Didion was a typist, and a famous one. She kept notebooks for fragments and overheard lines, but the real work, the drafting and the endless reworking, happened at a keyboard. She even learned to type by copying out a master.
Learning to Type on Hemingway
When Didion was fifteen or sixteen, she'd type out Hemingway's stories to learn how the sentences worked. She taught herself to type at the same time. Two skills, one habit. She wanted to feel the machinery of those clean, direct sentences under her own fingers, and the typewriter was how she did it. Years later she could still quote the feeling: very direct sentences, smooth rivers, clear water over granite, no sinkholes.
That early discipline stuck. Describing how long Play It As It Lays took, she called the real work sitting down at the typewriter and working every day until it was finished. The typewriter wasn't a prop. It was where the writing got made and remade.
When I was fifteen or sixteen I would type out his stories to learn how the sentences worked. I taught myself to type at the same time.
Joan Didion, The Paris Review, 1978
Notebooks, Then the Machine
Didion did write by hand, just not for the drafting. She carried a notebook for fragments, observations, and lines she overheard, the raw material she wrote about in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. As a traveling journalist and Vogue editor she famously hauled a Royal KMM typewriter everywhere, and her packing list in The White Album included a typewriter so she could sit down and start typing the day's notes wherever she landed.
Her tools changed over time. She moved through manual typewriters to electric, then to a computer by the late 1980s. The constant was the keyboard. To see how that fit her wider habits, read the full Joan Didion writing routine.
What You Can Steal
- Copy a writer you admire. Didion typed out Hemingway to learn how sentences actually work. Transcription teaches what reading alone can't.
- Split your tools by job. Notebook for capture, keyboard for drafting. Each does one thing well.
- Make your drafting tool portable. She wrote on the road because her machine came with her. Remove the excuse of the wrong location.
- Let the tools evolve. She went from manual to electric to computer without precious attachment. The work is the point, not the gadget.