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| My early typing class |
When I was in 8th grade, I got a chance to take a class at the local junior college for those who liked to write. One kid from each of my town's intermediate schools got to go and I suspect that I was the only one who applied from mine. We were handed ledger like books that were our writing tablets du jour. Our instructor had us start at 8am and simply start writing until 10am no matter what. No subject assigned. No forms. No great American novel....just write.
It is something that I do to this day. I sit down at 6am and write. This blog, a half dozen "ghost" blogs, comments, letters to the editor. I enjoy the pure act of writing and while my hands and arms still have some function, it will be a task of joy.
About the 5th week of this summer class it started to get easier, which meant that in honesty you got more fluent writing crap badly....but we were all Hemmingways or aspiring to be and were told over and over that just the physical discipline of writing on demand was a necessary step - perceptions and creativity were out of the instructor's control.
Back to the Royal Typewriter. At the end of the course we each picked a segment of a morning's writing and had to type it up with carbon paper copies to the other 7 in my class. Type. Royal typewriter. Agony. My mom did it for me but I found myself in typing class immediately. We learned by typing along to a metronome and later to music; keeping steady and not looking at the keyboard ... asdfghjkl; became second nature and the speed kept increasing.
It is a great advantage - having learned to type on a keyboard that you had to bang hard to force the lever up to strike the page with the character through a worn ribbon. Musicians know it as muscle training - finger training so to speak...or so to write. I always wanted to play this piece on a typewriter: