This is number 148 in the blog series, “My Writing Life.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“The moving finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”
--Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Quatrain 51
SINCE OCTOBER 2025, I have been keeping a paper journal. It isn’t the first time I’ve kept a journal, but nine months of daily journaling might be a new record, even for an obsessive writer like me. You’d think I could be more consistent with my blog. Ah well.
In November, I saw an ad for Ellington Pens and was reminded of how I once had a collection of fountain pens. I don’t really know what I did with them, but like many things, they seemed to disappear with the dawn of the computer age. I decided to buy an Ellington Pen just to enjoy the feeling of ink flowing onto the page. Now, I have five of them! And a shelf full of journals.
And I find that I am using them more frequently, not less. My habit is to write while I am eating breakfast—nearly always in a restaurant. I haven’t really cooked at home in over a year. I was really surprised the first time a waitress stopped to tell me what beautiful handwriting I have. I always considered it to be rather sloppy and undisciplined. I don’t think the months of journaling have particularly improved it.
What it is, I have decided, is a novelty. It’s something people don’t see that often. Like paper checks. Postcards have been replaced by email or text messages. ‘Writing’ is done on a keyboard.
I’m not a Luddite. I spend eight or more hours a day at the keyboard. I have a smart phone and even worked in that industry for a number of years. All high-tech stuff.
But I love writing with my fountain pen.
On the other hand, my daughter, at less than half my venerable age, told me she saw no sense in learning cursive writing. Her printing is just as fast (and almost as illegible). She seldom picks up a pen or a piece of paper. Words flow from her mind to the keyboard and she types almost as fast on her phone as she does at the computer.
Interestingly, she and I both have keyboards that click as we type, mimicking a typewriter. Anachronisms.
So, why am I so fascinated with handwriting?
One of the things that intrigues me about handwriting today is the ambiguity of the written word. Occasionally, I need to stop and puzzle over a word or phrase I have written in order to make sense of it. Also, there is a tone in the written word that is hidden in type. When I read my journal entries, I can tell if I was angry, depressed, or in a mental fog, even without reading the words.
That is not unusual in Chinese and many other Asian languages. My waitress at a favorite Chinese restaurant in Las Vegas took time to show me how her name was written in Chinese characters.
Her English name, Amoura, is a nickname given to her when she started school in America. Her surname, Poon, is a single character written by combining three different Chinese characters. Sounds kind of like English, since we just combine letters to make words. The characters in Chinese are entire words in themselves. The three characters in her surname are ‘rice,’ ‘water,’ and ‘field.’ A good name to ensure she doesn’t go hungry. Her given name is Kam, made of the characters for ‘gold’ and ‘jade.’ A name for wealth. Finally, her middle name, Hun, is made of the characters for ‘woman’ and ‘open door.’ Combined, they may mean ‘a hospitable woman.’
Recently, I found my favorite Thai performer’s name literally translates as ‘Rainbow Water.’
Chinese calligraphy has the precision and artistry of Spencerian script. The calligrapher can express ideas and emotions in both the words made up by combining characters, and through the artistry of the brush strokes. The words might accompany a work of art and be as important to the composition as the picture itself.
In the poem I cited at the beginning of this post, Khayyam talks about the permanence of the written word. When I write in my paper journal with a fountain pen, whatever I write stays there. Even if I make a mistake or scratch something out, the ink stays on the paper. It would be embarrassing at times, if anyone else ever read it!
This makes me think more before I write. I sometimes get carried away and write more of a stream of consciousness, but most of the time, what I write is quite deliberate. By contrast, I believe fully a third of what I type as a first draft is deleted, corrected, and added to before I finish typing it.
When I transcribe from my journal, as in the case of this blog post, I do a lot of editing as well. It is different, though. I correct misspellings and embellish the subject, but I find the words I drafted are closer to what I meant to say than words that go from mind to keyboard uninterrupted. So, I have been writing more first draft material in my journals than I ever used to.
In 1969, I bicycled across the US solo and kept a journal every day. Usually, it was written at the end of the day with my thoughts about what happened and what I saw that day. I was a pretty religious peacenik in those days and, having recently uncovered that journal, I found much of the scrawling to be cringe-worthy. On the other hand, I get a clearer glimpse of who I was when I was nineteen years old. It was not the writing that was cringe-worthy!
The hand-written journal is playing a more important role in my publishable writings, and not always as a first draft I will transcribe. Rather, it jump-starts my writing for the day, allowing me to collect my thoughts and get my creative juices flowing.
Julia Cameron’s 1992 book The Artist’s Way included the exploration of ‘morning pages’ as a way to unblock creativity and discover more about ourselves and our dreams. She suggests three pages of stream-of-consciousness writing each morning. Three pages in one of my journals is about 650 words, not a great amount by my normal writing standards.
I’ve done morning pages in times past and my current morning journaling is somewhat less stream-of-consciousness and more thoughts about my upcoming day, including planning out what I intend to write that day. This isn’t the same as a first draft, but it is more than stream-of-consciousness. Here’s an example:
It’s not quite an outline and far from being a first draft. It is a start at organizing my intent for the day’s writing. As I worked, I found I wasn’t ready for some of this stuff. I needed more set-up. But I had my thoughts on paper where I can continue to refer to them.
And that is why I continue to write with a fountain pen in a paper journal. In fact, indulging myself for Father's Day, I just ordered another fountain pen!
Happy Father's Day and Summer Solstice!