The pandemic is waning and it’s time to return to writing the memoir I started three years ago. But it wasn’t like I could just open up my document and start banging the keys again. If writing were that easy, tortured writers wouldn’t be reorganizing closets instead of writing their novels.

So I got warmed up by signing up for a personal essay class. I wrote an essay about the time period leading up to the memoir. But people in my writing group said it needed work, so much work that I wandered away. I took more classes and wrote more essays, but none of them were good.

I joined a spiritual group for women called Emerge and furiously scribbled in my journal about self-sabotage. I found a book, The Book You Were Born to Write, and was sure it was the book I was born to find on the shelves of Politics & Prose. I started doing all the exercises with a sand timer, mapping out color-coded writing schedules, sketching my book’s hero’s journey on a roll of poster board I got at CVS. None of these things stuck.

Then one day I was reading about writers rituals and I became convinced that what I needed to do was be like Cormac McCarthy and write on an old fashioned typewriter. I would write in courier. I would use white-out. I would not be distracted by email and Wikipedia. I found a turquoise Classic Royal on eBay that practically jumped into my cart like a lonesome puppy.

Every day, several times a day, I would check on that typewriter. With that beautiful machine under my fingers, I would write like a professional, I would be dedicated, I would fall in love with my book again. And all that for $269.99 plus shipping.

Then one day when I was gazing through the typewriter’s slideshow of images—again—I saw myself reflected on that MacBook screen.

You’re doing it again, aren’t you? You think this gadget is going to fix you. You think this piece of metal is going to change you into a prolific, confident, consistent writer.

I loved that old-fashioned turquoise writing machine. But I left my cart in the store because I knew I would have to find the ink spools and the steel letters inside of me.