The Pen is Mightier
I’m going to let you into a secret: every blog and review I put on damesnet I have written in its entirety in longhand first. I may have mastered the rudiments of half a dozen software packages and know my LAN from my WAN, but I’m just a digital daytripper.
I was faintly ashamed of my devotion to the pen until I went to a workshop run by novelist Andrew Miller (of Pure and Ingenious Pain fame) and discovered that his method was to draft the whole novel in longhand first. Well, if it’s good enough for him …
The truth is, I can’t really think without a pen in my hand. It’s probably some sort of Pavlovian reflex – sometimes I have to pick one up, even if I’m not going to write anything, just to get the synapses to snap into action.
There is something so direct about the act of writing with a pen: my thoughts are somehow marshalled in a halfway logical order in my head, they flow down my right arm, and then out through the nib, the point, the rollerball, or even the lead – rather than being diluted and diffused across ten fingers on the keyboard (actually about four in my case).
Once the words are all out, it’s time to get really creative: crossing out, scribbling in, lassoing groups of words with a line and sending them all over the page with an arrow, and adding marginal notes and absent-minded – but deeply inspirational – doodles. How could I abandon the pen?
Yet I remember suggesting ‘a nice pen’ as a possible 18th birthday present for my nephew, only to see a look of bemusement cross his father’s face. ‘He wouldn’t really use a pen’ he said, kindly. And upmarket styluses suitable for a big birthday are nowhere to be found, unless you commission a diamond-encrusted one from Damien Hirst.
But ‘a nice pen’ is fundamental to the pleasure of writing. It doesn’t have to be a Mont Blanc, or even a Parker. I’m writing this with a Uniball Jetstream 1.0 in black, available at W H Smith, or from Amazon at £5.08 for three (Keithybhoy says ‘Used these pens once and couldn’t use anything else after them’, another happy punter describes them as ‘God-like pens’!) The ink flows out smoothly enough for you to write very fast, but not to the point where it shows through on the other side of the paper, yet the pressure on the page ends up creating a pleasingly textured ‘onion skin’ effect on the paper.
Writing with a soft pencil is good, too – again, the point is yielding enough to write with ease, and you get a satisfying film of graphite dust that somehow lends whatever you’ve written an air of blurry gravitas. (I seem to see the word ‘nerd’ flashing up in front of me in neon letters.)
It’s time for the pen to fight back, and where better to start, in these days of vintage-mania, than with the advertising jingle of the Waverley pen company, though it might have to be tweaked a bit so as not to offend modern sensibilities.
“They come as a boon and a blessing to men,
The Pickwick, the Owl, and the Waverley pen.”
Phew! What a relief and so refreshing to hear. That is precisely the method I have been using for more years than I care to remember. I had begun to think my methodology was unique and outdated. (I go back to the age of chalk and slate). So I am delighted to be counted among the nerds. What’s more, the eventual finished product is invariably appreciated (on occasion gleaning the odd award or two), so I must be doing something right! Incidentally, in my case, it’s more like struggling with a mere two fingers on the keyboard….
P.S. Should you be wondering, in this case I broke my own rules and didn’t scrawl an initial version!
I totally understand the pen to paper first commitment . My beloved husband adheres to this fiorm of writing with total concentration , joy , angst and whispered muttering as he reads what is evolving. His pen flows through each thought and when fully satisfied and only then does he allow his precious musings if necessary to appear as type. Long live the pen!