Typewriter magic

I had become a writer by the simple act off owning a typewriter.

Ellen Gilchrist, The Writing Life

Ellen Gilchrist

I became a journalist with modest success, not a writer of literature like Ellen Gilchrist, yet I was struck by how the origins of my own career devoted to words mirrored her own.

She was 12 when her father bought her a Royal portable typewriter. I was 13 when my parents returned from a shopping trip with a Smith-Corona portable. The typewriter was never actually mine, although I monopolized it for years. At first my sisters and I fought over it, but they soon lost interest. I never did.

Gilchrist says she redecorated her room to match her typewriter, including curtains and bedspread. I never went that far, and at first the typewriter wasn't kept in my room. It was soon moved there, however, because I was virtually the only one in the family who ever used it. It replaced my bookcase and my chemistry set, perhaps even my bed, as the most important object in my room.

Gilchrist started by writing poems on her new typewriter, poems that perhaps never would have been written if that machine hadn't inspired her to write them. I wrote a few poems, mostly silly ones, but within days I was soon writing stories, comic fairy tales and satirical magazines and newspapers. Before the arrival of the typewriter, I had never felt any impulse to do such things.

As a teenager Gilchrist began writing a newspaper column, then later turned to writing fiction. I tried my hand at writing fiction in my youth and only later wrote a newspaper column.

Both Ellen Gilchrist and I might have found our futures without the benefit of a typewriter coming at just the right moment during adolescence. But then again, perhaps not. One wonders how many other young writers were inspired by portable typewriters during that period of history. Today it might be some phone app or perhaps the ease of blogging that gets a young writer started.

Yet it may still be possible for an old-fashioned typewriter to work its magic. Tom Hanks imagines just such a thing in one of his stories in his book Uncommon Type. Beginning with the purchase of a toy typewriter, then moving ahead with the purchase of a real one, a woman discovers that she actually has something inside her worth putting down on paper. The title of the story is "These Are the Meditations of My Heart." I was moved by this short story, and I'll bet Ellen Gilchrist would be, too.