I Love Pens

I love pens. Which means I’m picky about the ones I use. I don’t necessarily have to have expensive ones—I’m happy with the basics. But they have to have certain characteristics.

First they have to be 0.5 mm, not 0.7 mm. The latter are too blobby and I have enough trouble reading my own writing at all, let alone in a blobby 0.7 mm format. They have to roll smoothly across the paper, not scratch the paper. They have to feel good in my hand, like they’re an extension of it. And they have to put out ink consistently, not a little bit in one sentence and lots in another, depending on how you’re holding it.

I have a turned-wood pen from Dave, that has a nice weight in my hand and fits snugly against my writing fingers. It has a roller ball, and replaceable ink cartridges. I stopped using it, though, because I was going through so many cartridges. But that’s no reason to give up a fine pen, so I may start using it again.

I have three kinds of cheaper pens that come in boxes of 12: Sharpie S-Gel, Uniball ONYX, and Liquid Ink Rollerball Pens.

The S-Gel fits in my hand well, and has a thick rubber pad around the top so that it sits comfortably against my middle finger (which has a permanent bump from holding pens). The S-Gel slides across the page nicely, and doesn’t smear unless it gets water on it (case in point: I was sitting on my back deck, writing, when a rainstorm arrived and started blowing rain sideways under the deck cover. My notebook got misted with water, and the ink ran a bit). It’s a click pen, so when Silah comes out on the deck with me when I write, she hears the click when I’m done and gets up right away, knowing it’s time to go back in the house.

The ONYX is less desirable. It’s thin so doesn’t fit my hand as well. It also scratches a bit across the page, and is inconsistent with how much ink it lets out. Sometimes it looks like 0.4 mm, other times it looks like 0.6 mm. It’s also a lot pointier, so if the page I’m writing on isn’t exactly on top of the previous or next page, it can poke a hole in the paper. The good thing is that, like the S-Gel, it doesn’t smear. Because it has a lid and not a click, there’s nothing to signal to Silah that it’s time to go inside.

Then there’s the Liquid Ink Rollerball Pen. This is on par with the Sharpies. It fits well in my hand and isn’t too thin like the ONYX, and the ink rolls out nicely and consistently without scratching the page. You can also see the ink in the top half of the pen, as it has a series of disks stacked like records on the inside. It doesn’t have a clicker though, so again nothing to let Silah know that it’s time to go in.

Finally, there’s the fancy Kaweco pen my friend Erin gifted me for my book launch. Unlike all my rollerball pens, this one has an actual nib, and ink flows smoothly from it. It has a cartridge that you can refill (she also got me a jar of ink to refill it with!), and produces elegant script, even in my scrawled handwriting. It reminds me of a pen my dad used to have, which was just a nib on a handle and you had to dip it in ink to write with it. I spent a lot of time playing around with it, and I imagine I’ll do the same with Erin’s gift. The trick, though, is to use the right paper. Paper in a Moleskine notebook, for example, sucks up the ink, whereas the pen should glide nicely over less absorbent paper.

I’ve been testing out these pens in my daily writing, switching to another brand every few days to see what I think. I wonder if my propensity to use cheap pens is a comment on what I think of my writing. I don’t use the turned-wood pen because I think it’s “too fancy” for everyday writing. But I did use it for everyday writing five years ago, so maybe I’ve just decided in the interim that my writing isn’t worth investing in good pens for.

Maybe I’ll break out the wooden pen again. Meanwhile, I’ve put the ONYX pens into everyday use for making shopping lists and noting phone messages. They just didn’t perform well on their writing test. And I’ll find more times to use Erin’s pen—maybe for cards and other things that require fancy writing.