A not-so-recent article in the New York Times raised the question of the writer’s isolation, going so far as to say we all belong behind bars. That, apparently, is the only environment in which we’re capable of creating our masterpieces. Regardless of whether or not we agree with this statement, it goes without saying that there’s something to be said for distraction. In Stephen King’s On Writing, he claims that if there’s anything a writer needs it’s “a door which you are willing to shut.” “The closed door,” he adds, “is your way of telling the world and yourself that you mean business.”

But even behind the safety of that closed door, if you’re taking King literally, is your writing machine. Given that we’re already well into the second decade of the twenty-first century, I’m willing to bet that your writing machine is also an e-mail machine, a blog machine, a magazine and newspaper machine, a Facebook machine, a Twitter machine, and in some cases a pinball machine. Even if the door to your office or bedroom or walk-in closet is shut tight and the cracks have been stuffed with strips of foam, the metaphorical door is still open. The e-mails are still coming. The tweets are still tweeting. Your friends are still unfriending you over all the gay rights stuff you’ve been posting1.

For most of us, writing is our core interest. It’s our passion, and every day we make more changes to our lives until they’re structured around first drafts, revisions, cover and query letters, class proposals, etc. If this sounds unfamiliar to you, I hope you’re enjoying your brief foray into an entertaining hobby before you move onto something more fanciful, possibly involving toothpicks. If this does sound familiar—excruciatingly so—then you’re also aware of the corollary truth about writers: the act of writing is agony. Of course there’s something exhilarating about it—something riveting—but if it were all roses we wouldn’t be notorious procrastinators. King advises writers to set a goal for themselves—a daily minimum—and to lock yourself in that closed room until you meet that goal. It sounds like punishment, when he says it, and in a way it is punishment, but without a doubt the kind that teaches us a lesson, that helps us grow. If we get one or two thousand words out of that confinement, we can’t hate ourselves for the pain we went through.

The problem, of course, is that metaphorical door left wide open, all manner of Internet blowing in with the leaves.

Over a year ago, I was trolling the basement rooms of an antique shop here in Minneapolis. I have a penchant for buying silver2 and was in the market for a butter dish. What I came across instead was a 1940 LC Smith Super-Speed—a behemoth of a machine that weighed a good 45 pounds. The ribbon was completely spent, but otherwise all the keys worked and the little bell rang every time I reached the end of a line. I had a friend with me and she told me buying a typewriter was the stupidest waste of $40 she could imagine. I ignored her, of course, and brought it home with a smile on my face. A few weeks later, after my ribbon had arrived in the mail, I used it to type a letter to my mother.

That’s what it was, primarily, for the first year I owned it—a letter writing machine. I love getting letters in the mail, and part of getting them is to be sure you send them. I had fantasies about using it for fiction. I imagined hauling it up to a cabin somewhere and writing a novel over the winter. I’m a romantic. Fault me for it if you wish. Even with that temptation, I kept writing all my fiction on my laptop.

I’m not sure what exactly triggered the decision to finally try it out for fiction. It was probably around the time when I decided that every single thing I wrote—120,000 word novel or 500 word character vignette—would require a completely rewritten second draft. Everything I did would be retyped, no matter what it was, for the sake of getting the damn thing right. With that thought at the forefront, I decided I’d give the typewriter a shot for my newest short story. It would be a shorter one—that I understood—and I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted it to look like. The results were startling.

I’m not a very fast writer. A first draft of a short story can take me a week or two, depending on how engaged I am. Other writers may find my predicament familiar: you finish a scene—even a short one—and lean back away from your computer like you’ve just run around a lake. The idea of jumping right into the next scene makes you sigh—you literally sigh, there at your desk—and instead you get up and go rummage through the kitchen, because surely there’s some coffee left in the pot.

What happened when I wrote at my typewriter was the exact opposite of this, meaning I didn’t even realize that time was passing. I sat down on a Saturday morning and wrote 3,000 words with a three minute break in the middle to get a glass of water. The whole story—and I’d written the whole story—took 90 minutes. Sure it was rough—sure it had its share of typos and crossed out sentences3—but the first draft was fucking done, almost like writing was something that didn’t require a little sweat, that didn’t feel like punishment. It was even fun, sitting there clacking away and listening to the bell ding every few seconds.

I wrote first drafts for five new stories in July. That’s a pace completely alien to me, meaning I have never worked that fast in my life—not even when I was in college and had no apparent familiarity with any tense but the present4. Four of these five drafts were done on my typewriter, averaging 1,500 to 2,000 words per hour. Again—these are only first drafts, and a good strong rewrite is needed for all of them—but you get the point. For the way I work, I’ve reached an ideal solution, using a machine that lacks not only Wi-Fi but every other use imaginable other than putting words on a page (quite literally, as it turns out). In fact I’m such a convert that I recently acquired another typewriter—a 1933 Royal Portable that’s so impossibly cute than I get all giggly every time I walk by it in the dining room. With the Royal, I’m one step closer to making my dream of writing a novel at that snowed-in cabin a reality. I am, by the way, planning on writing the next novel on a typewriter. If that seems crazy, remember that I wrote my first draft for my first novel in three months, going between a desktop and a laptop. I imagine I can one-up myself with my newfound process. If that’s the case, I’ll be sure to brag about it.

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1: “Can’t you just chill out and post pictures of cats and Lady Gaga like the rest of us?”

2: ie: trays, teapots, coffee urns, sugar bowls, serving platters, and any other variety of early 20th century paraphernalia that would go a long way in hosting a brunch replete with catty homosexuals, strong coffee, and ouefs en meurette.

3: The keyboard on your run-of-the-mill vintage typewriter is not the same as the keyboard on your run-of-the-mill modern computer. Shift+8 = apostrophe, for example. Shift+2 = quotation marks. Lowercase L = the number 1. Enough said.

4: Just to be clear: I was writing garbage in college. Garbage. But we all have to start somewhere.