Everybody Writes, 2nd Edition



Part VIIContent Tools

What tools will help you produce your best work?

John Steinbeck reportedly used 300 Eberhard Faber Blackwing pencils to complete East of Eden. He used another 60 to produce The Grapes of Wrath.

The Blackwing 602's performance (expressed in its famous slogan, “Half the pressure, twice the speed”) gave the pencil a cult following that continued even after it was discontinued in 1998.

Who wouldn't want to use the same tool that Steinbeck and Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Finder and Stephen Sondheim used?

Other writers have been equally finicky about their writing tools. Here are Hemingway's requirements: “The blue-backed notebooks, the two pencils and the pencil sharpener (a pocket knife was too wasteful), the marble-topped tables, the smell of café crèmes, the smell of early morning sweeping out and mopping and luck were all you needed.” (From his Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast.)

Neil Gaiman and Stephen King reportedly use fountain pens because they both like to write more slowly and with more intention.

“I also discovered I enjoy the tactile buzz of the ritual involved in filling the pens with ink,” Neil told the BBC.¹ (I like that he says he changes the ink color each day so he can see how many pages he produced the previous day.)

Jane Austin wrote on sheepskin with a quill pen, using a special kind of ink made with stale beer. The Palimpsest blog has her recipe:²

Take 4 ozs of blue gauls [gallic acid, made from oak apples], ...