Neal Stephenson's guide to writing books with a fountain pen

Neal Stephenson writes his novels the way people did in 1850. The science-fiction author of Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, and the thousand-page Baroque Cycle has composed nearly every book since about 2001 with a fountain pen on paper. On his Substack, Graphomane, he says the handwritten manuscript for The Baroque Cycle stood 42 inches high and was displayed at the Science Fiction museum in Seattle.

He points to research suggesting that writing by hand recruits more of the brain than typing.  In 25 years of daily handwriting, he says, he has never felt a trace of "writer's cramp," because he doesn't use a pencil or ballpoint pen. Pencils and thick old ballpoints need real force to make a mark. A fountain-pen nib, he writes, is "basically skating on the little lake of ink that it has just laid down."

His other rules: use cursive, don't bother conserving paper, and skip the iPad stylus, since a hard tip on glass removes the faint friction — pen aficionados call it "tooth" — that your hand relies on. And an expensive pen is optional. A $20 ten-pack of Pilot G-2 gel pens, he says, gets you 80 percent of the way to a fountain pen.

Previously:
• Neal Stephenson and Weta Workshop's new project is… something?
• A.J. Jacobs beat a weeks-long writing block with a two-minute timer
• Mumble Grumble: font for illegible handwriting