A fountain pen can help you to slow down and concentrate when you are writing.

All of us live distracted lives. Many academic writers have a ritual to get into the right mindset for writing. Some sharpen a half-a-dozen pencils and line them up in a row. Others light a candle. Some turn to music. I have found pleasure in using a new foundation pen that I bought from Levenger. It helps me to slow down and concentrate my attention on what I am writing.

There are parallels between novelists and biographers and academic writers in the seriousness with which they take the tools of the craft. Pulitzer price winning author of many biographies, including a four volumes about Lyndon Johnson that runs more than 3000 typeset pages, Robert Caro says that writing out his text in long-hand first on legal-size yellow pads helps to slow down his thinking. In a 2019 book called Working: Researching, Interviewing, and Writing, this American journalist describes a process of writing that he has maintained despite the advent of computers. He writes the first draft in long-hand, then shifts to a manual typewriter.  Caro thinks a computer makes it too easy write fluently but not sincerely.

I find that the fountain pen’s slight drag, and even the subtle sound it makes as it scratches across the paper, helps to concentrate my attention on the words. To refine your words is to refine your thinking. The great American poet, Emily Dickinson, inserted the symbol of a cross in her poems as she wrote and edited them and listed other words choices that might better get at her point. 

Every serious writer adopts tools of the trade to concentrate attention and to organize his/her thoughts in a way that communicates effectively with others.