A typewriter to set me free
This blog was supposed to be a life hack to help me overcome writer’s block. Three weeks and not a single post, so perhaps not the magic bullet solution. I need to learn how to write more fluently, without distractions (i.e., the internet!) and without the habit of constantly revising, editing, censoring. The computer can kill people like me, short on willpower. I can spend hours chewing over the same four paragraphs. Plan B: a typewriter! I’m waiting until a good used one pops up on Craiglist. I’m not sure how my roommates will enjoy the noise, but I know I’m addicted to Google, Wikipedia and Gmail, and I’m crap at pen and paper. I’m meeting myself halfway.
In the meantime, I’ve installed a nifty program which can simulate the unforgiving memory of a typewriter. It’s a simple, blank screen that allows you no recourse to the backspace or cut-and-paste. Whether I fall in love with my physical typewriter or just continue to use the program, I think neither will replace traditional word processing. Rather, they would be a way to retrain a very weak and neglected muscle, and perhaps liberate me from the tyranny of being able to redo every thought a thousand and one times.
At the very least, after a decade glued to this screen, eight hours a day, my eyes will welcome the break.
My first experiment:
I am crippled by fear. Not the fear of jumping–what did they used to call it? something to do with a bomb into a tepid swimming pool. A swimming pool in Orlando in say, March. That I can do well. That Kind of bravery requires s a moment of crazy and then you just deal with the consequences. Too late. No choice. Quite a different thing , daily, silent strength. The strength to not constantly judge, self-censor, every word a referendum on whether or not I have the right to speak. We all regret the past bt but know it can’t be changed, so we learn to live with it. What if we all he had time machines like we have iPhones and it were possible to constantly return to some injustice inflicted upon us in the sandbox or a clumsy moment last week or two minute ago because now you’ve thoguht of the perfect comeback two minutes too late. We would e never move forward. We would stand still. We would live the same relationships over and over agan again, believing that the meaning of life was in the perfecting of it. Would my life have been more beauitful beautiful if I had done everythin g right? f If I could live each day for, five, a thousand times until I got it just right? If I cold could write this paragraph, four, five, a thousand times until it was perfect. Wold Would it really be that much h beter? Maybe the idea matters more than the form, the atempt attempt more than the execution. I can look aback at this paragraph and appreciate the idea, decide if it’s worth salvaging or not. And it took eme me only a few minutes to hammer this out. If I had been writing this in Microsoft Word or my Wod WordPress typew I could have easily spent twenty minutes shaping sculpting a piece of shit idea into a masterpiece, lost in the words, not making it so X making it so beautiful that I might confince convince myself it wasn’t just a…a symmetric shit pile is stil l a shit bile ile. piel pile. If I hiad be If I had been writing i this in Microsoft Word, I could have easily spent twenty minutes sculpting this into a masterpiece, lost in the words, the perfecting of the words he words the words, instead of asking msy myself the real question: is it worth excavating the instead of asking myself the real question: is this the truth?
March 16, 2010