Writing | Choosing Your Tools
“Choose your tools carefully, but not so carefully that you get uptight or spend more time at the stationary store than at your writing table. ”
If you are a writer,
if you write at all,
what are your tools?
Do you write with whatever pen or pencil is closest? Do you keep a lined notebook, or plain paged journal? Do you write by hand at all? Do you prefer to type it out on your laptop, or phone?
My tools are very specific—big surprise.
My tools are a blue-ink fine-point Sharpie pen and a lined Moleskine journal.
My tools are what they always have been, since the time I first began keeping a diary in third grade.
Blue ink, lined pages.
The style of pen has evolved. When I was younger and poorer, any old Bic ballpoint would suffice. These days, however, I am very loyal to my fine-tipped Sharpies, which I buy in bulk on Amazon and hoard in a drawer so as never to run out of ink. I love the richness, the smoothness. There’s a gentle grace in the way the point glides along the line.
Swish! across the page.
And oh! the page!
The pages.
The record-keepers. The story-holders. The secret-protectors. The dream guardians.
How many pages have I scrawled across? How many pages have I filled with my loopy handwriting, that looks more and more like my mother’s as the years go by?
Pages—clean, lined pages—have been my refuge and my rebellion.
When I was a little girl, I confessed innocent secrets to a hardcover, pastel purple diary that locked with the turn of a tiny key. I hid the key in a little gift-box in my sock drawer for safe keeping.
As a teenager, alienated and awkward, I’d sit on the stoop of my family’s yellow farmhouse and scribble madly across the pages of a 3-for-$5 spiral notebook. Angsty poetry and angry heartbreak songs.
In college, I spilled my newly tapped feminist rage into hip-looking journals from Urban Outfitters. It was a complex and contracted time for my writing. The often small and oddly shaped pages of very cool notebooks didn’t match the needs of my bursting, sensitive heart.
I needed space, wide open, but lined. Free to hold everything—in an orderly and safe way.
These days, I glide my blue-ink fine-point Sharpie pen across the wide pages of a Moleskine journal. I like my books to be hardcover, noting the seriousness of what they contain. The pages are creamy and smooth, and I never feel like I am running out of room.
My writing tools—do they really matter? Most likely, no one will ever see or read any of it, blue ink or not.
Can you imagine? My entire magnificent life, spilled onto pages no one will read. The thought makes all these books of paper covered in blue immediately more sacred to me.
They will always only ever be for me.
Of what other thing, aside from the secrets kept within them, can I say the same?
