Why You Should Write With a Fountain Pen
I used to write with Onyx brand rollerball pens. Not only was I a total addict but I also had this OCD thing about needing to have a fresh one on hand at all times. I liked to take notes with these pens, writing on eye-ease paper in neat, block letters. In short, I was missing out.
These days we do a lot of our writing with keyboards. Even when I was a student carrying around those God-awful rollerballs, I’d take my notes home at the end of the day and type them up. These days, and especially during the pandemic, I make a lot of my living writing and, for this, I have to use a keyboard because I’m either working in a screenplay format in Final Draft or I’m writing in a Google Doc for a client’s review.
Both of those media are fine, but there’s something about the way the mind moves when the hands hold a writing instrument and a blank notebook. It’s just different from hammering at a keyboard. There’s something viscerally different, something deeply embedded in the brain.
I do all of my brainstorming in notebooks. I have boxes and boxes of them, going back decades. I like to work out ideas on paper in longhand. Maybe some of this is owed to my seven years of formal art school training, or maybe it’s just a universal experience. I can’t say. What I can say is that writing shouldn’t be a chore. The act of writing by hand with…
