There is apparently something in New York called The Writers Room that rents space to writers and would-be writers to give them a place to work. A pretty cool concept, I think. But it's obviously populated with a bunch of wusses. Yep. Wusses. This article in the New York Daily News reports that a member of this little colony has been voted out because he uses, get this, a typewriter. Apparently the delicate nerves of the rest of the writers in this little colony are just too sensitive to deal with the muscular sound of words being slammed into shape by metal keys striking paper. Poor babies.
What's really funny is that the logo for The Writers Room is--get this--in a typewriter font!
It seems member Skye Ferrante took an eight-month hiatus from lugging his mother's 1929 Royal typewriter to his spot there and found, upon his return to the space he pays $1,400 a year for, that those in charge at The Writers Room had decided that all of the typewriter users had finally died off and such things would no longer be welcome in the quiet as can be confines of this high-minded colony of writers. They did relent and allow Ferrante to keep coming until his deal runs out at the end of June. Well, that was sure swell of them.
I know we all approach that scary void that is writing in different ways. Believe it or not, I still do rough drafts with a fountain pen and I even have some manual typewriters here I use to write rough drafts, letters and other things. I also compose on the computer many times but it's usually not my best work and it's usually not meant to be. My computer keyboard is where the workaday writing gets done. For things I care about, the best place to start is always with words directly on paper. I've got many reasons for that and chief among them is the ease of the delete key. I find many times I would like to have back words I deleted when I got distracted by the temptation to edit before my work was finished. I've already written about this process here in this blog, so I'll not go much deeper there--just scroll down.
I am prejudiced by my background here. I entered the newsroom after the days of typewriters on reporters' desks but not by much. And I learned to write under all kinds of pressure in a room without even the silencing effect of cubicles. It was just a bunch of desks shoved tight against each other and every desk was occupied by a reporter who was constantly talking on the phone, typing madly on the noisy keyboards of the early days of desktops and, oftentimes, the cacophony of reporters listening to tapes of interviews to try to double-check quotes on deadline. There was a copy desk still attached to the engraving department with pneumatic tubes. It was a noisy place and I cranked out 300 bylined stories a year in that din. And I never noticed. My words were always there in my head not hanging in that mid-air confusion of sound and furious activity.
Poor babies. They have to sit there in pristine silence with their own precious thoughts so ethereal that they could just drift away in the noise of someone banging those typewriter keys. Poor babies. I'm so sorry that writing is such a painful process like a migraine headache that requires a retreat to a dark, silent room to wrestle with the agony of getting words on the LCD. I'm sure their muses are such soft whispers that the sound of toilets flushing on the next floor up could drown out the most precious of nuggets of literary gold. Poor babies. It must be such a pity to have that thought stream broken by the sound of the doorknob being turned every time someone new enters the colony for a day's work. And, oh my God! That rustling sound of them taking off their coats! Really! I can't see how anybody can work in an environment so beset with noises that fracture the delicate dew-coated spiderwebs of words hanging right there in the mind. Poor babies.
Wusses.
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