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Typewriter
mdl | May 10 2007
I'm guessing this thread won't get too many responses, but I'll give it a shot nonetheless. Do any of the writers out there use a typewriter as part of their writing process? I've begun to draft my articles, etc. by hand--and it's made the whole writing process a lot less stressful. (With a word processor, I struggled with perfectionism: I used to write a first paragraph, delete it, write it again, polish it, delete it, and so on, until an imminent deadline forced me to pull an all-nighter and pound the whole thing out.) The advantage of the typewriter, of course, is that it forces you to write from begining to end before revising. You can only go forward--this would seem to take away of the urge to tinker with what already been written--it would also seem to raise one's comfort with a sh*tty first draft. I know that I would eventually enter the end product into a computer. But what particularly draws me to the typewriter is the idea of producing one physical page at a time. There's something balanced, measured, and satisfying in this approach. Any one had any success in using a typewriter? If not, does anyone no how to achieve a similar writing process on a computer--i.e., how to enforce the discipline of going forward one page at a time, and not going back until you're done with the whole first draft? Thanks in advance for the advice. 13 Comments
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One of the ways I've...Submitted by Linda on May 14, 2007 - 5:46am.
One of the ways I've been known to distract myself when writing is by toying around with the formatting too much. The LyX word-processor prevents this, because you don't do ANY formatting while typing, other than to say whether something is a paragraph or a header or a list (formatting is applied by a stylesheet afterwards.) It comes pre-installed on some Linux distros; this is how I use it. (It's a pain in the neck to install on Windows, because there are pre-requirements that need to be installed and configured separately. I don't know if it's available for Mac or not.) » POSTED IN:
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