On Answering the Big Question

Pen or pencil?

Do you write with a pen or pencil?

along with

Where do you get your inspiration from?

and

Can you give me your agent’s home phone number?

and

Exactly how many copies did your last book sell?

is one of the top questions writers hope not to be asked.

What difference does it make if I wrote my Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius with a pen or a pencil or, as is most likely the case, on a MacBook Air (though not the latest one)?

It’s a Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius — ask me a question that allows me to talk for at least five minutes about that, and hopefully include the anecdote about what my uncle said when he first read it.

(Uncle always gets a laugh.)

Don’t ask me about my tools.

However, speaking for myself, I’m more than happy to answer — in some detail.

Because I think it’s important.

I think it makes a difference whether a book, or a draft of a book, is being written in pen or pencil or on a new or old MacBook.

And when my uncle first read Adventures in Capitalism, he said I should seek psychiatric help.

My uncle was a psychiatrist.

Unfortunately, he was in Australia, so couldn’t give that help in person.

I won’t answer the pencil question with reference to my books. There’s not much in that for you.

However, a rumour did go around (spread by Jenny Colgan, I think) that I wrote an entire novel with a quill.

That is not true.

I did, though, write deadkidsongs with a dipping pen.

(With nib.)

There’s more in this subject than one entry can cover. But I’d say that the most important lesson I’ve learned — and this goes for notebooks just as must as writing implements — is that you must not be intimidated by your tools, and also that you must not feel contempt for them.

Your attitude to anything you use to write, pen, pencil, programme, is dominated by your deep body memories.

If writing in BiC Cristal Original biro (blue) takes you straight back to maths homework, and you really didn’t like maths, then trying to get your best down whilst using stringy ink that scrapes and clots — that’s an exercise in self-hatred.

Say you have an idea, and there’s nothing else around. You’re going to use whatever is around. Blue biro, fine.

But given the choice, hoping to have a stable and helpful medium, you need something that doesn’t make you feel like — after your best efforts — you’re going to find

3/10. See me.

appearing in red biro at the bottom of your draft.

The reverse of this is having a pen that’s so special occasion, so signing-the-wedding-register, that you sit there feeling like you’re wearing head-to-toe white lace or a morning suit.

I especially mean this if you got married and wore nothing like the conventional get-up. Neither the first nor second time.

A pen that is, essentially, cartridge-filled imposter syndrome will actively damage your writing — even if it was a birthday present from your biggest supporter.

Of course, there may be a stationery-centred equivalent of method acting.

Your narrator is an 18th Century Lord, so you go out and buy a quill; or, even more methody, learn to carve one yourself (from YouTube videos).

And it might also be a useful trick to bring in some biro-based contempt for a piece of writing you’ve become a bit vain about. (The laptop equivalent is changing the font to one you hate. Yes, even Comic Sans.)

But the most important day-to-day thing is that you feel your tools are your tools. They are on your level. Not only are you comfortable with them, you are yourself with them.

You are neither writing up nor down. You are just writing.

4/10 Could do better.