Are typewriters the new vinyl?

When Kimberley Hui sits down to write, the first words she produces are “Hello, Iris”. Iris is her Olympia Traveller Deluxe typewriter, made in Yugoslavia in 1970. Iris makes the writing process really smooth, she says.

I used typewriters in my first job as a journalist. They were not smooth. They were clunky, noisy monsters, chained to the office desks because a drunken journo had once thrown one out the window. I was always making mistakes, throwing away the paper and starting again. I spent a lot of time swearing at my monster.

But other writers got hooked. Typewriters.com reveals that quite a few famous authors who began their careers with typewriters resisted the lure of computers. Cormac McCarthy wrote for 50 years on an Olivetti Lettera 32 he bought at a pawnshop in 1963. He never serviced it, just blew out the dust. Danielle Steel wrote 190 books on a 1946 Olympia called Ollie. She refused to give up Ollie because she was “very low-tech, I do everything wrong on a computer”.

More recently, younger generations of writers who grew up with computers have been discovering the joys of the typewriter, much as their peers have discovered vinyl records.

Kimberley Hui with Iris, her typewriter: “I find the noise very comforting.”

Hui, who writes architecture reviews and fiction on three typewriters, will run Typewriter Club, a workshop for Writers Victoria on February 15. She hopes to meet fellow enthusiasts and also pass on practical tips to new users, such as where to go for servicing and repairs.

She grew up with her mother’s electric typewriter and always wanted one of her own, but what really inspired her were the Divine Rivals series of fantasy novels by Rebecca Ross, where two young journalists in a world where the gods are at war go on adventures with magic typewriters.

The best-known typewriter nerd is Tom Hanks, who is both a user and a keen collector. There’s a video where he shows you how to change a typewriter ribbon. He calls them “brilliant combinations of art, engineering and purpose”. He’s especially fond of the clacking sound of the keys: “the cadence of creativity, the percussion of punctuation. You get lost in it, it will spur you on to other areas of imagination.”

Why go back to the old technology? “I find the noise very comforting,” Hui says. It’s particularly useful when she has writer’s block: “It’s similar to the idea of free writing, trying to write without crossing out too much. You’re put in a position where you have to go along with the flow.” Not only are there no distractions from the internet, there is also no distraction from the impulse to edit as you go along and slow down your writing.

Of course, there comes a moment when the writer wants to send an article, an essay or a novel to a publisher who will only accept electronic submissions. So then the work must be copied or typed on a laptop. But that’s fine, Hui says. It’s just another stage in the editing process.

Daniel Marleau, who has a guide for writers on his website Typewriter Review, is almost evangelical about the typewriter’s benefits. “Your brain will sense that you’re on the high-wire without the safety net of editing and will respond with a creativity survival response,” he writes.

“The sound of keys striking paper begins to feel like music and when you stop writing, even for a moment, you’ll feel compelled to continue because there’s no reward in silence. Your words are your music. They are the soundtrack to your story. And the typewriter is the instrument.”

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