Thoughts on Quotes
When I say Quotes, I am of course referring broadly to fountain pens and the hobby surrounding them. My friends introduced me to these things some time last year, and Iāve been obsessed ever since. To a reasonable degree, I think. Thereās only so much about fountain pens to really be picky about, which I believe helps me remain clear-eyed: theyāre tools, ultimately boring. I pretend to be evangelical about them, but I donāt think Iāve done particularly great in forcing my passion onto my ball-pointed friends.
Why do I call them āQuotes,ā though? Well, the primary method of showing off a new pen and ink on the Internet is to write a quote. Facebook-ass quotes. Quotes from books. John 3:16-adjacent bible verses. Quotes from historical figures who have probably ruined millions of lives but had occasionally pithy things to say. The more inane the quote, the better the ink will show on the page.
There was one Reddit post I saw where they wrote a passage from Dune, a single sentence. It was written on a dark green ink with a gorgeous coppery sheen, pooling on the letters like oil slick on leaves. It was a passage about as consequential to the plot of the book as a bathroom tile is to the structural integrity of a house. It was about Tufir Hawatās face. Not even that heās a mentat or anything, just that heās grizzled and old.
Some of you may bristle against me making fun of people just enjoying things; the same things I enjoy, even. But have you considered that Iām a beautiful girl? See? It rather changes the tone of this piece from bullying to playful teasing. Maybe if Tufir Hawat was a beautiful girl I would have found meaning in the Quote about his face. Huoh.
To convince you of my sincere appreciation for fountain pens, Iām going to list reasons, from practical to sentimental, on why I love using them. Consider this my appeal to you, the reader, to get into fountain pens as well. Though my launching into tangents will put you right off the idea.
First, a fountain pen is easy on the wrist. This is my most boring and practical consideration. Even the nicest ballpoint pen requires at least a little pressure to work, while a fountain requires effectively no pressure to put ink on a page. I also find that my natural pen grip is actually perfectly suited for fountain pens, which need to be angled lower than other types of pen. Now that I think about it, why hasnāt anyone in school told me that you should hold a ballpen basically straight up so that it actually writes cleanly? Maybe itās obvious and intuitive to most people, but I deserve to have at least been teased about it.
Naturally, a fountain pen is also nice to write with. Itās hard to describe tactile and kinesthetic experiences, which is why in the mechanical keyboard community they have come up with awful words like āthoccyā and ācreamyā to describe different sensations of key pressing. In the fountain pen world we describe a penās writing character as either being āsmooth,ā like writing on glass (though even this isnāt accurate), or that it hasā¦ āfeedback.ā Feedback is vague. It means the pen isnāt āsmooth,ā but thatās not to say itās rough on the page. All fountain pens write smoothly unless thereās something wrong with the nib. So feedback is the word we use to describe a pen that provides texture to the sensation of gliding the nib on paper. I have a Parker 45 pen, and it has feedback that feels similar to a pencil, but also not really, because I hate writing with pencils, and I like writing with my Parker 45. All I can say is that writing with a fountain pen feels nice. :)
Because fountain pens feel so good to write with, and Iād like you to imagine that I said that in the most perverted way possible, I tend to want to reach for them more. Iāve written a lot in the past year (at least compared to other years), in no small part because I enjoy the feeling of writing with fountain pens. Beyond the tactility of it, writing with fountain pens has also fundamentally changed my process of writing.
Or I guess itās more accurate to say I rediscovered that I find handwriting the more natural way for me to write. It was how I was trained. I competed in essay writing and campus journalism competitions back in high school, see, and these contests were all done on the spot, handwritten, with not even a hint to what the topic we would write about might be (for the feature and editorial writing competitions it seems kind of strange to have that rule, but I suppose theyāre expecting you to have a wide breadth of knowledge to begin with. But I digress).
Because you donāt want to submit a piece that has cross outs and correction tape all over the page, you have to carefully consider the words first in your head before committing them to paper. I find that typing makes me write way too fast, and I often find myself hitting walls as soon as I hit the gas pedal. Handwriting forces me to think slower, and this has helped me write more and write more consistently. Iāve actually even completed NaNoWriMo finally! Sort of. Not really. I started writing a novel in September, restarted it in October, and got to around 40,000 words by December. Still, Iām proud of the achievement!
All that being said, I actually wrote this blog post entirely on my laptop. So fountain pens arenāt magic or anything, theyāre just nice pretty things. If youāre a magpie type of girlie this might be the only consideration you really have, and more power to you.