Pencils Rule!

Pencils rule. I hate writing with pens. Pens are too slippery. Mistakes made with a pen are permanent. My thoughts flow too quickly for a pen to capture accurately.

Pens make me write too fast. My penmanship is already terrible. Trying to put my jumbled thoughts on paper with a pen is a frustrating demonstration of the word, "fruitless". Thoughts begin all neatly in a row, but then - the changes come. They always come. They come mid-sentence! The ideas are always better when they come mid-sentence.

The problem is that new thoughts mid-sentence change the meaning of what has been written beforehand.

Example: Last night, I began a writing exercise about a guy who was sitting at a diner with this girl who was more than a friend, but not someone he would introduce to his mother. I got four sentences written and suddenly, this girl became his wife and I was writing from her point of view! And it was a better idea -- of course.

But, ink is permanent. There is no eraser for a pen. At least, there is no good eraser - only ones that will put holes in your paper. Had I been writing with a pencil, I could have erased the four sentences - or maybe just erased a few key words instead - and begun again. But no...I scratched out a couple words, wrote over some pronouns, and finally, just scribbled and crossed out the whole thing - and I began again.

If I had been using a pencil in the first place, the friction of the lead moving across the paper might have even slowed down my writing process enough as to have given me the time to have the new idea before all four sentences had been written.

Oh, and another thing. Regular No. 2 pencils trump mechanical pencils every time.

But that's a whole 'nuther argument.... :)