A bit of a shorter one again. I said what I set out to say, though, and that’s good. Then there is always this bit talking about what I just talked about. Writing always seems to lead to more writing.
I’m usually writing advice that I’d want to hear myself. Some of it seems to resonate, and that’s a fine feeling.
On a technical note, I sure seem to be improving my accuracy with the typewriter. Turns out familiarity with a tool helps. There are a couple mechanical errors up there, but fewer than usual.
If you need someone else’s permission, you have mine. I’ll sign the slip. Go make a bunch of low-stakes errors and learn from them.
I should probably stress the “low-stakes” part.
The typewritten work continues to pile up, little by little, and it’s really invigorated my desire to write. Even if it doesn’t originate on the typewriter. I really don’t want to romanticize it or apply special characteristics to it – it’s just a thing that helps put letters on paper. It’s kind of a neat thing, though, and it keeps me coming back. I think that latter part is the most helpful, and it isn’t unique to the machine.
I’m not as distractible as I made myself sound up there. I decided to embellish a little for the sake of the post. Mostly by accident, because once I had written that, the options were either to immediately explain it away, run with it a little, or grab an entirely new sheet of paper. One sounded too wasteful and the other struck me as just an awful way to write. I chose to run with it a little.
The bits about the typewriter really working in to my process and facilitating a lot of work, though, are true. I really started off exploring the machines to see if there was any value at all in this era of ubiquitous computers. It was kicked off by a book, The Typewriter Revolution, and I decided to see if I might be able to maintain a blog with various goals in mind. It turns out that writing is writing, and I’ve been slowly expanding what I work on. These are exciting times.
Technically, I’m displeased by some of the sentence structure and word choice in the typewritten document up there. Can’t change it now – it’s inked! Maybe some of these will be rewritten as actual text posts at some point in the future and I’ll have all the editing capacity I desire at that time.
It’s probably good advice that I will continue heeding.
This might be the most error-free document I’ve cranked out so far. That’s pretty exciting. I haven’t got any idea what happened with the “W” that starts a new paragraph up there, that one got a bit wild. I learned not to play too fast and loose with the margins shortly thereafter. Then I just had a few accidental key mashes, as one does.
That after-the-fact analysis is perhaps interesting only to me, but it’ll be the only place I really have a record of fewer mistakes over time. I am noticing that the improvement there is carrying over to computer keyboards. I’ve always been a bit of a fast typist but the “Backspace” key gets unreal mileage because I’m occasionally wildly inaccurate. Ironing that out won’t really convey a ton of benefits but it’ll be neat and that’s all that really matters.
As you can see from the above text, sometimes mistakes are part of the process. Those are things that I’d just edit out, obviously, in any other medium for presentation. However, I just don’t want to. If I ever transcribe these posts into some other medium, I’ll go over them and fix ’em then. It’s not that they don’t bother me, it’s just that I’d go through a lot of paper.
Also, I’m probably not using correction fluid. That feels like a bridge too far for posts such as these.
On a typewriter technical note, I find that the rollers in the Quiet DeLuxe don’t have nearly as much trouble grabbing that sheet. It was a slightly lighter weight than I’d been using and it seems to have made a tremendous difference. Since we’re discussing how tools influence your process, I’ll state that my process involved a lot less fiddling with the paper and trying to get it to be properly aligned. That was a pleasant experience.
This is another post that exists to convince myself of something and solidify my own arguments. At least, it’s as much that as something I want to put out into the world; maybe it’ll be useful! I’m usually very hesitant to write anything if I suspect that someone else already covered the idea to some greater or lesser extent. I’d like to get over that.
I do have a couple notes about the execution of the post itself:
The last sentence in the second-to-last paragraph is so clunky as to almost be nonsensical. I had intended to write “I’m arguing both you and myself into the idea” but what came out of my fingers is what you see up there. I’m not about to waste another piece of paper to re-write the whole thing and avoid one awful sentence. Another small mistake to live with, this is the way of things.
I also typed a few letters in a burst of speed that the machine couldn’t keep up with so well – it’s really evident in “consciously” and “material.” I want to call attention to that because it’s a clue as to how fast one can actually type on a typewriter that works well. That said, if I was better at operating these things, that kind of error wouldn’t happen – I just got ahead of myself and treated it like a computer keyboard, briefly.
I will admit that this one is half-baked but that just means that I have fertile ground to improve this idea later. I just really didn’t want to get back in the habit of not writing and posting something with a degree of regularity.
I figured I’d write about this instead of what I was going to write about tonight. Mostly because I experienced the exact situation that I describe above where I decided my initial idea had too many holes in it to make a good post.
Generally, I’m uncomfortable with the idea that I have anything useful to say in the first place. I don’t want to spend effort and put things online if I don’t actually use that effort to say something useful. It’s very much a “who am I to say such things?” question I pose to myself. I suppose that’s the second hurdle and it’ll be coming out in typewritten form tomorrow.
The answer to that, by the way, is probably best phrased as “who cares?” It’s unlikely that I will develop anything useful to say by not practicing.
In a technical note, I one of the rollers on the typewriter I used for this doesn’t like gripping this paper very much. You can see the effect of that a little where the thing decided to almost mash one line into another in the second paragraph. It eventually got its act together and the rest of the document is actually relatively well-aligned. If it wasn’t for trying to overcome those quirks, I don’t think this would be half as fun as it is.
I’m not entirely happy with this one, but it came off my machine and I feel like I have to post it as a result. I don’t post everything, of course, but I’m trying to widen the funnel a little bit because, as expressed above, one of the goals here is to just get used to the idea that I put work out there for people to read. If it’s not the best work, that’s fine – we’ll both be uncomfortable about it, then.
In terms of the production of this one, I am way happier with how the text is readable on a computer screen. I think the typewriter has some alignment issues that I’ll get around to correcting eventually. The machine that produced it (a Royal Quiet DeLuxe) is quickly becoming my favorite to use. Somehow the platen has life in it despite being original to the machine. I don’t know how that might be possible but I’m not questioning it.
Further thoughts along the same line as an earlier post. I just realized that I didn’t specify that these guitar lessons were jazz lessons. I figure it’s a little important to the narrative I was trying to build because that tends to be a bit more demanding, in terms of what you need to execute on your instrument, than singer/songwriter stuff. That difficulty caused some serious overthinking, which was ameliorated by the thought “to play the guitar, you have to play the guitar.” But since I have the benefit of text formatting down here, I’ll say it thusly:
To play the guitar, you have to play the guitar. The gist of it was that there isn’t anything that you should do that you aren’t doing anyway – just play the instrument as best you can and keep learning. This holds for solo work and ensemble work. I assume the mindset holds for most things you can get up to unless it’s like, surgery or something. That has a high enough margin for error that you maybe shouldn’t take my advice for that.
Also, I’m noticing that the typeface of that typewriter doesn’t really play so well on a screen. It looks great on paper. The machine in question (a Lettera 22) is really fun to work with but I might not use it as much if it produces stuff that’s difficult to read. It did make the phrase “stuck in a rut” look a lot like “stuck in a rat” which is kind of funny and also a rough predicament.
Typewritten 