As writers and/or students that spend quite a fair bit of time touching ink to paper, the value of a well-flowing pen can never be overstated. It is a subject rarely touched on in academic discussion nor in everyday speech, but yet it is something we all innately understand. We are all familiar with the sight of a fresh sheet of lined paper, perfectly smooth and free of wrinkles, as if, by a helpfully gentle breeze, it had floated directly from the College-Ruled Lined Paper Factory squarely onto our desks. On a deeper level, we can all find common ground in the primal need to snatch up a writing utensil and mark that immaculate three-hole-punched rectangle with musings, ideas, bullet points, arrows, useful bits of information, useless bits of information, random drawings of cubes and repeated practices of our signatures, our wrists pressing into the page, crinkling and distorting its pristine smoothness. It is akin to the sensation one feels when driving on a country road in Colorado in January and passing a snowy field, bright and untarnished and fresh and subsequently having the mad desire to drive a tractor through it. There is something inexplicably satisfying in tainting a taintless space with a creative flourish, and the proper instruments are required in doing so. In a snowy field, this might be a tractor. In the case of lined paper, it is a pen. Not just any pen. A well-flowing pen. The distinction between a regular pen and a well-flowing pen is, well, it's like the difference between a fresh sheet of paper and a sheet of paper after a mad creative artist is finished with it.
What is the importance of a well-flowing pen? Firstly, it helps establish the crucial symbiotic bond between writer and instrument. The writer has to feel a certain kinship and trust with the implement in which she chooses to express the inexpressible. After all, how can she really know that the pen she wields will do a sufficient job in bringing her ideas to life, in releasing those floaty abstract concepts in her mind into the concrete world of ink and paper? No other pen than a well-flowing one is up to such a formidable task. As the writer is bumbling about with her head full of larval-staged ideas, only a precious few of those ideas making it to paper, a pen that happily shares its abundance is absolutely necessary. A well-flowing pen is a selfless philanthropist, offering liberal doses of ink as gifts to the writer, insisting she have more when she herself does not even know that she needs it. It gives freely and fully, relishing its sacrificial duty in the knowledge that it is part of something greater than itself, namely a written masterpiece. It is on constant standby, ready to spring into action when inspiration strikes. This is most noticeable in the fascinating habit well-flowing pens have of sharing ink when the writer is not actually writing. What writer is unfamiliar with the event of holding pen poised over paper, ballpoint barely touching, as they search their brains for something worthy to scribble down, barely noticing a pool of ink rippling out from the pen's point onto the paper, as the pen waits in earnest, letting its master know that she is free to ravage its precious ink stores as much as she needs. Indeed, the necessity of a well-flowing pen is of the highest importance, and one only needs to have a few inevitably unpleasant experiences with poorly-flowing pens to realize this. Poorly-flowing pens, by bitter contrast, are stingy and selfish, refusing to perform their basic job of administering ink, as if they were keeping it all for their own. The result is highly unappealing: an obnoxious scratching sound when writing, and words come out faint and unnoticeable. It is enough to make the writer, like some particularly picky version of the Prodigal Son, come back to their loyal well-flowing pen, crying and promising never to betray it for some superficially fancy PaperMate Inkjoy again.
Yes, the value of a well-flowing pen can never be overstated, and I say that while typing on a computer.
This is so true! There's nothing quite like that moment when you get a pen and you realize it writes perfectly with your particular penmanship and you can just glide over the page. It's like magic. Unfortunately, as you cover in your last sentence, I have also become one with Microsoft Word as of late
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