I just got done writing a short story on my new typewriter, and the one thing I really appreciate about the experience is how … relaxing it has been.
I don’t know what it is about working on the typewriter, but I don’t feel the usual stress of constantly thinking “Is this good?” “Where should this bit go?” “Am I doing justice to this dialogue between these characters?” while I’m writing my first draft.
You know how people tell you that the first draft should just be about telling yourself the story, just getting it down on paper? It actually felt like that this time, without forcing anything.
I think it’s partly the fact that you can’t really edit anything you’ve already written, so you’re just moving forward. So the editing part of my brain is simply not working when I’m writing on the typewriter, even for the kind of tiny edits I usually make when I write on the computer (like just now when I went back to change “really not working” to “simply not working” to avoid using “really” too many times in this post).
Even when writing a story with pen on paper, I’m usually looking back and making changes or writing little notes to myself. None of that here – the most I’ve done is, when I read the whole thing back this afternoon before writing the final chunk, I made a margin note that I need to add a few sentences between two points early on when I do the second draft.
I think it also forces you to think ahead and hold more of the story in your head while you write, while still not working from a nailed-down outline which (for me at least) saps some of the spontaneity from the writing process.
In sum, I really enjoyed this, and plan to do a lot more of it. I’m not sure it’d work with a comic script, but it might be worth a try.