5 Things Instapoets Don’t Tell You About Typewriters
More and more poets on Instagram are using typewriters, but is this marketing technique worth the effort?
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 think 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.
