PF Kluge, writer

WARNING: What follows may not be suitable for a young audience, especially in the age of computers. Here’s a confession, a credo: I write everything in longhand first, in spiral notebooks, with lines that you write between. The lines are your friends, the empty pages are a challenge. Write every day and the pages add up. Usually, I write four or five pages a day; after that the prose gets watery. I stop at the bottom of the fourth (or fifth) page, even if it’s in mid-sentence. It takes about nineteen pencils or ballpoint pens to write a book. Not that you asked. But all this is foreplay. After I put down my pen, or pencil, I select one of my collection of manual typewriters. I own half a dozen such machines, proud products of long-dead companies, bearing names like Underwood, Royal, Smith-Corona. I find old typewriters—or they find me—and when I touch the keys, throw the carriage, I am the typewriter’s partner and, together, we connect with the century of writers who came before me. (And with few of the writers who will follow, but that’s alright with me.) I love my typewriters. There’s a gent in a town fifteen miles south of where I live who can still find ribbons, replace parts, clean and oil the machines that he loves as much as I do. People keep pointing me to quicker, labor-saving devices that process words. No thanks, I tell them. I like my work the way it is. And, by the way, it comes in on time.