Clunky. Heavy. CHONKY. With ink-laden ribbons.

Ah, the memories.

My mom probably still has it. Collecting dust in a cobweb corner of her basement. Her old typewriter. Not the electric one (although they hold their own magical, whirring, nostalgic powers). Older still. That typewriter that felt like it weighed 100 pounds.

Outdated? Yes.

Do I miss it? Also yes.

There is something satisfying and final when you type something out on a piece of paper.

It’s not like on your computer where you can hit backspace and delete everything and start over, again and again and again.

You type something out. And there it is, in black-and-white, staring at you on the page, menacingly.

Sure, you can cross it out later. But I can see how a typewriter could give someone writer’s block. Like honest-to-God blockage. Not to mention the royal pain that it could be to change the ribbon.

Do I miss it? Sure. It’s nostalgic.

There’s a character in the movie, You’ve Got Mail, who is obsessed with old typewriters. I get it. He gets verrrrreh excited about his new electric typewriter.

And here we are 30+ years later.

Another classic typewriter scene: The Shining, where Shelly Duvall sees the pure insanity of her husband’s “writing.” It’s terrifying. Some pages look like poetry. Some pages look like paragraphs. Then the scene pans to her from the back. And we see Jack Nicholson come into the doorway. “How do you like it?”

I’ve been in little bookstores here and there that have a typewriter out and you can type the next line of the story, or a poem. It is intimidating to me for some reason. I can’t think of a good line to type. Next time I see one, I’ll type anything, just for practice.

What would you type on a typewriter?

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