Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

While I’m working on something more meaty, here’s a bit of fun.

Like most people my age, I learned to type on a manual typewriter, an old Smith-Corona, to be precise. It was heavy — damned heavy — and came in its own nearly-as-heavy hard-sided case. It had a black-and-red ribbon that always got twisted, the keys continually got hooked onto one another, and after typing up an evening’s homework, my forearms ached from the physical exertion of pressing down the keys. That’s no exaggeration; it took some oomph to make those levers thwack with enough force to register through to the carbon copy.

What’s a carbon copy, you ask? Well, it’s a … nope, I don’t have time or space to explain it all.

The first time I was able to use an electric typewriter was in the ’80s, and it was an IBM Selectric. The Selectric replaced the individual letter-levers with a letter-embossed ball that spun around to smack the appropriate letter onto the page. You could type faster — miles faster — and you could actually switch fonts by swapping out the ball, but it was even heavier than the old manual models. Not designed with transportation in mind.

Then it was word processors, and then computers, which effectively killed off the typewriter industry and brought us all into the age of the electronic keyboard. The world never looked back.

Well, most of the world.

For me, I missed the sound and the tactile feel of the manual keyboard. It had its quirks, but it worked at a slower, more thoughtful pace that was more in step with my actual compositional speed. The speed of the new keyboards did nothing to improve my writing. On the contrary, my writing suffered.

When the industry rolled out “virtual” keyboards — either displayed on a touch-sensitive screen or (horrors!) projected onto a desktop — it was a disaster for folks like me. I’d come to depend on the keyboard’s tactile cues, like the little raised dots on the F and J keys, or just the feel of the keys beneath my fingers. My typing speed slowed down dramatically, as I was constantly having to check on where my hands were situated, and whether or not the “helpful” auto-correct feature had correctly corrected my typing. The constant interruption of the “flow” made it impossible for me to write anything longer than an email. And people wonder why I still write fiction longhand.

But now, there’s a new type of keyboard on the market. They’re a chimera of retro and modern functionality. They are manual-typewriter-inspired, Bluetooth-enabled, and fully compatible with both computers and tablets.

And they are wonderful.

There are several varieties on the market — mine is a QwerkyWriter — but they’re all highly reminiscent of the old manual typewriters. They have big scratch-resistant letters on rounded, metal-ringed keys with a faux-platen to hold your tablet (without the protective case, sadly, but you can’t have everything). The Qwerky has a working return bar (which is actually programmable, so you can assign a macro of keystrokes to the return bar — helpful for screenplay writing and such).

It still has the raised dots at F and J, it has all the function keys, the Ctrl/Alt/Del combo, Page Up/Down, arrows, everything, even a Delete and a Backspace key. The Qwerky also has faux platen knobs at the sides, for a nice retro aesthetic.

And while the sound of the keys isn’t exactly what it was on my old Smith-Corona, it’s a lot closer than my ergo-board, and won’t make my carpal tunnel act up (see video, below, for a sample of how it sounds).

I’ve had mine for a couple of weeks, now, and I thoroughly enjoy using it. The Bluetooth connects with my tablet, my laptop, even my phone if I want it to, and the performance is instantaneous. Just as for a violist switching to the smaller violin, there’s a brief transition period when I move from my big ergonomic split-style keyboard over to the more compact Qwerky layout, but it’s an easy adjustment to make. Besides, the Qwerky’s layout is still wider than the virtual keyboard on my iPad, so it’s less torque on the wrists.

There are several makers of this type of keyboard; I opted for the Qwerky despite it’s higher price, primarily because of the company’s longevity and good track record. There are less expensive models available, most of which have received good reviews.

The only downside to the Qwerky and it’s ilk is a basic lack of transportability. I mean, I kept the box it came in, just in case I want to take it to a writing conference (yeah, like I go to writing conferences), but to be honest, I see little need to carry it around. That’s not what it’s for.

So, if you have a quasi-Luddite writer at home and want to buy her an excursion back to the 1960s, consider one of these.

Have fun.

k

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