Journal: News & Comment

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What kind of penmachine?

Some years ago I went to see Timothy Findley, one of Canada's (and the world's) great novelists, speak at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre. I was surprised to discover in his talk that, as the CBC reported in his obituary this week, he "always wrote in longhand, in pen and ink, then [his life partner] Whitehead typed his manuscripts. 'I love the ink,' Findley once told an interviewer. 'I love the feel of the pen in my hand, and you don't get that flow into a machine.'"

Few enough people write with even a typewriter anymore, let alone composing whole novels and plays with a pen. As someone who used to write many school essays, in their only draft, on the bus, I know that doing so is a very different physical and intellectual process than the infinitely-reviseable typing into a computer that I do almost exclusively now. Knowing that what you write is hard to change makes you think more, and write less but better.

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