What Happened to the Great American Novel & the typewriters that typed them? AKA Unplug & Start Writing Already!

Hemingway at his Underwood Noiseless. We sell a similar one here.

Today, they say anyone can be a writer with self-publishing. And by the sheer volume of pages printed by Amazon each month, it must be true. Yet that special something that made writing the Great American Novel what it was is auspicious in its absence.

The thing that keeps buzzing around in my mind is whether the loss of the Great American Novel and the writers who wrote them can be linked to the time when word processors and computers replaced typewriters.

The real tragedy is that so many Americans still aspire to write the Great American Novel but never make it past the chirps, beeps, pokes, mentions, story reading, and story posting. Ugh, yep, the writers who could be writing the next Great American Novel are fighting a losing battle with the distractions of social media.

In this blog, we will explore the world of writing with a manual typewriter in the computer age. If Jurassic Park is any indication, dinosaurs should be brought back. Oh, wait. They ate a lot of people in those movies. Maybe we should leave out the dinosaurs and just get our writers unplugged so they can do what writers should write.

Why is writing on a computer so challenging for many people?

When computers arrived on the scene, word processors had only been out a short time. They offered instant editing, and some even had dictionaries installed on them. Suddenly, you could correct typos as you went instead of typing them and circling mistakes in red ink.

Then we got the computer, and low and behold, we had a dictionary and a thesaurus, and we got to edit as we wrote! Holy moly, these were glorious days for writers. Yet despite these advances, something happened to throw a wrench in the editing as your writing phenomenon.

Many writers began to write slower. Sometimes ponderously slower. What could have gone wrong? We had editing software built into the computers, and we knew that we had made a mistake as soon as we made it. Oh, it was not as easy to add words to the dictionary, and programming was done, and that can of worms is best left to the annals of history, yet something went wrong for the writers of that time.

That was in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Today, computers are as recognizable to a Wall Street attorney as a Neanderthal man is. Over the years, word processors have evolved and gotten better until we can have real-time co-writing between an author in the USA and one in Antarctica. Not to mention speech-to-text, Grammarly, and all the rest of the built-in editors that are supposed to help us write faster.

So why does all that editing as we go speed up the actual writing process?

Could it be that editing and writing are not the same thing? Could the fact that we have to stop or at least pause the flow of the words to edit and then resume the writing be the problem? I have often found that each time I notice all those underlines as I am writing, it is a minor distraction.

Of course, as the page fills with text and the underlines grow in number, it can become more than a minor distraction. Grammarly, the Hemmingway app, and even Pro Writing Aid all have plug-ins so they can work right in the word processor or even your email as you are writing. So, is editing something that should come after we write, or is it meant to be completed as we write?

Poke, ding, buzz, ring pop-ups, and notifications from social media, email, apps, and programs are constantly demanding our attention…

Yes, this is part of the modern computer world, and somewhere in there, we are supposed to focus on writing. This is like sending a fat kid to eat all three meals at fast food restaurants and sleep in a candy factory with free samples all night long.

The kid would not lose weight, and who would face the blank page when so many demands of our attention are never-ending? Wait! Who said you can just silence all of them for an hour or a day?

That is so amazing! Of course, that would work. And the kid could just order the one healthy food choice at the fast-food chain and take an apple to the candy factory. What could possibly go wrong?

Yes, I am being sarcastic. I have been fighting this fight for years. Shutting things off that are available at a click or nudge of the mouse is not the same as forgetting they are there. Even if we stop hearing all of those annoying notifications, we still know they are going off.

What memes are we missing? Would it really matter if we stopped here and checked our messages? What if it's important?

Writing is a lonely art for most of us. The blank page has always been daunting for writers. Ask any agent or publishing house how well writers meet deadlines, and most will tell you that writers ignore them. There are always exceptions, but most of us struggle with deadlines.

I have written on a computer since grade school when my mom took a third job to get me a computer back then. I’m not proud of it, but I am proud of her and the sacrifices she made for me. I would take my notebook home each night and type in what I had written that day.

Mom took a computer class when I was in fifth grade, longer ago than I care to remember, and was angry that what she was learning did nothing to help her actually use a computer. She could memorize facts about the bits and bytes and dos, but even then, using the computer didn’t rely on that. Only the programming of one did.

Today, she has a computer and uses it to play games and work on her children’s stories. However, she does a lot of the actual writing on an old-fashioned typewriter. The reason she uses the old-fashioned typewriter is to keep people from stealing her ideas and stories.

I used to think she was being paranoid, but with major companies hacked every week, I am no longer sure of that as I once was.

What’s the answer to all of this?

Much like how we find our ideas and put them together, each of us has to answer for ourselves. What I can say is that I find writing without editing to be an amazing experience.

I went to a carnival once and spent $5.00 to see an automatic writer. This man looked like anyone else except for some makeup and his costume. But once I started focusing on an idea, he closed his eyes and started writing with his left hand, and it was uncanny.

He didn’t write my ideas verbatim, but at the time, some of the plot of the sci-fi novel I was focusing on in my head ended up in that page and a half of his. And I never spoke about that story idea to anyone, let alone a man I had never met.

The point is that every writer must find the magic switch inside themselves to allow the stories to flow out. The problem is that, like a water pipe, that flow can be slowed or even cut off. Unlike with a plugged-up sink, there is no plumber available to fix the writer's word flow when it gets plugged.

That is despite the numerous books and classes claiming to do just that. The point of all of this is that the easiest way to fix a plugged-up writer, aka writer's block, that I have ever found was to simply do what that automatic writer did.

In that tent, it was that ordinary man, a pencil, a few pages of unlined paper, a table and two chairs, and me.

For me, I started using old-fashioned writing methods after my stroke five years ago. I couldn't write. It was more than relearning to use my right side. Telling stories was something I did from when I was a toddler, and until my stroke, I never stopped. How I shared them evolved, but it never stopped. I never learned how any more than I learned to breath.

I broke my expensive laptop from frustration back then. I was convinced that I would never write again. Then, one day, while I was sitting at my desk with nothing to do because I no longer had a computer, I found my Bic mechanical pencil and a notebook in a drawer from years before. It had a story in it. I had started when the power was out during a snowstorm.

I started writing with that pencil, and for whatever reason, the words flowed freely again. I eventually was able to use my right side, and today, other than a slight sag on that side of my face, which I am told is not noticeable to most people, you would never know I had that stroke.

When I find the words slow or dry up, I reach for a pencil and notebook. Other writers I know use manual typewriters, computers with no internet, or a voice recorder and speak the words.

After all, you can't have a clogged pipe when there is no pipe…

Voldane Pelt

The Classic Typewriter Company. Bringing reality back to writing.

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