Corona, Futura and Stephen King's Wang

My friend Brian uses a typewriter (1938 Corona Sterling) and recently sent me a bit of correspondence using said typewriter. To be honest, it was kind of cool. It's been a long time since I'd read/seen something typewritten. I thought about how I should respond. I thought about using my own typewriter (a Royal Futura 800, gifted to me by my friend Justin) but after a long side eye from the wife, I decided to just send him an email in return. But it did get me thinking about typewriters and the tools we use to write. 

When you think about it, until relatively recently most "writing" was done on typewriters. There are still some writers that still use typewriters not unlike my Futura or Brian's Corona. And we're talking about people that don't write small books. David McCullough, Robert Caro, Cormac McCarthy and even Danielle Steel. I think about my last post. How much of Wheel of Time was written on a typewriter? I mean great googly moogly, that's a lot of paper. That's a lot of ribbon. That's a lot of time. 

There's almost a romance to it. The sounds alone: the platen makes when you roll the paper in, the click-clack tapping of the keys, the typebar hitting the paper, the ding at the end of the line and the thunk of the carriage return lever. But there's also a sense of labor in typing. A sense of satisfaction by the end of the page that you've done the work. 

A few nights ago I fell down a rabbit hole, looking at pictures of famous writers/artists/celebrities and their typewriters. It was fascinating and interesting to see. This was the way people used to work. Computers for the purpose of word processing is a pretty new thing. One, I think, that we take for granted. It's made writing a novel something anyone can do anywhere they could do it. It's said that Stephen King was an early adopter of this digital revolution, using a Wang Word Processor by the early 80s. (A $12,000 piece of equipment at the time.) I read somewhere that King may have been the first author to have a novel published that was written entirely on a computer. (A simple Google search seems to refute this, but it's still a cool piece of mythology.)

Stephen King and his Wang

Besides paper and ink, I've only ever used computers, mostly using Microsoft Word. (I'm sure in my younger days we owned a typewriter and I tried to write using that, because that's what writers did in the late 80s/early 90s.) I've used other word processors. Google Docs is incredibly useful and a back up when I need it. I tried Scrivener but found it overwhelming. Even George RR Martin, one of my literary idols, uses Word Star 4.0, a 30 year old word processing program that runs on DOS and from what I've seen it looks almost as unwieldy as Scrivener. I've never had a huge issue with Word and I've grown accustomed to it. I have other friends that swear by other things. Some even use typewriters.