Obsolete Lessons in a Writer's Life
This morning I am writing with a view of my recently planted wild flower garden off the front patio. Morning birds sing. The locust are starting to buzz as this August day warms. My coffee mug, from a writers workshop I attended this summer atAnam Cara in West Cork, Ireland, sits to my left. It is in front of the printer connected to my laptop computer, but safely away from the exit line of the printed page. It's a lesson I learned hard and long ago and one of several in my writing life that is now obsolete.
I remember when I learned that paper quality was related to weight. Twenty-pound being the desired quality when submitting a manuscript. No erasable paper or onion skin accepted. I remember what a relief it was to have one of the new self-correcting typewriters. No more erasing or feeling around the edge of the typewriter for the typing eraser or looking under the notebook from which I was transcribing handwritten manuscript. No more discovering that the tiny bottle of correcting fluid was dry, just when I was about to snatch the last page from the machine and run breathlessly into the post office with my addressed Manila envelope at 4:58 pm. I remember discovering that dried out correcting fluid could be reactivated with water!
I remember my first typewriter with memory...It could retain about three lines of type, it could back up and correct exactly what you told it to. It had a line delay and could actually make a correction before the type went down, if you caught it in time. I remember when my neighbor, Ginger, who was married to a high tech kind of guy employed by what was then known as Sperry Univac, got a computer set up in her home. It took up one end of the living room. She allowed me to compose and print my weekly column for the Marine-on-St.Croix Messenger on it, saving me at least a couple of hours of frustrated time with my electric typewriter a week. When I made a typing error I only deleted the offending letter or letters. She counseled me that it was faster to eliminate the whole word or even the whole line. If I decided to change a word like more to or, I would only delete the m and the e. I just couldn't bring myself to waste...what? There was no more typing ribbon, no more white out solution, no more typing eraser. Somehow I couldn't get beyond the years of training and the concept of waste. I am still inclined to delete only the m and the e. I suspect that sometime in the future we, the human race, will discover that there is a limit to the capacity of cyber memory, like we discovered later rather than sooner that there is limit to potable water on the planet and a limit to how much polluted air our atmosphere can neutralize.
I remember sitting in my office/den/my husband's office/my husband's stereo center at four o'clock in the afternoon with wine in a one of a kind hand thrown coffee mug that Connie, another working from home Mom, had made. I had the big white stereo ear phones on and the volume on the Japanese made stereo tuner, which Mike had bought in Turkey in 1970, turned up as loud as it would go. The dial was set precisely to a spot between two local FM stations on the dial. I had learned that the white noise was just enough to allow me to concentrate on editing, while blocking out any disaster that might occur in the living room where my children and a half dozen neighborhood kids watched Sesame Street.
I remember the single most important lesson I ever learned as an at home Mom/freelance writer. I learned the lesson through the experience of my first electric typewriter. The electric return was powerful, fast and made me feel efficient and real, a real writer. The sleek machine had a carriage that was longer and lower than that on my manual typewriter. In fact, the top of the carriage was the exact height of my favorite coffee mug. It could hit an average mug solidly about an inch and half below the rim and tip the contents, whether coffee or red wine, onto neatly stacked manuscript pages with surprising speed. I went from productive real writer to a disaster sopping Mom in under 7 seconds more than once, until I learned to work with my coffee to my left.
I remember when I learned that paper quality was related to weight. Twenty-pound being the desired quality when submitting a manuscript. No erasable paper or onion skin accepted. I remember what a relief it was to have one of the new self-correcting typewriters. No more erasing or feeling around the edge of the typewriter for the typing eraser or looking under the notebook from which I was transcribing handwritten manuscript. No more discovering that the tiny bottle of correcting fluid was dry, just when I was about to snatch the last page from the machine and run breathlessly into the post office with my addressed Manila envelope at 4:58 pm. I remember discovering that dried out correcting fluid could be reactivated with water!
I remember my first typewriter with memory...It could retain about three lines of type, it could back up and correct exactly what you told it to. It had a line delay and could actually make a correction before the type went down, if you caught it in time. I remember when my neighbor, Ginger, who was married to a high tech kind of guy employed by what was then known as Sperry Univac, got a computer set up in her home. It took up one end of the living room. She allowed me to compose and print my weekly column for the Marine-on-St.Croix Messenger on it, saving me at least a couple of hours of frustrated time with my electric typewriter a week. When I made a typing error I only deleted the offending letter or letters. She counseled me that it was faster to eliminate the whole word or even the whole line. If I decided to change a word like more to or, I would only delete the m and the e. I just couldn't bring myself to waste...what? There was no more typing ribbon, no more white out solution, no more typing eraser. Somehow I couldn't get beyond the years of training and the concept of waste. I am still inclined to delete only the m and the e. I suspect that sometime in the future we, the human race, will discover that there is a limit to the capacity of cyber memory, like we discovered later rather than sooner that there is limit to potable water on the planet and a limit to how much polluted air our atmosphere can neutralize.
I remember sitting in my office/den/my husband's office/my husband's stereo center at four o'clock in the afternoon with wine in a one of a kind hand thrown coffee mug that Connie, another working from home Mom, had made. I had the big white stereo ear phones on and the volume on the Japanese made stereo tuner, which Mike had bought in Turkey in 1970, turned up as loud as it would go. The dial was set precisely to a spot between two local FM stations on the dial. I had learned that the white noise was just enough to allow me to concentrate on editing, while blocking out any disaster that might occur in the living room where my children and a half dozen neighborhood kids watched Sesame Street.
I remember the single most important lesson I ever learned as an at home Mom/freelance writer. I learned the lesson through the experience of my first electric typewriter. The electric return was powerful, fast and made me feel efficient and real, a real writer. The sleek machine had a carriage that was longer and lower than that on my manual typewriter. In fact, the top of the carriage was the exact height of my favorite coffee mug. It could hit an average mug solidly about an inch and half below the rim and tip the contents, whether coffee or red wine, onto neatly stacked manuscript pages with surprising speed. I went from productive real writer to a disaster sopping Mom in under 7 seconds more than once, until I learned to work with my coffee to my left.
posted by Martie | 9:30 AM
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