"You can't delete any of you're written gems on a typewriter."
You mean 'your'?
I wish YOU had deleted something .. What you are saying here is "You can't delete any of you are written gems on a typewriter."
Does this make any sense to you? Do you like writing nonsense?
In any case, when you use a typewriter, it's more REAL, and the 'not being able to delete' is actually a feature. (Plus, you obviously never heard of 'white-out', so you're embarrassing yourself on two separate levels here.. kind of amazing, considering how short your post is)
It makes you type more carefully, hones your craft, and when you have finished your book, novel, story or whatnot, you have a nice bunch of slightly crumpled paper with dirt, stains, notes, typos, Xs typed over misspelled words and such, and it's a mess.
It's a beautiful mess, it's your real creation, it's your baby, it's something real and tangible, it's unique, it has personality, it's gorgeous.
Text on a computer screen is always going to be just text, it's boring, it's always in order, it's always clean and perfect. It has no personality the same way.
Of course you would have to re-type everything anyway, when you use a typewriter, and this is an added bonus, because it gives you an opportunity and an excuse to review everything you've written and maybe make some improvements and corrections along the way.
The end result will be much better than if you just lazily type it on a modern computer and press CTRL+S and go to sleep and then upload it to your publisher the next morning without even reading it again.
Inspiration is important in creativity, and you have to optimize your circumstances to maximise the possibility of maximum inspiration; some people compose music on real analog synths, some people make sure it's 3 am when they start their work, some people open windows and live near a forest, and so on.
Using a typewriter is a big step towards inspiration.
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avortac4 (3744)
3 years ago
There's also the added bonus number two; no possibly annoying / interfering electro-magnetic fields or constant noise that a computer makes (even laptops can be surprisingly noisy on a hot weather).
You also don't need electricity whatsoever, so you can do the typing off-the-grid. You also don't have to worry about battery life, about the computer overheating due to warm weather, about hard drive crashes or failures, about the computer crashing in the middle of writing while you haven't saved for a long time, and so on.
Typewriter also gives you a more intimate experience, you're more closely 'in contact' with what you're doing, because you are directly and mechanically manipulating paper - instead of having the distance, where you type something on a keyboard, and after electric impulses have gone through a thousand steps, something seemingly appears on an 'illusory' screen (pixels aren't REALLY real, you know), because the computer has been constructed to make all this happen, but not because you're directly putting a letter somewhere.
Typing is very close to handwriting - there's a lot to be said about creating pixel art, but hand-drawing is always going to be more direct and intimate, and you can immediately do it anywhere without restrictions, as long as you have pen and paper - you don't have to boot to an operating system or launch a word processor or text editor or find the file you were writing to continue, etc.. you can just immediately start smashing the keyboard - what could be more fun than that? What's more user-friendly than such immediacy?
Obviously I recognize the benefits of word processing and text editing, but having done my own experimentations in typing an interesting story on old eight-bit computers and such, I also realize how much more fun it can be to 'downgrade' to something just for the heck of it. And how much inspiration starts to flow when you give up the conveniences and advancements of modern tech.
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