Keyboard magic

"My imagination doen't really work unless a typewriter is sitting directly in front of me," novelist Larry McMurtry once said. "I am all but incapable of conceiving stories abstractly."

One of Larry McMurtry's Hermes typewriters

I found this quote in Tracy Daugherty's fine biography of McMurtry, and I have no idea when he said, whether it was before or after the computer age. But it doesn't really matter. Even after other writers had switched to writing on computers, McMurtry continued using the same kind of typewriter he had used since early in his writing career. When he was sitting there with his fingers on the keyboard, he was in his comfort zone. That is when his imagination fired up and the stories and characters came out.

Although I switched effortlessly from typewriters to computer keyboards, I identify with McMurtry. I have written previously about how, in my early teens, I had no interest in writing and no clue that I had any writing ability at all until my parents brought home a portable Smith-Corona typewriter. I seemed to turn into a writer overnight.

Even now I usually have no idea what I am going to write about when I sit down at my computer to write a blog post. Yet when my fingers are on the keyboard, ideas begin to form. Words come from somewhere and flow through my fingers and those keys and onto my computer screen. Give me a pen and paper and I am incapable of writing anything noteworthy, as I learned when I had to write all those in-class college essays on test days.

Our minds operate in strange ways. Some writers can only write when they are standing up, like Hemingway, or sitting in bed. Whatever works.