Things To Knock Loose

I wrote my morning pages on my typewriter for the first (and maybe last) time. I've been typing short prose with it until now, mostly in service of testing. This was the first full, 8.5 x 11 inch page I've written with it and I have some thoughts.

It should be said that this was an unplanned thing, typewriting my morning pages. I was stuck, which I've been feeling a lot recently. I couldn't get myself to do the thing I needed to do, let alone open my notebook to quickly scribble down my morning pages.

The usual tactics helped but fell a bit short; walking, keeping a clean work space, breaking things up into chunks. But I remembered how good the tactile nature of fixing my typewriter had felt. Now that it's fixed, I reasoned that typing on it might similarly salve my stuckness.

It did.

It also came with a learning curve.

First, there's the more tactical stuff... like the technical setup and formatting.

Reformatting the margins tripped me up. The warning bell seemed to work fine when sliding the carriage, but wouldn't while typing. It was the darnedest thing. So, I'm going to take the bell cover off and see if the spring needs tightening on the mechanism that triggers the bell.

Stay tuned.

Then, there was another, more obvious, problem...

I had no idea where the bottom of the page was. Like, zero. It fully snuck up on me, mid sentence. Shit. Immediately, I felt a bit sheepish. The irony I'd walked myself into seemed to jeer at me. Here I am, software tech guy who specializes in configuring modern business systems, and I'd overlooked one of the most completely basic processes of using an analog machine. I felt like a cashier who couldn't make change without the help of a computer.

I guess I could mark the pages themselves lightly with a pencil or something, but I'd like to avoid that if I can. So my solution's to measure and mark one inch margins on all side of the backing sheet I've been using. Then, by drawing thick lines that run the length of the page at each mark, I'm hoping they'll show through when pressed up against the platen.

Next, there's the typing itself.

The whole idea of morning pages is to pull yourself out of your head a bit by keeping the pen moving on the page and not judging what comes from it. I figured much like penning my pages, typewriting them would offer the same constraints: no backspace, copy, or paste to interfere with the ink on the page. When crossing out words, I took to simply backspacing, then typing a big fat 'X' over any errors.

With time, I think typewriting can become another means of getting out of my head. Right now, however, the mechanics of setting the margins and stumbling over the occasional typo brought me right back in, instead of pulling me out of it. Even so, it did offer distraction. The feel and sound of the keys smacking the paper helped me loosen something I hadn't noticed was knotted up. While my writing flow may have been disrupted occasionally, so had my analysis paralysis.

I'd done what I set out to: I typed my morning pages.

Then I moved on to the next thing on my list.