Pencil Me In
🗓 posted Jul 15, 2025 by Josh Erb🔢 1239 words
🏷 #life #writing
This week I have had the misfortune to learn that my good friend and close confidant, Myron, has celebrated his first full monsoon season by contracting a fungal skin infection. As a result, my main job for the next few weeks is lurching through Mumbai traffic for multiple vet visits and managing a rigorous medication & bathing schedule.
This isn't a post about vet services in Mumbai, so I won't digress. But it is worth mentioning that every concern or visit I've done with Myron has resulted in no fewer than 2 visits to the clinic and an average of 5 different recommended medications in order to ensure that Myron is comfortable and on the road to recovery.
What does all this mean for you? Glad you asked! On the days like today, when I've spent +2 hours to get him to and from the vet and pick up medication, it makes it hard to do the kind of deep research and writing that I'm currently preoccupied with for my second novel manuscript.[1] So instead I'm writing a little blog post, as a treat.
Writing with Pencils
Working on a new manuscript is exhilarating and vertiginous. Anything is possible! I can conjure any story or character I want... and... oh god, anything is possible. Nothing is done! All the ideas are half baked! There is so much work to do and there are so many decisions to make.
If I'm not careful, I can go days on end where I spend hours researching ideas but don't write a single world. It's difficult not to succumb to the oppressive voice in my head that whispers that I don't know enough to tell a story and my writing is subpar and I'll look back on the time and energy I've spent on this project embarrassed about how zealous I was and how little I have to show for it after so many months of work.
Now, I've said before on this blog (ref. How's Work?) that I don't want this space to be swallowed up by anxious writing about my writing. There are a thousand blogs that do this already, and most of them are clear examples of writers procrastinating about their main projects. I still feel that way, but I since I sank almost 3 hours into carting around an itchy, nervous dog today, I'm bending my own rules a little bit. And I want to share the most effective technique I've found for hopping the stone wall that separates me from the garden of my creative output.
The technique so simple that writing it out here makes me cringe a little bit: I write my earliest drafts in pencil. On my best writing days, I'll sit somewhere with my phone and computer further than an arm's length away, set 4 to 6 freshly sharpened pencils nearby and start putting one word after another until I run out of words or I need to attend to some other responsibilities.
I haven't spent too much time thinking about why this works so well for me, but I wouldn't write it up if I didn't have a half-formed psychological theory. First, it's important to clarify that it's not just about writing away from the computer. I have no problem writing up a few hundred words on my computer. But also, I have tried it with different pens and the results are less consistent. What's more, it doesn't seem to necessary for subsequent drafts that iterate on the first.
With all this in mind, I think that pencils are proving useful here because they: 1) implicitly hold the promise of impermanence, and 2) give me a physical sense of the progress of my work. In the case of the former, I can write as much garbage as I want and I know that I can erase it. I don't actually circle back and erase too much in my drafts, and as I'm going I actually have a tendency to just scribble things out if they don't feel right. But the knowledge that I can erase would appear to be a necessary a psychological salve. For the latter, it's visible from the picture above. My approach gives me a sense of progress in the short term as each pencil dulls and I have to swap it out. Crucially, though, it also gives me a sense of progress in the longer term. The more I write, the shorter the pencils[2] on rotation get and this induces a satisfied sense of the sum total of writing that is happening.
At last count, my current manuscript is up to 18,200 words. My inclination to pragmatism demands that I stick with pencils until the well runs dry.
In Media Res
I really don't want this to be all about how I've "discovered a hack" or "unlocked my creative potential," so I'll end by noting a few things I've come across in my daily life or in my manuscript research that I think you might like.
I could watch this London Review of Books video a hundred times. In it the artist Jon McNaught talks about his process for creating covers of the magazine. Masterful stuff.
I recently stumbled across the artwork of Julie Cockburn. Currently, she's occupied with this intricate process of embroidering found photographs with colorful, geometric patterns. But if you take the time to look further back into her oeuvre, you'll also find some wonderfully thought provoking collage work.
Finally, after noticing that every director who visits the Criterion Closet has made a point to talk about Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colors Trilogy, I've finally set aside some time for it. I've yet to watch the final one, but Blue, the first, was incredibly well done. White was a bit more uneven for me, but the final scene was iconic and seared into my mind despite that impression.
One nice thing[3] about being more focused on creative work for the first time in my adult life, is that I have more time to follow my interests and encounter the art of others more regularly.
My first novel manuscript, a 78,000 word novel that explores how technology and data alienate us and warp our collective memory, is still being queried & submitted. If you work in or adjacent to the publishing industry and think you could help me sell it, reach out.
It's probably important to admit that I realize that the Blackwing pencils in my picture are overpriced and fetishized. I'd like to think I could write with any old pencil, which is probably why I've kept the Ticonderoga around so long, but I grabbed a pack of Blackwings back in the day because I liked that the eraser design kept them from rolling away. Since then I am forced to admit that I have totally ingested and metabolized all their great marketing around materials and graphite composition.
I can say this if I allow myself to set aside the constant existential angst that comes with trying to get published for a moment...
<< all notes.