On Writing With a Fountain Pen

On writing with a fountain pen.

From 2018

On my desk are several fountain pens. I have one that stays on my desk that is just for writing in a journal about my kids. I have another that travels with me to work and gets used mostly in meetings. I have a pretty teal one filled with highlighter ink that I use exclusively for grading my student's papers and exams. I have a green one with matching green ink that I use to write checks and pay bills. What kind of neurosis leads a person to have a special pen for each occasion? It all started with a Sheaffer white dot fountain pen that I bought myself to celebrate moving into my first apartment. I had actually had several cheap calligraphy fountain pens before that, but I thought of them as novelties or art supplies, they certainly weren't my pen. But that Sheaffer, now that was a different story. It was heavy and it had deep engraving on the brass band around the cap. Writing with it was really fun, and I would sometimes just doodle in a notebook because I wanted an excuse to use it. Eventually the glue that held the inner cap sleeve let go, and the clip lost its springiness, and it eventually found its way into a drawer where it resides to this day. Carrying that pen was like a tiny ink-filled time bomb in your pocket. If you clunked it against something, it would get ink all over you, if you flew on an airplane with it, it would get ink all over everyone, if you dropped it, it probably wouldn't ever work again. I eventually supplanted its daily use with a middle of the road Japanese pen. It's nothing fancy, plain and almost blue collar really. So why bother with a plain fountain pen? So long as I'm using a plain old pen, why not make it a plain old pen that regular people use? Well, because with each of my fountain pens, there is a little bit of a ritual to using them. The cap comes off in just a certain way and I put it back on each time before I set the pen down. The act of writing becomes much more deliberate. There is no way to erase my mistakes, so I think for just an extra second before I start. I can't let the nib sit against the paper or it will bleed, so I pull it away without hesitation when I finish. You treat a fountain pen more like a paintbrush than a pencil, get it ready only when you are ready, and make it count. A fountain pen is an artifact, a pencil is a commodity. My mind focuses on what marks I really want to make when I take the cap off.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson once described the limited ink capacity of a quill pen as a factor in why Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address was timed and punctuated the way it was, no rambling on and on if the ink runs out before the end of each line. I'll give most of the credit to Lincoln himself, but maybe the pen deserves a sliver of credit too. I can type at about 70 words per minute, which is roughly 400% faster than I can think. Writing with a pen slows down my writing enough that my brain has a fighting chance of keeping up. 

A Bic pen is fast food, it's quick, cheap and reliably gets the job done. A fountain pen is a home-cooked meal, it takes way more effort, and sometimes you burn the lasagna, but it is a meal that matters. There are things that I write that I want to take that extra time, I want to give a bit more thought and I want my words to matter a bit more. When I give my students feedback on their essay, they deserve a measured and deliberate response. When I journal about what a mess my boys made while playing in the back yard, I want my words to be the right ones. Slowing down, and making the act of writing a special activity helps me to make the content of that writing special too.