Why I Hoard My Empty Pen Refills

A small pleasure I've come to appreciate more deeply lately is the experience of having a pen run dry while in the midst of the act of writing.

As a lifelong yet inconsistent devotee of journaling, I started running through my pen refills more regularly and more frequently when in short order my wife gifted me a nice new writing pen for my birthday, and when I re-read Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way around the time of its 35th Anniversary.

If you are, or you suspect you might be, a writer or any other form of artist or creator, and you have not yet read The Artist's Way, you might give some consideration to making it a priority to secure a copy and put yourself through what is essentially a self-guided journey to creative recovery and discovery. 

The book holds legendary status in the creative community and as such, the title now carries with it a loaded set of expectations: a path to a life of deeper meaning and a connection with your purpose in the universe. 

Drop those expectations and simply get after it. Like any classic work, every reader will get something unique from it, and something different from it each time the choose to read it again. The best advice here is to show up and read it. Full stop. Let the book speak to you as it will, not predetermined by what it perhaps (or perhaps not) gave to others.

The book was first published the same year I graduated college when my dreams of becoming a screenwriter were strongest. It's reputation spread like wildfire in the LA communities I was a part of, and I embraced its "Morning Pages" with abandon -- writing three pages, in longhand, every morning for twelve weeks.

Like many others, I've come back to the practice at various times in my life, finding comfort and refuge in the daily ritual of noting down thoughts in free form stream of consciousness.

Something different happened this time. I wrote for the twelve requisite weeks, but then I kept writing. And I started writing other things in longhand again more frequently. Letters. Drafts of book pages. I was surprised to see that my pen, which more typically would seem to last FOREVER (or more accurately at least be lost before going dry), was now running out of ink on a weekly basis.

I started buying refills by the dozen. And, as a writer, there was something concrete and rewarding about this process. Books may take months, if not years, to write. Journals get stuffed in the back of a closet, or thrown out (I like to burn mine). But the pen, much more so than the keyboard, puts everything into a single, concrete, and measurable action.

The idea appears in the writer's mind or heart, morphs into a language that can communicate, however insufficiently, the nature of its intent. It then mysteriously transitions further into a physical movement of the arm, elbow, hand, and fingers, and often with even less sufficiency further springs forth into the world through this magical and mechanical instrument that travels in a sometimes confident and smooth, often unsure and jagged, path across the paper leaving a trail of ink for others to interpret.

I look at the growing collection of spent refills in my desk drawer as a sort of badge of honor, like stickers on a football helmet tracking tackles, or stenciled markings on the side of a navy pilot tracking confirmed kills.

The refills seem worth keeping. Impractical. Nonsensical. Messy. Yet, as they pile up, I have a simple and growing record of the small victories of getting a word, one word, then another, down on the page, each one a tiny action of creative expression.