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5 Things Instapoets Don’t Tell You About Typewriters

More poets on Instagram are using typewriters, but is this visual style worth the effort?

By Leigh FisherPublished 2 years ago 5 min read
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Photo Courtesy of Yossarian6 on Adobe Stock

If you've spent time reading poetry on Instagram, you might start to notice some of the style trends. There are a lot of poets and writers on Instagram who post beautiful, aesthetic photos of typewriters and the poems they write with them.

If not that, you know all those stock photos of typewriters taken at dramatic angles to symbolize being a writer or supposedly give some kind of glimpse of the writer’s life?

Even though typewriters are largely seen as relics of the past, they hold special reverence in the writing community. Everyone seems to believe that a photo of a typewriter somehow epitomizes the existence of a writer. I’ve used typewriter stock photos plenty of times in different articles, so I’m no one to judge. It gets an idea across and it does it effectively.

Regardless, the actual practicality of typewriters today is a whole different story. They may look pretty, but they’re even more impractical thank you think. Typewriters may look cool, but there’s a reason why they aren’t mainstream anymore. If you didn’t live to see the history of typewriters first hand, the first commercial typewriters were introduced in 1873, but did not become common in offices until after the mid-1880s.

It’s actually harder than you expect to line up margins.

Some typewriters are more mechanically blessed and might go to the same spot when you start a new line, but others softly whisper good luck.

It’s incredibly hard, especially with poetry, to lose yourself in the writing process when you need to properly line up your margin when it’s time to start another line. It’s very disruptive to focusing on your writing, especially if you’ve been spoiled by modern technology that takes care of all those things for you.

I’m a word processor girl at heart, but when I dabbled with typing my poetry on typewriters, the margins were shockingly hard to line up properly.

Photo by Author

Even so, doesn’t that look classy? Impractical, but really classy.

Some typewriters don’t have exclamation points.

You better hope you don’t need to use them because some typewriters just don’t have them at all. Back in high school, I had a creative writing teacher who has a very amusing way of giving advice. He considered his teaching materials that were about creative writing to be creative writing. They would be amusingly worded and have lots of little funny remarks.

One such remark was on the usage of exclamation points. He was not a fan of overusing exclamation points. In fact, I suspect he spent so much time with fledgling writers that he had a burning hatred for them.

His most recurrent piece of advice to writing students was, “Only use exclamation points once a year. Once. A. Year! See, I’m done for the year now.” I can only assume that he greatly missed the days of typewriters over word processors, for a lot of typewriters don’t have a key for an exclamation point at all.

If you don’t push hard, you don’t get letters.

We are, quite honestly, pansies in comparison to the novelists of old. We can just lightly tap a key on the keyboard and poof! We have letters. It’s quite delightful.

I never realized just how delightful until I sat down with a typewriter and tried to type a single sentence. It takes significant pressure on each key to get a decently dark letter. If you don’t push hard enough, you might not get a letter at all, or end up with a pale gray ghost of a letter.

The physical demand of using a typewriter is incomparably hard to when you use a keyboard. Though many people still have memories of needing to use typewriters professionally, for a twenty-something like myself, it was pretty shocking to realize how much effort every single finger needs to put forth to type on a typewriter.

Running out of paper is a thing you need to keep track of.

Photo Courtesy of Yossarian6 on Adobe Stock

And if you don’t, your lines will start to slant strangely and you’ll ultimately have a very awkward half-cut off slanted line at the very end of your page. This isn’t something you even pause to consider when using word processors. You can just type and type and there’s no end in sight.

Using a typewriter for any kind of writing, but particularly poetry is a choice of aesthetic. It’s essentially a marketing technique. What do you want the “look” of your work to be? If you’re posting on Instagram, the classy, older typewriter look is very eye-catching.

Part of the typewriter craze might in part be that they aren’t being widely manufactured anymore. Though you might’ve thought that typewriters were rendered obsolete long ago, The Atlantic reported that the last typewriter factory in the world actually stayed open until 2011.

Typewriters are very heavily romanticized by today’s poets and writers.

While they may look cool and while typewriter poetry definitely does have a charmingly old-fashioned look, using a typewriter is not all it’s cracked up to be.

Does it win for looks? Absolutely.

You score five to ten “writer points” to add to your experience bar if you have a typewriter lovingly displayed in your abode. The more you post photos of it on Instagram, the more followers will know that yes, you are indeed a writer.

But does it win for practicality? Not in a million years.

It takes longer, it requires more physical effort, and a lot more can go wrong between wonky margins, running out of paper, and the absolute existential horror that comes with making a typo. This drawback is simply common sense, so I didn’t see the need to hash it out, but it’s the icing on the cake inefficiency that is using a typewriter for the look.

With that said, the look is so delightful that it’s hard to fault anyone willing to put the time and effort into using a typewriter today. Whether using a typewriter is a calculated marketing technique or a choice to go back to the basics, it’s a choice that comes with a lot of effort.

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About the Creator

Leigh Fisher

I'm a writer, bookworm, sci-fi space cadet, and coffee+tea fanatic living in Brooklyn. I have an MS in Integrated Design & Media (go figure) and I'm working on my MFA in Fiction at NYU. I share poetry on Instagram as @SleeplessAuthoress.

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