt of the last, occasionally taking a pull from the bottle of bourbon in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet.”
If this is evidence of soul-baring, what is toiling mindlessly into the early evening under the flickering light of a row of unflattering florescent lights, t-shirt sleeves unrolled, jaunty scarf hanging down, adjusting the volume of each new song from the uneven loudness of the last, occasionally taking a pull from the SIGG water bottle on my desk evidence of?
If the typewriter somehow introduced the character of Writer into our collective consciousness, has the computer yanked it offstage with one of those giant hook things? I certainly don’t imagine other bloggers and web writers hunched over their keyboards, caffeinated beverage of their choice at their elbows, conjuring the prose I’m reading into being. And I don’t know that that’s a bad thing. Perhaps the computer, and by a larger measure, the Internet, make our words more important than our personae. Interpret that as “impersonal,” if you like, but it could mean content really is king.
Even if the guy wearing the crown is watching porn online while writing the next top hit on digg.
You can find more of the interesting word usements I structure on Apple.com.
Read my article, Better Writing Through Design, on No. 242 of A List Apart.