I have stumbled into one of the writing traps that I warn my students against: too much plot for a short story. As my story ideas progressed, it became more and more evident that I could not fit them into short-story form. It’s time to eliminate the excess. This wrong turn put me into a funk, and I’ve been treading water for a few weeks.

So today I decided to adopt some method-typing, by which I mean that, like a method actor, I immersed myself into the story. It was time to take out the old guns to get the job done. Rather than use my go-to machine, the Olympia SG1, I decided to use a Royal 10 and an Underwood 6, the very machines that would still be in use during my story’s timeline. My machines both were manufactured in 1937, and the bulk of my story takes place in the mid-1940s. Sure, they wouldn’t be hot off the sales floor, but they still would be around, especially during belt-tightening wartime. In the end, I will return to the SG1 for story action but use the Underwood 6 for the protagonist’s journal as well as for the Infinite Monkey Experiment. The latter machine is one of my best, and, if the type face were elite, I would use it every day.