How A Typewriter Made A Writer Out of Me

This is what a typewriter looks like if you are born in the digital age.

As a child I was always going the extra mile towards perfection, especially in school. If there was an assignment I had to make sure it was unique and I would do more than what was asked from me. In retrospect, this was a huge red flag regarding my anxiety-ridden adult life. But that’s another story to tell. For now, it is all about how my push towards uniqueness made me fall in love with writing without knowing, and it is all thanks to my dad’s old typewriter.

In my days, Word or any other form of writing software was not yet heavily used. So, we did our assignments the old fashioned way; writing with a pen on a lined piece of paper. So where does the typewriter come into all of this? Well, I once had an assignment on the Egyptians when I was in Year 6 and at that time Mr. Google was not even created so research was done using books- encyclopedias- the fact-based, accurate and compiled volumes of books, remember? To put it in perspective, encyclopedias in my days is what Wikipedia is now, except that encyclopedias weren't written by amateurs.

I would go to the basement in our house where my dad hid so many valuable treasures- such as antiques, one-of-a-kind die cast models, old books and much more. To me they were treasures and I always loved to sit in his office and just go through all of his collectables. One collectable that became my trusty partner in my quest for uniqueness in front of my teachers and peers was the typewriter.

I fell in love with the sound it makes as I type, the rolling of the paper and the gun-like salute noise that tells me that I have written enough for one line and the way the bar moves from left to right and back to tell me I can start a new line.

In my twisted way to become different and one-up my classmates, I realised that I enjoyed sitting on the typewriter and playing piano with its keys and buttons. The typewriter was my introduction to writing. I was not interested in being unique anymore, I was interested in writing and getting an audial orgasm (well at that time I was too young to have orgasms) from the sound the typewriter would make. It was as if the typewriter and I were communicating; my words and its sounds.

So, thanks to my dad’s treasures and a weakness in my personality, I knew that I wanted to be a writer but that would take me eleven years to realise.