My sister once gave me a set of beautiful notebooks with thick, acid-free paper and lovely patterned covers. I always wanted to write in them, but never felt like I had an idea worthy enough. Whatever went in those notebooks should be a real knock-out story with deep insight, huge emotional payoff, and enough humor to kill a yak.

It took me years before I wrote in one of them, and the only thing I wrote was an account from a period of my life shortly after my father passed away. They languished in a box with other unused notebooks for years after.

That doesn’t do justice to the trees they were made from. I felt terrible about it, but I slowly set aside my anxieties and worked up the courage to write in them.

It was a problem of self-defeat: a writer has the perfect notebook and now needs the perfect story to write in it. No idea is even close to perfect, therefore the writer never writes in it.

Maybe the story should go on scrap paper salvaged from the recycling bin. But then what if it turns out to be a good idea? What if one day we sell our personal archive to Harvard and this story doesn’t survive for posterity because it’s not on acid free paper? How, then, will the scholars of the future write their dissertations if our documents have disintegrated?

Both of these ideas are absolutely ridiculous, and both have plagued me. I’m a defeatist with delusions of grandeur. But what about the problem of notebooks?

This shouldn’t even be a discussion. Use a computer, dummy. Right? It’s the obvious choice for its convenience and functionality. We live in the 21st century and there are computers literally spilling out of our pockets, mounted on our bodies. We complain that we’re overstimulated by them. Surely, we can use this to our advantage?

Actually, I don’t love writing on computers. I mean, it’s fine, but I do better with pen and paper. There’s something about the the deliberateness of moving a pen across a page, the connection between thought and hand, that keeps me focused on the story. It draws me in and keeps my attention. I’m less distractable if I don’t have immediate access to the entire body of human knowledge. Or video games†The absolute worst invention re: video games has been the counter that tracks the number of hours you’ve played. It’s like giving a drug addict a badge that says, “Achievement unlocked: 10,000 grams of coke snorted!”.

Computers are a distant second place for me†Editing in them is WAY more convenient: less rewriting. I still feel the pain of having to write several copies of every essay by hand in grade school and a typewriter didn’t make it that much easier, only more legible.. Notebooks it is.

✦   One problem is more ridiculous than the other   ✦

I had two options:

1. Become comfortable with the fact that I’m writing bad ideas in good notebooks.
2. Become comfortable with the fact that nobody will ever care about my personal archive.

Fun fact: dozens of people visit my website every month†Thank you, kind reader!, but Harvard has not yet reached out.

As I’ve aged, I’ve become increasingly OK with the idea that nobody cares about my work and that I will die in obscurity. And this is more a feature than a bug. It’s liberating. I can do whatever I want for the simple joy of doing it regardless of quality or completeness†This has always been true, but I feel a neverending obligation to be “productive,” whatever that means, and I have been fighting it my entire adult life. Only recently have I started to believe I’ve been winning on this front..

I remind myself constantly to enjoy the process, to allow myself to enjoy the luxury of the materials I have. The only metric of quality should be the enjoyment I take from the journey.

✦   Composition books are actually amazing   ✦

The worst thing about nice notebooks is that they’re so dang expensive. Prohibitively so, if you write in volume. The expense was the easiest way to justify not buying them for myself†I’ll gladly accept them as a gift, if you’re wondering….

Instead, a $2 composition book has become my go-to. It’s easy not to be precious when you have a 200-page notebook that cost almost nothing†I hear there are acid-free versions for slightly more, but I haven’t looked into this yet.. The B5-size paper is wide enough to give the words space to breathe, but not so wide that the line feels sprawling. Regular 8.5 x 11 and A4 both feel a bit too wide and A5 feels too narrow. B5 hits the sweet spot and it’s still compact enough that it doesn’t take up much space in a bag or backpack.

The lower paper quality belies the perfection of its form. It’s completely utilitarian and fit for exactly the purpose of accepting ink. In fact, the lower paper quality becomes its most inviting aspect. It’s like the Ellis Island of writing tablets — it accepts the tired, the poor, the most-huddled and tempest-tost ideas without the weight of judgment. It allows us to nurture our ideas until they’re ready to be released into the world, to stand on their own.

What then of the vehicle for ink?

✦   Luxury can come in the form of eco-friendliness   ✦

I’ve been using Bic ballpoint pens for years. They’re reliable, they don’t dry up easily, and they’re so cheap you can buy them in bulk and keep them everywhere you’d ever need one. I usually travel with two just in case. But the more I wrote over the years, the more I realized I was tossing away a good amount of plastic. These are cheap single-use pens and I felt bad about even that relatively small amount of waste.

Still, I wanted something more sustainable. I looked into fountain pens.

These things are great. They write like really juicy gel pens and you can change out the inks†Read: procrastinate from actually writing…. They require a little maintenance and they can dry out, but it takes less than a minute for me to rev it up again if I haven’t used it in a few days. Once it’s working it writes smoothly and clearly with barely any pressure. My hand never aches.

Mine’s made of brass and has a satisfying heft compared to a Bic. I love the style and I always look forward to using it. My fountain pen is easily one of the best gifts I’ve given to myself.

It did cost about $45, which I blanched at initially, but I imagined I’d use it for the rest of my life. And what’s $45 over a lifetime, especially if I’m saving the Earth in the process, right†The Planeteer with the monkey: I’m pretty sure he was the fountain pen guy.?

I’m not inclined to feel precious about something so indestructible. Ink isn’t too expensive and a bottle lasts for an incredibly long time. The feel of the nib gliding across the paper is like a svelte figure skater to the Bic’s clunky Zamboni. It more than makes up for the composition book’s lower-quality paper.

✦   By your powers combined…   ✦

The luxurious fountain pen gets me even more psyched to write and the cheapo composition book is my low-stakes sandbox. Words flow unimpeded, quality doesn’t matter. The most important thing is to put words on the page. Everything else proceeds from there.

Those fancy notebooks my sister gave me? I’m enjoying the slow process of filling them up.