I dictate my texts. I use Grammarly to fix my commas. I use ChatGPT to brainstorm titles.
Writing has become frictionless. And because it is frictionless, it is often thoughtless.
For this post, I bought a 1965 Remington Typewriter. I have no backspace. No copy-paste. No spellcheck.
I typed this entire post on paper, scanned it, and transcribed it here.
The following is the raw experience of mechanical writing.
THE PHYSICALITY OF THOUGHT
My fingers hurt. You have to HIT these keys. It iis not a tap. It is a punch.
Every letter requires commitment. When I type 'A', a metal arm swings up and smacks the ribbon.
WHACK.
It feels satisfying. Anger management via alphabet.
THE PERMANENCE OF ERROR
I just made a typo. I spelled committment commitment wrong.
On a laptop, I would backspace and nobody would know.
Here, the mistake stares at me. I have to xxxx it out. The page is messy.
The page shows my history. The page shows my struggle.
NO EDITING, ONLY FLOW
I cannot move this paragraph up. I cannot "fix it in post."
I have to think the sentence through BEFORE I start typing.
This slows me down.
But it also mkes But it also makes me deliberate.
I am not vomiting words on a screen. I am carving them into pulp.
> THE "DING"
The bell at the end of the line is the greatest notification sound ever invented. It tells you "Good job, you finished a line. Now throw the carriage return." Zip-CRUNCH. It is a physical rhythm. Clack-clack-clack... DING... Zip-Crunch. It puts you in a trance state that a silent Macbook keyboard cannot match.
> THE REWIRE
After 2 hours of typing, I tried to check my email on my laptop. I found myself hitting the laptop keys way too hard. I almost broke the spacebar. My brain had re-calibrated to "Heavy Industry" mode.
> CONCLUSION
The typewriter is not efficient. It is loud, heavy, and unforgiving. But the words I wrote on it feel heavier too. They feel earned. I won't write every blog post on this. But when I need to write something that matters, something that needs to be etched rather than processed... I'm bringing out the Remington.