Sunday, January 14, 2018

Shoveling Snow

Some Inside Baseball stuff:

I wrote this on the typewriter, drafting a piece that was a page and a quarter long, double-spaced. I pulled the second sheet out of the typewriter and took out my blue felt-tip which I used to hack away at the original, cutting words as much as I thought I could.

Knowing that this would be a typed blog post, I reset the right margin so that I was typing in a column 40 characters wide and typed a new draft. This too was double spaced and had some flab in it as my drafts usually do. By the end of the first page, I knew I would type it again. Rolling it out of the machine, I went back to editing it some more. I crossed out my original ending and wrote the sentence about my beating heart, smiling at the sound of it.

For the third and final draft, I left the margins, switched to single-spacing, and typed pretty much from the marked up copy, making just a few changes along the way. I took that from the typewriter, fed it into the scanner, and posted it here.

If you haven't written with a typewriter lately, you're missing out on the fun.

No comments:

Post a Comment