My Olympia SM4 typewriter got me writing.
I’ve written things for my entire adult life, but I’ve always had a special fascination with short stories. Early in the pandemic I bought this Olympia SN4, and it seemed so romantic to write stories with it, so I did. I used the old method of first drat, second draft, etc, and did all my corrections with a red pen between the drafts. I really got into it. So much sho that it kick-started a whole collection of fabulous short stories. There’s nothing quite like hammering out your thought on a typewriter.
I’ve been enamored with typewriters for a long time. In the early 1990s, when I was in my 20s, I had two typewriters: an IBM Selectric 1 from 1961 that I got from a business that was going to throw it away, and a 1920s Remington Portable that I bought for $5 at a garage sale. It was the Remington that got me started writing stories back then. I wasn’t planning to write, but when I found this old Remington typewriter, it seemed so romantic to do some writing on it. I was also reading a lot of Faulkner at the time, so i gave it a shot, and started trying to make up stories. My stories then were terrible, but I loved the typewriters. After a while I sort of gave up writing but kept the typewriters around as decoration and as props in photography. But a few years later, in the mid 1990s, I moved to Seattle and sold nearly everything I owned. I ended up selling both of my typewrites for $1 each. Almost immediately I regretted selling them. And for years later, those two typewriters were the only possessions I regretted selling.
Then about five years ago I was wanting to get an old typewriter to use as a prop for some photography I was doing. As I started looking around for one, I felt that old romance coming back, and suddenly I was falling in love with typewriters all over again. But by then, typewriters had begun having a resurgence in popularity. They were harder to get, and were much more expensive. Even so, over the last three or four years I’ve managed to buy five typewriters altogether. I have a 1974 Smith-Corona Galaxie Twelve, a 1966 Smith-Corona Classic 12, a 1950s Royal Royalite ultra portable, a 1966 Olympia SM9, and my pride and joy, a 1961 Olympia SM4 that was refurbished by Jennifer Colombo at Colombo Collection. I love them all, but the two Olympias are my favorites.
I had just received my dream typewriter, the Olympia SM4, and was itching to use it, when suddenly, the whole world stopped with the arrival of the pandemic. If there ever was a perfect time for me to start writing stories again, this was it. I had already been thinking about writing short stories for a while and, had been reading books on plot, structure, and character development So, in my mind, it was now or never – I wasn’t getting any younger.
I came across an old picture of a soldier in WW1 using a portable typewriter on the battlefield, and I came up with a quick little story called Private Jim. I twisted a piece of paper into the beautiful SM4 and I was off.