Resorting to type to find the write stuff

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Tom Hanks is planning to write a book – and by virtue of his standing as Hollywood royalty, it’s a sure-fire best-seller before the ink is even dry on the page.

Only this isn’t the story of his stellar career, his Oscar success, his famously happy marriage, his life on the silver screen.

No, when you’re already famous, you can pick an esoteric topic as the theme for your debut collection of fiction.

And Tom Hanks has chosen to write about typewriters.

Not to write with, but to write about – 17 short stories, all themed around his passion for typewriters.

Uncommon Type: Some Stories will hit the shelves in October, with each tale involving a typewriter.

Turns out that Hanks is known – at least in his own circle – for his love of typewriters, and who’s to blame him for that?

Those of us who hammer the keys on a computer like we’re still on an old Remington or IBM still miss that click and carriage return bell from a different era.

Hanks summed it up in a way that suggests both a love of the machine and a way with words.

“Each one,” he once said, “stamps into paper a permanent trail of imagination through keys, hammers, cloth and dye – a softer version of chiselling words into stone.”

The thing is he said that when he himself came up with a digital app to replicate the sound and feel of a typewriter, a device which ironically became a bestseller on Apple’s iTunes store.

But he’s right about typewriters – for all of the technology, clean lines, spell checks, cut and paste options and downright simplicity of computers and tablets – there is nothing as romantic and evocative as the big old lumbering machine.

The tab key; the shift key that gave you capital letters by moving the whole thing an inch into the air; the worn ribbon that meant everything came out a hybrid of black and red, the need for Tippex.

Think of any great movie about newspapers – All the President’s Men, the Front Page, Citizen Kane…even Lou Grant – and you see hard-chaws, cigarette bolted in between the fingers, belting the lard out of their typewriters as they produced another classic.

Of course typewriters were utterly impractical because you were stuck with your mistakes, unless you were fortunate enough to have that bottle of Tippex or you simply belted the X key to obliterate the wrong words one letter at a time.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.