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Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts

Friday, October 06, 2006

Typewriters and serialkillers



What is so damn special about typewriters? I don't get it. Recently, I saw a movie about a writer, who wrote all of her stuff on an old typewriter.
I have an old typewriter myself, actually. I used my pocketmoney to buy it from an antique shop when I was ten. It’s a great typewriter, as far as typewriters go, but actually writing on it is a bit like trying to get a three-year-old to eat its vegetables: it’s a slow process and sometimes you get your fingers bitten.

Those who love the idea of writing books on a typewriter, probably aren’t writers. They might want to be, I suppose. They might think that creating one masterpiece after another on a typewriter, is a terribly romantic idea. And every once in a while, someone (who’s obviously been staring at theirs for way to long) says that it helps them to “get in touch with the words”. I still think that after the second, third, fourth or maybe fifth draft, they’re going to wish they had a laptop. I mean, you can only sniff a certain amount of whiteout before you start going a bit loopy.

In the movie, the writer moves to a tiny, little island community with only 100-and-something citizens. Here, she moves into a tiny, little cottage with her typewriter (obviously) in order to work on her next book. She meets a handsome man (obviously) and falls in luve. Then he turns out to not only be a deranged serial killer, but a ghost as well. The thing that struck me as being the most odd, wasn’t the dead-bit, but the serial-killer bit. Son of Sam killed only killed a handful of people before folks started freaking out. And that was New York. I could go on a killing-spree in Hellhole, and I’m pretty sure I’d get arrested quickly. But this guy takes out several percent of the population, and nobody notices.

I guess everyone was just to busy messing around with their typewriters.