WRITING | MEMOIR

I Wrote a Million Words Before Learning How to Type

Cruise control, learning to type, and exploring a boundless world with a slap-in-the-face ease

I bought my Ford Focus for a bargain only a few months before a pandemic swept its way across the world. A mere few weeks after I first heard the word “Corona,” the car’s value practically tripled overnight. It had been a generous deal for even pre-pangolin-borne illness prices.

It was a good friend who sold it to me. As COVID-19 cases began to skyrocket and a billion cabin fevers began to reach a febrile pitch, road trip dreams sang a siren song for the masses that sent automobile prices into a snide and swanky stratosphere. As shoddily held-together minivans began to soar beyond the prices our parents paid for their first three-bedroom homes, I reveled in the $1300 I paid for my lived-in little jalopy. It had no seat warmers, no skylights, and few of the modern amenities many might hope for in a car. But with a Bluetooth radio and the freedom a full tank provided, I could snake between oysters in this gaping world full of whales.

A small dent still marks its rear end and I’ve been assured on more than one occasion that its repair would be nearly the price I paid for the car itself. The crater of chrome has grown a certain character. It’s a contused battle bruise that gently vibrates to the ever-eclectic cadence of ever-changing melodies.

I’d driven the Ford between states on multiple occasions, though, before my father ever pointed out to me that the car had cruise control. Though I love driving, I still can’t tell a hub cap from a blinker fluid transmogrifier. It’s only through the goodwill of my local mechanic that the car has passed yearly inspections for under the price of a small flat.

It was the first car I’d ever bought myself. And unlike the vehicle I learned to drive in, my father rarely bore the misfortune of being a passenger in the moving manslaughter-mobile I could now call my own. The stark absence of “oh shit!” handles made entry look all the more intimidating to the short and safety-first septuagenarian.

“Do you use cruise control when you take this out on the highway?” He asked on a summer night in upstate New York, windows open, crickets bleating, and tentatively double-checking that his seatbelt was in fact fastened.

“Cruise control?” I repeated back as a fluorescent bulb suddenly illuminated above my head with a cartoonish glow. I’d been aware that the feature at least exists in some cars but had never had the sense to consider whether my 2011, air-duct-retainer-missing, warning-lights-constantly-flashing car might be a member of this hallowed club of land-locked quasi-spacecraft.

I managed to tick up its odometer by at least four or five figures before I learned of the futuristic feature. And by the time I did, it only further widened a world that already felt utterly boundless. Hundreds of miles could suddenly be driven without the piddly first-world burden of an ankle bent forward. I nonchalantly fix a phone to the car’s dashboard. The luminary light guides me between international borders on impromptu Siri commands with uncanny precision. It connects to satellites that deliver me any song under the 2 million nearest suns.

The opening up of the Qwerty keyboard has brought with it a similar broadening of horizons. But instead of a feature I never quite realized I had available to me, the typing skill was one that always felt like it was suspended just out of reach — a cookie jar full of words sitting on a too-high counter.

In my school district, they never put the proper effort into teaching students how to type. In elementary school, we occasionally spent days in the computer labs playing rudimentary typing games. But for many of us, the skill never quite took.

By high school, roughly half of us had learned to type, but the other half among us remained diligently hunting and pecking their way through an increasingly digital world. I achieved an admirable speed for a mere two fingers, but in my past couple years as a writer that 50 word per minute limit had grown to feel more and more constraining. I feared that with a decade of labored, hard wired key-searching under my belt, that to learn the true typing discipline would have grown into a herculean task. In the years since high school, my learning skills have certainly waned. I’m a spry millennial, but this trick I’m learning is older than my grandparents.

But contrary to my fear, my double-decade long career of stenographic malpractice had still granted me a disjointed familiarity with the tools of my trade. I know what these keys in front of me do, and how they work together, even if the tactile tendrils on my hands remain clumsy compatriots. Even though the backspace key is once again a far greater friend than I’d like to admit, when the words finally appear on page now, it’s a long overdue hand full of fingers that put them there.

Learning to type at this late stage has brought with it its share of hand-wrought revelations. For one: typing is surprisingly fun. These Qwerty keyboards are a well-crafted thing we figured out, and it’s hard to fully appreciate their utility when your two fingers are only hovering above it like they’re engaged in prosaic whack-a-mole. Without a full hand at play, the positions of keys can feel almost arbitrary.

But there’s a beauty to the pitter patter of a keyboard when it’s properly employed — the come and go faucet of words on a page a steady, sporadic and splenetic cannonade of raindrops beating haphazard against a nylon tent.

Another revelation is that typing isn’t as simple as getting your whole hand involved or not. Each finger has specific keys assigned to it, and harder than getting my whole hand immersed in the process was consistently using each finger for their correct and allocated function. For example, there are times in typing where it feels less labored to allow my pointer finger to temporarily assume the role of my middle finger and press “C.” When I struggled to figure out a direct answer to whether this occasional skirting of standards is strange or counterintuitive, ChatGPT explained the following:

Your typing experience is quite common and not at all odd. In typing, there’s a balance between following the strict guidelines of touch typing and what feels natural or instinctive for your hands. The standard touch typing method suggests using the middle finger for both ‘E’ and ‘C,’ as this adheres to the idea of each finger being responsible for a specific set of keys.

However, in practice, people often develop their own variations that feel more comfortable or efficient for them. If using your pointer finger for ‘C’ (or ‘E’) feels more natural and doesn’t significantly disrupt your typing flow or speed, it’s perfectly acceptable. This kind of adaptation is quite common, especially for keys that are on the border of another finger’s “territory."

So unless ChatGPT is hallucinating, my experience here might actually not be so uncommon. I’m curious how many others defy this convention — whether knowingly or unknowingly — in their efforts to express ideas.

Perhaps the most unwelcome surprise of learning to type, though, was the epiphany that ease of expression doesn’t equate to ergonomics. I’d mistakenly assumed for most of my life that I was only hurting my hands by typing the way that I was. But apparently, there are physical reasons why even able-bodied people would prefer the hunt and peck method to typing. The first few days of recording thoughts like a real writer arrived with some hand strains I hadn’t experienced with my prior, far more tedious typing method. But a few store bought grip/wrist strengthening devices later, and I’m well on my path to enduring the blows that the keyboard warrior way has in store.

Getting all of my dexterity digits embroiled in this thinking process has been a great enough reprieve that it’s already daunting to imagine ever going back to my clunky old ways. Even with 10 fingers in use I haven’t yet surpassed my 2 finger speed, but with each day that I’m deleting less and less, it’s a story of steady progress that accelerates with each new essay written.

I may have typed my first million words with a mere two fingers, but I’m hopeful that my next ten million will be put onto paper by a fiery, eager hand. I’ve spent the earliest days of my career going frenetically against the grain — a sword fish swimming stubbornly up a confining, claustrophobic stream.

As with the car whose pedal provides a ticket to the world and the switch that turns it into a melodious little spaceship, I feel like I’m prying open a doorway into the world of words — finger by finger. I’m excited to finally have these digits doing their proper heavy lifting.