When you come down to sit at a typewriter, you often have no idea what you are going to write. What makes is worse is every strike of the key is permanent. It is darned hard to correct to the extent that I just tend to go back to an error and X it out and start over. This leads to a very ugly page and also a very beautiful page at the same time.
What do I mean?
Well visually the text is messy, there are typos and corrections, missing spaces and blotches. Yet the beauty is in the creative process. Before you, captured in time, is the outworking of what is inside my mind in a creation process that can only be captured via a medium such as a typewriter. Sure a pen may do the same thing yet it is just slow enough for me to self edit as I go and make far less mistakes.
The typewriter gives me the speed I need to type at the speed of thought with enough friction that I am bound to make mistakes, or go off on unexplored tangents that might need correcting or revisiting.
Unless you were to look at track changes in a Word document, the thinking process is much harder if not impossible to see. Whatever you do with the computer will always look polished at the end as you will be able to edit and proof before you print.
In this medium however (typewritten) every imperfection hits the page and stays there. The beautiful imperfection is freeing as I do not need to think of how I say things, I can accept that I am going to make mistakes, it is probably going to be an ugly manuscript but the contents of it will be more true to me than anything written digitally.
Think of when you speak. You often do not know what the whole sentence will be before you start speaking. Much less the whole paragraph and more. You cannot delete what you said and that is what makes it authentic. I cannot delete what I type, and I didn’t really know what this sentence I am typing was going to look like, but I was able to enter a flow state, without self editing where I could let my stream of consciousness flow and let out what was inside.
This is my most authentic self. This is an outpouring of what is inside of me. This is a snapshot of my mind. A window into my thoughts. I look into my world. I glimpse of what goes on in my mind.
My very busy mind which is thinking nearly non stop and asking huge questions and having some pretty cool insights which I then very quickly forget! That is the other benefit of the typewriter. You as the writer get to read what you produced in a raw and unedited way. You start to understand how your mind works and you find you learn more about yourself as well as make amazing new connections.
You learn by writing, learning so much clearer when you can see the errors along the way such as writing with a pen or in this instance my typewriter. I cannot kid anyone, much less myself that I get it right all the time or that I have all the answers. Of course we all logically know that but when you read stuff online it is easy to forget that!
The edited polished blog with attractive imagery is impressive and well written. The video on YouTube has amazing sound, and a perfect video setup with a presenter sharing ideas clearly and with confidence. We see that and we unconsciously put them on a pedestal and put ourselves down! We stop creating because we cannot chase that sort of perfection it becomes a blocker to us.
Yet when I embraced the messiness of typing and realised the mistakes were as much lessons for me as much as a sign of authenticity to others, I felt so much freer to create.
Polished perfection is not as helpful I don’t think than tagging along with others who are working this out as they go too. Slick production is something I cannot relate to. It suggests that the person giving the advice is way ahead of me and rather than that being an inspiration it becomes something that discourages me. I built a podcast over 10 years. It became huge in it’s niche, with 3 events, sponsorship deals and more. I even added a YouTube channel and all that polished perfection I thought I needed to give was exhausting to produce and whilst what I would share came from the right place, and contained value, it was very often not my authentic self. Not the warts and all but the edited cleaned up version that could give the reader, listener or viewer the impression I was really much more authoritative than I am. That I really had my shit together more than they did.
This typewriter allows me to write as I think, learn from my mistakes, learn from putting things together as I think and finally show others that I am another human (not an LLM for example ChatGPT) who is winging it the best he can and managing to get on with life in a messy way.
Embracing the mess, the clutter, the imperfections are extremely freeing. I imagine my brand will continue to develop and I hope it becomes one of a normal chap, who doesn’t add polish to impress others, but shares from reality.
No AI was used to write this post. Just me, and my thermal typewriter! (65+ year old Smith Corona Electra 120).
