Start Typing. by Dativa

Start Typing. by Dativa - July 2025 Scholarship Essay

Crackling wood fire, and the dim click and spring of a typewriter. This is the setting of James Baldwin finishing his first novel in a mountainous Swiss village. I fight for entry into this envious scene, specifically as the author beginning a successful and respected career. Thus, My advice to my younger self: start typing.

The illusion of crackling archival footage is the distance of time. Fittingly, as I hear about this moment in history, I suddenly remembered the fixed existence of a typewriter in my own girlhood — not an unknown relic, but a real thing of my own eyes.

I remember it now most powerfully because of the emotional current that lights it; I was not supposed to use it, because it was not mine. Probably an artifact of my grandfather’s heyday. And I remember its stateliness as inviting. I realize the reality of my hesitation about it was what such a thing could represent in my life: a writing career.

Thus the possibility of my dreams has always been present in my life. Since that young age I have learned the importance of ambition and have now been published twice as a writer for my school. And I realize, altogether, that the comfort I find in the artists, the men of decades past and their things, is really the recognition of my own life’s possibilities. And I have every intention to continue typing.