ed_rex

More memeage: In this edition, Young Geoffrey remembers his first typewriter and presumes to compare himself to the Beatles twice and William Shakespeare, once.

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6. Where are you most comfortable writing? At what time of day? Computer or good ol' pen and paper?

I do most of my writing, creative and otherwise, at the keyboard. I've been typing since 9th grade, when I elected to take a typing course. I suspect the full-year thing would have been a hideous bore, but six weeks was enough to teach me about the home-row and other basics aspects of the Art, and to force me to do enough practicing that by the time I left that school to move to Toronto, I was probably touch typing 30 or maybe even 40 words per minute. I know clock in at about 70 words per minute according to online typing tests.

Of course, being an ancient Young Geoffrey, I did not learn to type on a computer. Nor even on an electric typewriter, not even within the not-so-ivy walls of the Lockerby Composite School in Sudbury.

No, I learned to type when "pounding out a story" meant one pretty literally pounded or hammered one's keys.

Four or five years ago, during one of my not-so-infrequent bouts with writer's block, I hauled out the portable manual typewriter my maternal grandmother had given me when I was a teenager, the weighty beast I had even taken with me when I hitch-hiked to the West Coast and back lo! these many years ago.

Like the Beatles trying to return to their roots with Let It Be, I thought that returning to mine by forcing myself to use a typewriter rather than my computer's keyboard might kick-start my creative juices, forcing me to re-write everything rather than to lazily cut and paste.

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