I was editing my book, “Saving Ellen: A Memoir of Hope and Recovery” and could see the finish line.

The draft I had handed into Skyhorse Publishing at the end of April had weighed in at 86,000 words. I had written the book over two years starting at the beginning of the Covid pandemic. But it took time to find an agent and for him to find a publisher, so here I was, more than four years after I started, doing a final edit.

The book I got back after the publisher’s editing process had slimmed down. A Skyhorse editor left scores of comments and suggested many changes, nearly all quite reasonable. So I went through the edited version of my book with the idea that I might even turn it in a few days before my Oct. 24 deadline.

Then I came to the last chapter and hit a wall.

My editor did not like the final chapter. It bounced around in time too much, with the tangents that are the bane of my writing on full display. He even suggested I cut the chapter entirely.

I nearly had a heart attack. I balked at scrapping the chapter.

To figure out where the problems were, I used storyboards for every scene in the chapter. Storyboards are commonly used in shooting movies. They boil the action down to separate scenes. Once I had sketched the scenes out on large, blank index cards, I quickly saw the problem. The chronology was all over the place, and potentially confusing for the reader.

So, I sat down at my computer and tried rewriting

Instead, I spun my wheels like truck with bald tires in an ice storm. I went back and forth aimlessly.

Finally, I knew what I had to do to get moving again: Walk away from today’s technology. Either write the chapter out in longhand, or choose one of my dozen typewriters, all bought at yard sales and auctions, and type like it was 50 years ago.

I moved a typewriter table out on the porch outside my office, and placed one of my favorite typewriters – in this case, my cranberry red, 1939 Sterling Smith Corona — on the sturdy wooden table, itself an antique.

I rolled a fresh sheet of paper in the platen of the typewriter and began to tap away, writing a new version of my last chapter.

It only took two double-spaced pages for me to know that I had stopped spinning my wheels. I ripped the pages from the typewriter, walked into my office and finished writing on the computer. The new chapter had fewer words and, scenes, and I fixed the chronology problem.

Writing on a computer just doesn’t work when I’m stuck. It offers too many temptations to jump on an interesting web page or answer an email. Moreover, the act of writing with a pen and paper, or typing on an old typewriter, slows me down and often produces more thoughtful writing, going deeper instead of faster. It connects me to generations of other writers, too, which makes me smile.

That conscious choice to slow down is one reason why I have kept handwritten journals for more than 50 years in dozens of notebooks. And if I REALLY want to change the course of my writing, I am not averse to using a fountain pen and scratching out the words using pen and ink.

I’ve tried it before, but this time, I didn’t need to get quite that extreme. Writers such as Andre Dubus III and Joyce Carol Oates prefer pencils. Fountain pens are a hit with others.

When it comes to my struggles with writing, most of the time, my typewriters never fail me. They always manage to get me going, and if one doesn’t work, I have others, ranging from a 1915 Corona to a 1960 Hermes typewriter with an italic font.

The point is to do whatever it takes, remembering that modern technology is not always a friend of the creative process.

Morse code, anyone?