Link: https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/writing-by-hand-is-good-for-your

About twenty-five years ago I stopped composing at the keyboard and switched over to fountain pen on paper. Since then I have written many thousands of pages that way. The manuscript of The Baroque Cycle was a stack of handwritten pages 42 inches high, which for a time was on display at the Museum of Science Fiction in Seattle. With the exception of The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O., which I co-wrote with Nicole Galland by emailing Word files back and forth, every book I’ve written since then has been composed with fountain pen on paper.

Read 75% of this article.

To summarise, don't use cheap pens or cheap paper. Ideally use fountain pens because author does genuinely really love them, but actually this branded product wil get you most of the way.

In final paragraph branded product name dropped twice.

All thats missing is a “backtoschool” discount code and an official sponsor line.

Can confirm. If you want to try a fountain pen without breaking the bank, Jinhao make a bunch of really nice clones that you can get for like $10 on aliexpress. My favourite is the black 75.

Also Uniball Eye Fine pens are amazing. And waterproof, so good for drawing too.

I adore Stephenson, he's one of my favorites, but we have COMPLETELY different writing processes. I could never dream of writing on paper like that anymore. I'm not saying it's impossible, but the time sink is just too much for me to justify. I can't work 40 hours a week and then go home and write on paper just to have to type it into a computer anyway.

However, this very much tracks with his brand of fiction. He doesn't edit as he goes, and that's apparent. Stories often don't end where you think they will, and a lot of that probably comes from being forced to live with what you wrote 5 chapters ago instead of being able to go back and edit it in Word.

It's double disgusting, because every corner of the web, even the ones where we try to find genuine content, is full of ads, and also people fall for it as long as it's just presented with enough appearance of authenticity. That's why I type my angry rants against consumerism and capitalism on my beloved KMarrrX Ergosynth Keyboard - the radical way to shitpost and comment!

write on paper just to have to type it into a computer anyway.

I don't think he does that himself.

Stories often don’t end where you think they will, and a lot of that probably comes from being forced to live with what you wrote 5 chapters ago instead of being able to go back and edit it in Word.

Um. That's not how writing by hand works - it's not meant to look good. You can scratch out, squeeze in, re-number pages, add asterisks, even cut into pieces, as the story requires.

I think this is a generally helpful guide and not spon-con. The g-2 pens he recommends are way better than the cheaper lookalikes that are usually on the same rack so I think it is good that he mentions the brand. Moleskine notebooks do have better paper in them than the store brands that look the same. How could someone recommend a specific product in a way that you don't see as paid advertising?

...You think Neal Stephenson is shilling for brands online?

Did you read the Blue Ant trilogy and think William Gibson was in the pay of Big Mechanical Calculator?

So.. People can't talk about the tools they use to do their craft?

I don’t know who Neal Stephenson is and neither can i vouch for their ethics of any partnership they may be bound to.

What i am saying is, an ai could easily spin up advertisement articles like this as part of some small print business contract that they didn’t know they signed. Or just without permission.

Or a legit honest witten article could be tweaked to include an ai inserted sponsorship after the fact. Maybe this text was entirely stolen from their personal blog. Sure you can research to check this but from the information that is here its clear that,

anything is possible,

the internet is dead,

the only way to know anything for sure is if you knew person irl and asked them about it directly.

They could mention it more briefly and maybe include that they aren’t sponsored to recommend this brand.

Which is actually a compliment to said brand i would take the recommendation more seriously if its explicitly since. but it also cannot be lied about without causing potential legal trouble.

Though i want to conclude i am in no way saying this specific named author is doing anything wrong. my critique is the general state of the digital world. It may not be slop, but it might aswell be and there is no obvious difference.

Obviously

Great if you like to have ink all over everything at all times now and forever. Fuck off brand

On the other hand, a ten-pack of Pilot G-2 gel pens goes for about twenty bucks.

I also like the G2. Its almost unheard of as common practice in the US, but refills are easy to find online and cheaper than a new pen.