Hello.
A couple of days ago I started doing some library research for Undrafting, and I popped into the British Library to look at manuscripts by Angela Carter for The Bloody Chamber and J.G. Ballard’s Crash, which I’m hoping to use in the book — reproduce some pages if I can get the rights.
Very excitingly, as I was coming out, Julia Donaldson was doing a reading of The Gruffalo and launching her new book — well, out in the autumn — Gruffalo Granny. She was reading to the children in the foyer of the British Library, and she did the entire Q&A wearing the mouse ears, because she played the Mouse when she did the reading.
So: the bonuses of going out to a library and doing some actual physical research, and on top of that, the greatest children’s writer of our time — let’s say.
I’m going to talk about paper today. Loose paper, and maybe, if I’ve got time, pads.
I wasn’t sure whether to go straight on from smart pens and pens and pencils to typewriters and laptops, which are obviously the other means of production. But I thought paper fitted better with the things you write on paper than after, when you get to just printing out from a laptop.
I was a bit of a paper snob when I could afford to be. From a specialist supplier in Covent Garden, I bought reams — half a thousand sheets — of 100gsm paper, grams per square metre, and it was the colour of really good vanilla custard. I’d take this home and use it along with a dipping pen and some posh ink brand I’ve forgotten.
It worked. I wrote a whole novel called deadkidsongs, and the manuscript is the most beautiful I ever made. For years I kept it out of the boxes in the cellar, because I liked to glimpse it occasionally.
If you’re using an ink pen — dipping or a fountain pen — you can’t be doing with a paper that either doesn’t absorb the ink or absorbs it only too well. Some notebook papers can leave a paragraph of words still glistening for a full minute on their waxy surfaces, and very cheap writing paper will approximate to a blotter, making each letter bloat as the ink spreads out into the gaps between fibres.
I find even a slight fattening of each line after it’s been left an annoyance, unless for some reason it fits the prose, fits the narrator.
Nothing I’ve bought in the UK is as rough as the paper I used when I arrived in Prague in 1990. This was so woodchippy that if you dragged your palm across it as you wrote, small but sharp splinters would prick you and stick in you. Some of the Czechoslovak toilet paper I used at the same time had this quality too. And if you held it up to the light, you could see pieces of bark incorporated into the texture. I’m not exaggerating.
This basic Soviet paper — writing (or toilet) — not quite A4, was great for typing, although it felt like if you tried to fold it, it would crack.
Nowadays, I buy 80gsm recycled paper in packs of 2,500 from an online office supplier. About twice a year I need to do a stationery order: Post-it notes, basic ink, brown envelopes, glue, thumbtacks. It’s when I’m running out of paper that I put this list together of necessities. But I find I’m printing a lot less out than I used to.
The brands of recycled paper that I order seem to change every time. I have no recommendation. This one is cheaper, or advertises itself as unbleached as well as recycled. I don’t have any loyalty.
It’s far more affordable to buy paper in bulk than in high street stationers, 500 sheets at a time.
I will sometimes write directly onto my blank 80gsm printer paper. To make sure my lines are straight and consistent across the page, I have an A4 plastic sheet that goes beneath the page I’m writing on. This has thick black horizontal lines printed on it, visible through 80gsm paper. I bought this sheet in Prague along with the pencil extender I mentioned a few days ago.
All good basic kit.
And I would say that most of the paper you’re going to buy in any high street shop or from an online retailer is going to be fine. There’s no need to be fussy about it.
A word on paper pads, then.
Angela Carter wrote on pads, I saw. She kind of flipped the pages up and wrote the extra bits in on the upper page, the reverse, upside down, of the page she’s writing on. Interesting to me.
For every day at the desk, I like either a narrow-lined or, more often, a quadrille A4 pad. These I buy from Ryman’s. Although not harsh like Soviet loo paper, the WHSmith pads I’ve found can be slightly unpleasantly prickly.
Occasionally I’ve been persuaded, by reading an American writer talking about their means of production of writing, to try a yellow legal pad. Or if I’ve been reading some European writer, some German product with extra lines and boxes at the top of the page. But I always go back to the narrow-lined or quadrille, and that’s fine.
Note: with both narrow-lined and quadrille paper, I write on alternate lines and on one side only of the paper, which ends up as a recto, or page on the right-hand side. And I will be talking about recto and verso and the opposite page pretty soon.
Thanks for joining. I hope you got something out of this.
What kind of paper do you use? Does it have to be very, very special? Does it have to have a certain kind of lines on it? Let me know.
Like, share and subscribe, and I hope to see you soon.
