I am a firm believer in doing the work required to maintain mental plasticity and for me this means writing.
I don’t have much of a publishing track record, I will admit. My only commercially published writing was over 20 years ago and was related to technical topics. My personal journal entries from the 2002-2006 period, covering the time period in which I lost my religious faith, have been available as a free Creative-Commons licensed e-book for years over on archive.org, but that’s about it. Most of my writing never leaves the confines of my personal journal.
And that’s OK. Writing is a joy. It is a tool. It is a way to explore inner space. I’ve been a writer for almost as long as I’ve been a reader, the vast majority of my time spent on this earth.
The two forms of writing that I share with the world most often and most effectively are blog entries such as this one and songs that I write. Both of these public forms of writing stem from my personal writing practice which I learned by reading books by writer and teacher Natalie Goldberg. The two books that sparked my interest in writing practice were “Writing Down The Bones” and “Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life”. I’ve since had the pleasure of meeting Natalie and thanking her for the massive impact those two books have had on my creative, personal, and professional life.
The writing practice that Natalie teaches approaches writing in a similar way as one might approach running. You don’t sit and wait for the running bug to strike you, you just pick a time and go to it. Do the thing for a predetermined time with regularity and let the action of doing the thing change you. Writing can be like that. You can just decide that you are going to write, set a timer, cut out distractions, and do it. Don’t worry about what you think you want to say, just keep words coming until they figure themselves out. If you make the space for things to be said, you will find that you have things to say.
I adopted this practice, timed writing sessions with no set goal other than being in the moment making words, when I was a teenager. I have used this practice to write novels, stories, poems, journal entries, blog posts, and song lyrics. I usually don’t know what I am going to write about before I get started. I just choose my weapons (computer, fountain pen, typewriter, pencil, what have you…), set a timer, and go at it. I like using technologies that make editing difficult because it makes me have to be more present in my writing if I can’t just backspace and correct. Autocorrect of all types is absolutely banned from my writing outside of a business context.
I highly recommend this practice to everybody who is human and capable of recording words via media. It’s good for you. It’s good for your mind.
I’m starting to think about finally turning to some of the long dreamt of long form writing projects I have fiddled with over the years. Getting a proper novel done, writing a memoir, cranking out a couple of the screenplays I have in mind. I have thought of myself as a writer for ages, I have fairly good proficiency with the essay/blog format and with songwriting. I am looking forward to branching out and leveling up my writing game.
The one thing I find is consistently challenging for me is maintaining momentum on larger writing projects over time. The memoir project, for example, has been nothing but a series of fits and starts for about 10 years. I’ve written and rewritten and rewritten portions of it so many times. I don’t even remember what I wrote most of the time, to be honest. I’m currently reading a book called It’s All Right Now by Charles Chadwick. The book is a fictional memoir of around 700-ish pages in which not a lot happens and the narrator is not a very interesting person and yet the book is lovely and I am enjoying reading it.
The thing I connect to about the main character, Tom Ripple, is that he just keeps plugging away at writing the record of his life and occasionally, as his perspective changes and time passes, he is tempted to go back and rewrite earlier sections with the benefit of hindsight. It’s a wonder that anybody ever finishes any sort of memoir given the way life continues to evolve and casts new shadows on old memories but the thing is, if you take writing seriously and just go at it, like the character in this book, you have to make decisions on what to keep, what to throw, what to highlight, what to leave unsaid, when to rewrite and when to leave good enough alone.
This is a lesson I need to internalize in order to write a memoir. I need to combine the timed, disciplined, focused writing sessions with some ground rules about not revisiting, not rewriting, not revising… at least not until a complete first draft exists.
So, that’s my new plan with my writing. I am going to get intentional. I am going to continue to blog, I am going to continue to write songs, I will obviously continue personal journaling, but I am also going to learn to work on longer projects. I’ve been writing a lot for a very long time. I crank out thousands of words that nobody reads every week, sometimes daily. I think I’m ready to become a memoirist and novelist. Why not?
I have COVID. It’s something I had managed to avoid up to this point because I have a history of chronic bronchitis and pneumonia as well as asthma. A killer lung virus was not high on my Christmas list. The good news is that I managed to avoid a COVID infection for over two years and in that time the medical treatments for COVID have advanced to the point where my case is so far been manageable. I was quite sick on Friday afternoon and by Sunday I was quite worried about developing severe complications so I did the smart thing and went to the Urgent Care. The doctor agreed that I needed intervention and prescribed the new anti-viral for COVID, paxlovid. Since I started taking it I have noticed a trend towards getting better rather than getting worse and I couldn’t be happier.
I’ve missed three days of work so far and I’m really tired and taking a lot of meds but I don’t see an ICU in my future if this holds. Knock on wood.
Anyhow, one of the side effects of being laid out sick for a few days is that I tend to catch up on media. Shows and movies I’ve been meaning to watch, books I’ve been meaning to read, games I’ve been meaning to play. The last few days have been no exception. I binged all five Dirty Harry movies, watched the second season of Russian Doll, read the final book in the EXCELLENT Noumenon trilogy (Marina J. Lostetter is maybe my new favorite sci-fi author if she can crank out this level of work consistently… wow) and spent some time playing Beneath a Steel Sky on my new MNT Reform Linux laptop, reacquainting myself with the world of non-corporate computing and open-source in a purer form than I normally use.
What I haven’t done is make additional progress on my new album, but that’s OK. Awkward Bodies is in the closing stages of recording our new album, which has been a ton of fun. I still have some bass parts to re-cut and some backing vocals to lay down, but there is an album tracked and getting ready to go out in to the world. This is very exciting to me as it represents the first album I’ve made in collaboration with a band in more years than I care to mention. My solo album will be a nice follow on.
I’ve had some time to ponder while laying around for the last few days and one thing I’ve pondered is the fact that I am almost constantly making things, fixing things, restoring things, writing things, but at some point in the last decade or so I stopped aiming to make larger projects out of the smaller things. On any given day I usually start and complete one or two small projects. I write a journal entry or repair a piece of technology or build something. So why, then, am I no longer trying to write novels, develop software applications, make movies, record albums, build businesses, or any of that?
I’ve never lost the creative urge, but I’ve lost the ambition to try to make anything coherent, larger, more meaningful. I have many theories as to why, and I have written about them in many a journal entry. I haven’t always even been particularly sure it was actually a problem. So what if I am no longer trying to do anything big? It was never really necessary in the first place, if I’m honest with myself. I just always thought that “making a dent in the universe” had a nice ring to it.
But something else has been going on, something less about big intent and more about small habits and patterns and over the last two years I’ve become more and more aware of those changes as underlying causes. I can’t, and don’t, blame everything on the culture or technology, but I am a person who has spent most of my adult life living in close symbiosis with technological advances in computers and communications. It’s my job, and something I’ve been interested in since early childhood. With each adaptation I have made to technologies (home computers, the internet, mobile phones, smart phones, social media, etc.) I have changed my habits and daily patterns. I have very much been both master and servant to my devices and their needs.
I have finally learned that my actual thought patterns, my levels and lengths of attention, my capacity to absorb and retain and use information, my sleep cycles and physical fitness, all of these are shaped by my habits and activities throughout the day and those habits and activities are shaped by my relationship to communications technology. I have also learned that it is possible to intentionally reshape that relationship, to regain control of it, even if my career is based in those very technologies.
I learned a long time ago from Buddhist teachers that it is very difficult to change your mind and from there change your self. Your mind is the core of your self. Waiting for a change of mind or thought before making changes to action is a lovely way to stay mired in your thought patterns for all eternity. The best way to change your mind is to change your practices and behaviors and allow your mind to change in response to the new stimuli. Ergo, if I want to have more attention span, if I want to regain the capacity for long-form creative work, if I want to redevelop the ability to be present and focused and to be ambitious with my intentions, the first step is to change the behavior patterns and practices that are creating that mental state.
So, that was what I set out to do. I made a conscious effort to rearrange my relationships to the technologies that have mostly shaped my life for the last 30 years.
I would like to say that I had a clear plan that this was what I was doing, but that would be giving myself too much credit. I just knew I had some unhealthy patterns that were creating negative mental states and I hoped that altering those patterns would lead to changes of mind. I wanted to stop being tethered to screens, stop responding to a constant influx of updates, messages, and notifications, stop chasing an endless flow of information, just stop. I wanted to start to live more like when I am backpacking. One foot in front of the other, present with the trail, not half-connected to some fake meta-universe. I decided to change my tech in order to change my patterns so I would change my brain. I won’t go through everything that happened, everything I tried, but I will summarize by saying that I decided I needed a divorce from the endless feeds of social media, podcasts, and the news. My smartphone needed to stop living in my pocket. My computing, whenever I chose to do it, needed to be rigorously controlled, with me totally in control of the experience and nobody else’s agenda pushing into my space. No ads, tracking, or reselling of myself to data brokers. And last, but certainly not least, I needed to find and learn how to use disconnected creative tools so I could be creative again without depending on the devices that were disrupting my brain.
Hence, a return to typewriters. Hence, a return to vintage, pre-internet “retro” computers. Hence, fountain pens. Hence, film photography. But the retro-analog thing wasn’t even really the point. It was more important to my project that I adopt technology that was disconnected than that it was analog. The goal was to return to focus, disconnection, presence of mind, concentration, not to make a fetish out of old gear. So, I also adopted two very modern solutions: I acquired a standalone 32-track digital multi-track recorder so I could record music without using a computer and I acquired a computer that is entirely free of proprietary hardware and software and which has nothing on it or about it that I did not choose.
I ordered this computer a couple of years ago. It was made by some hackers in Germany as a “free as in speech” project that was crowdfunded. No mega tech corporations involved in making the hardware or the software. It’s called an MNT Reform and there are only a few hundred of these machines in existence and it took over two years to get it delivered. It was worth the wait. It’s a symbol, sure, but as an artist I’ve always honored the power of symbols. It’s also a tool that makes me feel free when I use it, rather than making me feel as if I’m being guided along by some invisible hand whose motives are beyond me.
I’m kitted out. I can write, shoot, record, edit and publish without giving over my control or agency. My communications patterns are radically altered. I feel healthier than I’ve felt in a decade. I don’t yet know what I’m going to create, but I can report that the changes in my habits and patterns over this stretch of time have started to create the hoped for changes in my thoughts and feelings. I may not yet be spending extensive hours in the recording studio, but I have been enjoying spending extensive hours in the darkroom and behind a typewriter or a camera or playing a guitar. I may not yet have written a novel, but I have found new joy in writing and spending focused time doing it, indeed I’ve developed several new types of writing practice for myself.
For many years, as far back as a decade, I’ve felt unglued, unmoored, as if the world was flying by at a pace that removed all joy or even the opportunity for it, like every day was an endless feed, nothing really mattering for more than a minute or two, nothing could really stick. Everything was one little dopamine hit after another and nothing really made a dent. I wondered if that was just a side effect of aging or my career or other events in my life, but the fever really took hold and broke through the Trump presidency and the pandemic and the overall insanity of world events during the last few years. I came to realize that, yes, the world is an endless feed of events happening and, no, nothing inherently matters for more than a moment or two, if you always move on to the next thing. And there is always going to be a next thing. You cannot ever catch up, you cannot ever win, you cannot ever make it change. You can, however, change your relationship to it. You can stop being addicted to it. You can detach from the streams and services and corporations and media outlets and technologies that thrive on your attachment to them. You can choose to live fully in the life you have on a daily basis rather than vicariously through the ambient intimacy and perpetual thirst trap of the modern digital culture. Sure, it might be an over-correction to replace your 5g smartphone with a quill pen you hand carved from a found turkey feather, but maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s exactly what you ought to do. At least for a while. Give your brain a chance to catch up, slow down, chill out, and reconfigure.
At least, that’s how it’s looking to me. Look at that, I just wrote over 1900 words. It’s working.
Yesterday I drove to an estate sale in southeastern Minnesota and purchased a 1933 Klein-Adler 2 typewriter. I am not even sure how many typewriters I now have in my possession. This year of our lord 2020 has turned into “the year Ryan started collecting old typewriters”. I blame the pandemic. Why not?
It started innocently enough. I had a lot of pandemic downtime on my hands and when I have idle time I tend to write. I write almost every day. I type, I scrawl, I scribble. Pens, computers, typewriters, I use them all. I seem to have a non-stop need to be saying things and when there isn’t anybody there to say them to, I write them down.
I’m writing this blog post on a computer; modern laptop with modern software on the modern internet. Nothing particularly unusual there, right? I have learned, however, that I don’t like modern computers for certain types of writing. I can’t write a poem on a computer, for example. I’ve tried. I can only seem to do that with a pen on paper. More insidiously, modern computers contain within themselves too many distractions and temptations for me. The temptation to hop online and look something up and then spend the next three hours on social media or reading Wikipedia articles or stupid viral listicles instead of writing is ever present. Even if you avoid these grosser temptations and actually do some writing, the ways in which modern computers enable real-time editing, spell-checking, auto-complete, word suggestions, and grammar correction change the nature of the writing process. On a modern computer you can just kinda spew out whatever is on the top of your head, revise it as you go so that it has just enough polish to be dangerous, and click publish to share your work with the world.
It’s powerful, but I find that it leads to a shallower, less thoughtful and deliberate, writing process. I have revised this post extensively as I have written it, second guessing myself, wiping out whole sentences with a click. Last week I read the new Obama book, “A Promised Land”, and he expressed how I feel about word processing fairly well when he explained his decision to write his book in longhand on yellow legal pads by saying, “I still like writing things out in longhand, finding that a computer gives even my roughest drafts too smooth a gloss and lends half-baked thoughts the mask of tidiness”.
The “mask of tidiness” covering “half-baked thoughts” may be fine for a blog post, a tweet, or some other ephemeral bit of word salad, but when I really want to Write this is not what I’m looking for. I’m looking for a process that will force me to really be present for what I’m doing. I have yet to discover any better way to do this than to use a typewriter.
Remington Quiet-Riter
This is something I have known for a very long time. I bought my first typewriter (a lovely 1950’s Remington Quiet-Riter https://www.antikeychop.com/remington-quiet-riter-typewriter) in fifth grade when I was convinced that I wanted to grow up to be H. G. Wells and decided to write my first of many unpublished/uncompleted novels “The Second Men In The Moon”. My parents gifted me a more modern, electrified, machine in middle school, a Smith-Corona SL500 (https://typewriterdatabase.com/Smith+Corona.SL+500.86.bmys) and I used it through high school as I wrote such unreadable classics as “The Palace of Conservative Haircuts”. I didn’t even know about word processors until I was introduced to the Macintosh during my sophomore year in high school in a creative writing class. I had only used computers for programming and video games, I never thought about computers as being useful for writing.
Smith-Corona SL500
After high school I attended CDI Computer Academy and embarked on a career in software development that would span the public explosion of the internet, the invention of smart phones, and all of the other high tech innovations of the last 25+ years. In that first year at CDI, I had a class in which I learned typing and another in which I learned to use the old DOS word processor WordPerfect. I moved on from typewriters, viewing them as obsolete. I don’t even know what became of my Smith-Corona SL500. Probably a Goodwill donation or a trade in at a pawn shop for a few bucks.
Olivetti Lettera 36, aka: “The Gateway Drug” (image from MassMadeSoul.com)
This changed about eight or nine years ago when I encountered a little electric typewriter at a thrift shop that was just, well, COOL. It was an Olivetti Lettera 36 (https://www.massmadesoul.com/olivetti-lettera-36). I knew nothing about Olivetti, I knew nothing about their history of iconic industrial design, heck I knew almost nothing about typewriters, but the thing was just so damn COOOOOOOL and it was, like, ten bucks or something, so I brought it home. I found out pretty quickly that I missed typewriters. After years and years of writing on computers, the typewriter felt so radically different that it made me think differently as I wrote. A word processor and a typewriter both end up giving you words at the end of the day but the process is just so different, it was like playing an acoustic guitar instead of an electric guitar: the thing written would be shaped by the tool used to write it.
The typewriter certainly seemed to promote more creative writing and I fairly quickly put the little Olivetti to use in my recording studio as part of my songwriting process. When I write songs it’s usually something like this. I get a melody and maybe one or two lines in my head. I start listening to that part of the song and wait for my brain to fill in the rest. Then I go grab something to preserve whatever little song seed I’m jamming on. I will sing into a tape recorder or voice recorder app if I have to, or I will scribble down some lyrics on a sheet of paper. Later on I will get in front of a keyboard or pick up a guitar and work out the song. I will expand and revise the lyrics and write down the chords once I discover what they are. The resulting song sheets are messy with lines crossed out, chords written in the margins, and sometimes whole verses and choruses in the wrong order or in totally different notebooks from each other. Fun, but not easy to work off of when you want to, oh, say, record the song.
Now, I could put all of that mess into the computer, and I usually did, but I would always find myself wanting a printed paper copy to scribble notes on, reference, and play along with. I forget my own chords and lyrics, especially when a song is still new to me. I just needed one hard copy that didn’t look like the ravings of a lunatic. The problem was that ink jet printers SUCK almost as much as my handwriting. Seemingly every damn time I would try to print up a hard copy, the ink would be unreliable, nozzles dirty, whatever. If you don’t print with an ink jet every day they are basically useless. I didn’t have a laser printer with the nice dry non-shitty toner. So, instead of working on my song I would wrestle with the printer for 20 minutes cleaning nozzles and then give up and go eat a bag of Doritos and be sad.
The typewriter solved this. I could just turn it on, grab a sheet of paper, and type up my song. Woot! I was so happy with this minor miracle of convenience that I started eyeballing other typewriters at other thrift stores but I was faithful to my little Olivetti until one day when it died on me and I couldn’t make it work anymore. Crapsticks.
Underwood #5
I wound up with a rather unexpected next typewriter, an Underwood #5 (http://www.thisisdrivel.com/typewriters/UnderwoodNo5/UnderwoodNo5.html), a machine that was probably the most common typewriter in the world prior to the mid-1920’s. You cannot get much further from a Lettera 36 than an Underwood #5. The thing weighs about the same as a Toyota Camry and has an equivalent amount of sex appeal. It brings to mind adjectives such as “workmanlike”, “sturdy” and “reliable”. Ain’t nobody slinging an Underwood #5 in their carry-on for a bit of late night writing during a weekend jaunt.
But it was functional and charming in it’s own way and I lugged the damn thing home. After a while I partially disassembled it with the idea of turning it into a USB Typewriter (https://www.usbtypewriter.com) but I never completed the conversion. The fact that it wasn’t working, however, did lead me to snag another machine at yet another thrift store.
Smith-Corona “Corona Seventy”
This next typewriter was another electric from the 70’s, a Smith-Corona “Corona Seventy” (https://typewriterdatabase.com/1970-smith-corona-clipper-seventy-deluxe.3324.typewriter). Like the Lettera 36 before it, the Seventy had a kinda cool design, was portable, and was a lot of fun to pound away on. Also like the Seventy before it, it started experiencing minor malfunctions of the aging electric components. This whole “old electric typewriter” thing was proving to be fairly unreliable, so, I looked for something old and cool but mechanical, no electricity. I figured that would be less trouble. Eventually I found a 1965 Royal Aristocrat (https://typewriterdatabase.com/1965-royal-aristocrat.13819.typewriter) and pretty much fell in love. The Royal looked good, typed well enough, and was always reliable when I needed it. It was portable and did everything I asked of it. For a few years it was “my typewriter”. But then 2020 happened.
1965 Royal Aristocrat
This year I started doing so much writing that the limitations of the Aristocrat started nagging at me, just as the irritations of trying to write on a modern computer did. I fought with the Royal a bit more than I would have liked and started combing online auction sites, online thrift stores, Craigslist listings, and online estate sales with an eye towards finding The Perfect Typewriter. Things went, um… a little off the rails.
First I did research. I watch the documentary California Typewriter. I read blogs. I searched for “best typewriter for writers”. I found many opinions and much interesting information. I started to notice that usually when the appearance of a typewriter caught my eye it was an Olivetti. They had style. I also noticed that most people seemed to agree that the three most “writerly” typewriters of all time were the Olympia SM-7, the Hermes 3000, and the Olivetti Lettera 32. The internet was full of loving posts by diehard aficionados singing the praises of the three machines. I also learned that many typewriters are essentially Lettera 32 machines with different bodies, including what is probably the most eye-catching typewriter of them all, the Olivetti Valentine.
My 1969 Olivetti Valentine
There was a pandemic on. I was in a bad mood. I was scared, figured that if I got COVID, with my history of chronic lung issues, I was a goner. So, I splurged and picked up a Valentine. It was not a thrift store special. This thing cost a couple hundred bucks but when I saw it and used it for the first time I was bitten by the typewriter bug HARD. We’re talking WELTS. The resulting infection caused me to experiment with all sorts of typewriters. All year I’ve been haunting estate sales and auctions, grabbing any unloved and unwanted Olympia, Olivetti, Smith-Corona, Adler, Remington, Silver-Reed, or Underwood that happened to strike my fancy. I’ve learning basic typewriter restoration skills and bestowed a few machines on others who were typewriter-curious. I have a pretty solid little collection at this point. Art deco machines from the 30’s and 40’s, East German behemoths and Swiss beauties from the 50’s, compact and swift Italian and Japanese machines from the 60’s and 70’s, I’ve got a machine for every mood and every whim. It’s a fun little collection and not exactly a bank breaker, since so many people consider the typewriter to be quite obsolete.
I’ve found that if I keep my eyes open, there are excellent, high quality, solid, beautifully engineered machines available all over the place for around the price of a couple stops by Super World Buffet (yes, I measure monetary expenditures in Chinese buffet visits, don’t judge me) and usually they just need paper, a ribbon, and maybe a little light lubrication and cleaning.
This 1956 Olivetti Lettera 22 was purchased off Craigslist for $30 from the original owner in mint condition with a case.
It’s fun to have a new hobby and each time I take one of these little machines out for a bout of writing, I find myself inspired in a way I rarely am with a computer. What will I type with today? I don’t know, but I’m sure it will be a rewarding experience.
Edit: I went with the 1958 Smith-Corona Silent-Super.
