My Granddad gave me a typewriter.

It was the summer of 1972 (if I remember it correctly), and I had been writing short stories by hand on lined school paper for about a year. I showed no signs of letting up. I had shown some of my stories to my Mom, and to my Grandmother and Grandad Allen, who lived two blocks away from us when I was a kid. They would read them (or pretend to read them, I’m not completely sure in every instance), smile at me, and give me encouragement to keep writing. After all, one never knew where it might take me, right?

My Granddad gave me a typewriter.

My Grandaddy Allen had been self-employed for years. He ran a successful TV and radio repair shop in downtown Jacksonville, Texas beginning in the 1930’s. Of course at that time, TV was a luxury for the rich. So mainly he repaired radios, as radio was the primary form of mass communication for news, entertainment, and information. After World War Two, in the 1950’s, peoples’ wages increased, the price on luxury items decreased, and suddenly everyone had both radios and televisions. And of course, when wires got frayed, circuits got shorted, or or tubes got burned out, who did they contact for repairs? Yep. My Granddad.

Work was steady and life was good. He ran his own shop, kept his own books. Whenever I visited his shop after school or in the summer, I could sit at the workbench in the back and play with the old manual Remington typewriter. Of course, as I got older, the time I spent on the typewriter became less like play. I think Granddad had an inkling about my compulsion with storytelling. So in 1972, he bought a new Smith-Corona electric typewriter for himself. But what to do with that clunky old manual typewriter that still used ink-laden silk ribbons? Well Granddad was from a generation that was loathe to throw out anything still even marginally functional, and he had a kooky, slightly off-kilter  grandson who wrote short stories, so….

My Grandad gave me a typewriter.

Needless to say, I was elated! We set it up in my bedroom on a tiny table against the north-facing window between the foot of my brother’s bed and the small 12-inch black and white TV that sat at an angle in the corner of the room. My Mom made sure I had plenty of plain white typing paper, and I took care of the rest.

From then on, I was unstoppable. Anything I wrote, I wrote on that typewriter. I even rewrote my old short stories, typing them up as fast as my untrained “hunt-and peck” fingers could fly. And in the 45 years since, not much has changed on that account. I never learned how to type properly; I never took a typing class in high school. But I loved that old typewriter, loud and heavy, peppering out interrupted rapid-fire staccato as the mechanical letterheads struck the ribbon, infusing the paper stretched beneath it with ink. I banged away at that thing almost every day. Probably drove my poor, long-suffering mother damn near insane. I typed until the ribbons ran out of ink. I’d save up money so I could go buy another one, have one in reserve at all times.

I loved what I did. I still do. That event opened new doors, led me to new realms, new discoveries, new lessons, new disciplines, new headaches, heartaches, and introduced me to writer’s block. And I loved every second of it, because I knew it was all part of the journey, part of becoming a literate storyteller, a human being who wanted to communicate and share with others through the power and the magic of the written word.

Most importantly, it taught that I could not live my life in a fulfilling fashion WITHOUT writing. I can’t “not write”. I know. I’ve tried. And it did not work out well. I felt off-balance, off kilter. The listing ship never righted itself until I got back to doing what I was born to do — WRITE.

And while I no longer have that first typewriter, I still remember it. I still can see it in my mind, a slightly faded photograph, a Kodak Moment in the scrapbook of my childhood memories. And though I still write in my own unprofessional, self-taught “hunt-and-peck” fashion on my trusty laptop (the typewriters of our modern age), everything I’ve done, everything I’ve accomplished as both a screenwriter and a novelist, I can trace back directly to that one seminal, life-changing event in 1972.

My Granddad gave me a typewriter.