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Windows 0000: The lead pencil.

This is an ode to the No. 2 pencil, and yet I am writing it on a Dell Latitude laptop.

I hope that establishes that I am not a Luddite. Long ago–when I bought my own original IBM PC, I said goodbye to my Underwood upright. Forever. It might be in the attic somewhere. I don’t know; I don’t ever even visit it anymore.

A No. 2 pencil is another anachronism entirely. It has been the means by which I have written the first two drafts of every novel I have published and a couple I haven’t. And it is married forever in my mind–for better paragraphs or for worse–to a narrow-lined yellow legal pad.

The first time I brought the two together in the aspiration of making literature, it was purely by accident. They just happened to be ready to hand.

I was an Army PFC at Ft. Bragg, waiting to get orders for Vietnam. I had lots of free time (this has never happened again) and no money (this has, but not lately). If I remember correctly, when you took laundry, insurance, taxes, and the commanding officer’s favorite charity out of your pay, you had barely three figures left for the month.

During the day I had access to typewriters. They were electric, and I hated them. At night even those were inaccessible. Buying a manual typewriter was out of the question. Hence the No. 2 pencil and legal pad.

Every evening after chow I would go to the Service Club near my barracks and spend a few hours creating a piece of fiction fired by the common, hopeless aspiration–with Vietnam as an accelerant–that something of mine might survive me.

I wrote a novel called “Moebius Strip” on a yellow pad, then I rewrote it longhand. Eventually I thought it was finished (and from the title, you can probably tell that it was finished from the very start). I had my orders by then, and so I sent the manuscript to a friend, who had graciously offered to type it and send it to the New York publishers who, I was sure, would have been eagerly awaiting it had they only known.

Mercifully, this novel has never been published. But the habit of its creation is firmly established and enduringly linked to that marvelous invention of wood, graphite, tin, rubber, and yellow paint. Today it’s more often graphite, rubber and plastic. But it must use No. 2 lead. And yellow is definitely the color of preference for the plastic.

Why No. 2? In the old days we used pencils with softer lead for editing typewritten news stories. This was fine for the short bursts it took to delete or insert a few words or slash out a paragraph or two. But soft lead is no good for the long haul. Finer lead than the No. 2 might seem a better match to the narrow lines of the legal pad. But it barely leaves a mark. This is not a good quality when one’s first-draft hold on a story is so precarious that it threatens at all times to fade away.

I do not write non-fiction in pencil. That’s why this is going down on a Dell. Non-fiction is logical, organized. It marches smartly along like a cursor across the page. A computer works just fine.

But for fiction, a pencil and paper are just the thing. I start out every morning saying to myself, “Don’t even try to make this perfect. Don’t even worry about good. What you are doing now will not make it into the final manuscript. Not one mischosen word or awkward phrase of it. So just go ahead. Get something down. Not in ink, which is too final. Put it out tentatively. Erase and do it again if it makes you feel better. But for heaven’s sake get something down on the page before your time runs out.”

In truth there is another reason for my attachment to the No. 2 pencil, and like many attachments it is simply historical. Once I started creating fiction with it, it became the instrument by which I turned myself from a logical, methodical reporter, editor, or businessman into a hopeless dreamer. For that is what writing fiction really is. A friend of mine says that to do it, a person has to sustain himself in an alert dream state. He also says that, if you try to think your way out of a fictional problem, you have already failed.

Many writers have spoken about their characters taking over the story. For me, the story actually teaches me something about the world around me and about the inner life of people very different from myself. All this must sound hopelessly mystical to literalists. But it is literally true. In fact, if a fictional story you are working on does not surprise you with the truth you did not know before, you probably have a dead piece of writing on your hands.

To project myself into the mode in which it is even possible that I might make a fiction truly live, I have developed a number of rituals: writing early in the morning before too much has intruded between me and the unremembered dreams of the night before, choosing music in advance specifically for the kind of novel I am trying to write. (This was, as you can imagine, very easy when I started my novel “Mass.”) And the feel of a No. 2 pencil on a narrow-lined yellow legal pad.

Then when I am finished for the morning, I do the pencils the respect of sharpening them.