In Defense of Fountain Pens in a Digital Age

I write everything with fountain pens. Yes, everything. Notes, drafts, shopping lists, the occasional great idea for a play that might become a poem. People think this is charming or eccentric or deeply impractical. It’s none of these things. It’s economic.

Not in the “saves money” sense (fountain pens are a conspicuous money pit if you let them be). I mean economic in the real sense: the optimal allocation of scarce resources. And the scarcest resource we have isn’t money. It’s attention.

Friction is a feature, not a bug.

A fountain pen requires you to slow down. Not much, just enough to notice what you’re writing. The nib hits paper with intention. You can’t mindlessly scrawl with a fountain pen the way you can with a ballpoint. The act of writing becomes deliberate, which means the thinking becomes deliberate.

Digital writing is frictionless, which sounds like an advantage until you realize frictionless also means thoughtless. I can type 100 words per minute and delete 95 of them because they were noise, not signal. The delete key is the enemy of clarity. It tricks you into thinking you can edit your way to coherence instead of thinking your way there first.

With a fountain pen, crossing out is expensive (not in ink, but in aesthetics). A crossed-out line is visible evidence of a false start. You learn quickly to pause before you commit. This isn’t romantic nonsense about “the craft of writing.” It’s behavior modification through designed constraint.

Objects shape behavior.

The keyboard doesn’t care what you type. A fountain pen does. Different nibs, different inks, different papers and each combination produces a different writing experience, and therefore different writing. A stub nib forces you to consider letterforms. A flexible nib makes you pay attention to pressure. A scratchy nib on rough paper is visceral feedback: you are making marks on the world.

This matters more than you think. When everything is mediated through a screen, we lose the sensory vocabulary of creation. The fountain pen returns it: the smell of ink, the texture of paper, the slight resistance that tells you you’re making something real.

The coordination problem of digital tools.

Here’s the economic argument: digital tools require constant coordination with their future selves. File formats change. Software updates break workflows. Cloud services disappear. Every digital note I took in 2010 requires active maintenance to remain accessible in 2025. And let’s not even start with the stuff I was doing in 2004.

I recently had to take five old CDs (treasured memories, irreplaceable recordings) into a store to get them digitized onto a USB drive. The USB now travels everywhere with me. Some memories you just can’t trust to the cloud.

A fountain pen and a notebook require zero coordination. They work the same way they did in 1920. They’ll work the same way in 2050. This is infrastructure you can depend on.

And yes, I’m writing this on a keyboard. The irony isn’t lost on me. But I drafted it first with a Sheaffer Imperial (the same pen I used in high school) on paper hand-crafted in Cuenca, Ecuador by my best friend..

(Before you do the math on how old that makes me: I started high school at nine. I did mention I’m precocious.)

Some friction is worth keeping.