Pencil Me In

🗓 posted Jul 15, 2025 by Josh Erb
🔢 1320 words
🏷

This week I learned 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 I've raised with our vet about Myron has resulted in no fewer than 2 visits to the clinic and an average of 5 different recommended medications. For comparison, in the US I lived 4 blocks from the vet and would maybe take him there once or twice a year? I think it's a combination of India's high touch approach to customer service and a cultural tendency to take the stewardship of animal well being very seriously.

Pondering the cruel twists of fate that led him to this point.

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 and each one will do damage to the idealized image I have been carrying around in my head.

If I'm not careful, I can go days on end doing hours of research without writing 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 other projects. I still feel this way, but since I sank almost 3 hours into carting around an itchy, nervous dog today, I'm bending my own rules a bit. So strap in because 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 is so simple that writing it like I've discovered something innovative 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 more 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.

Looks like the gang's all here.

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. And let me be clear, it's not simply the fact that I am writing away from the computer. As this blog demonstrates, I have no problem writing up a few hundred words on my computer. To put an even finer point on it[2], it's not even about writing by hand. I have tried it with pens and ink and the results are less consistent. Even more befuddling, it doesn't seem to be necessary for any iterating or revising of subsequent drafts. It's only necessary when wrestling with that first blank page.

With all these caveats in mind, I think that pencils are proving useful here because they: 1) implicitly hold the promise of impermanence, and 2) give me a material 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 in 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[3] on rotation become and this induces a satisfied sense of the sum of writing occurring.

At last count, my current manuscript is up to 18,200 words. My tendency toward pragmatism demands that I stick with the pencils until the well runs dry.

Summa Mediae

I really don't want this to be all about how I've "discovered a hack" for "unlocking my creative potential," so I'll end by sharing 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 came across the artwork of Julie Cockburn. Currently, her practice consists of intricately modifying found photographs by embroidering them with colorful, geometric patterns. If you look further back into her oeuvre, you'll also find some wonderfully striking 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 film, was incredibly well done. White, the second film, was a bit uneven for me, but despite my impression the final scene remains iconic.

One nice thing[4] 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 with more regularity.

  1. My first 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.

  2. Pun very much intended.

  3. I'll admit without prompting that the Blackwing pencils pictured above are an overpriced and fetishized commodity. 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 — mostly because I liked that the eraser design kept them from rolling away — and I have totally ingested and metabolized all of their clever marketing about materials and design.

  4. 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...

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