'The Write Tools' #13 - Mark Sarvas

Welcome to another edition of ‘The Write Tools’: a blog series featuring authors, artists and their favourite tools.

Today’s guest is US novelist Mark Sarvas, author of Harry, Revised, and blogger at The Elegant Variation. Mark is now writing his second novel.

Mark, you have a stationery ritual when you're in France?

I do, indeed. I have two actually. The older of the two is that I always buy myself a fountain pen when I’m in Paris. This particular tradition was borne of the time I began traveling regularly to Paris in my late 20s, and I really couldn’t afford very much at all but I wanted some sort of keepsake of my trip. I found myself in the stationery department of the now departed Samaritaine - the Seine-view café was always a required stop for me – and I found an inexpensive but stylish fountain pen. It was modest, not disposable but not all that much better. But I used it religiously for that trip while writing in my journal. I go to Paris every year (twice when I can get away with it), so as you can imagine, my drawer of pens has filled up a bit over the years.

About six or seven years ago – right when I was writing my first novel, Harry, Revised – I added a new ritual, one that began out of necessity. I got to Paris and realized I hadn’t brought the notebook I had intended to write in. So I stopped in a little stationery store where I usually bought my morning paper, just off the Rue Buci, and I fell in love with these hardbound, spiral notebooks, the kind that have an elastic hooked to the cover so you can mark your page. I bought it and wrote the sixth chapter of my book in it – with my latest Parisian fountain pen – sitting in Les Editeurs, my favorite café right near the Odeon.

Are you loyal to the one brand of pen, or notebook? And if so, which?

Oddly – because I can be quite particular – I’m not brand fussy in this area. And each year, the kind of pens I’m drawn to vary wildly - my favorite is an oddly impractical but beautiful Yves St Laurent pen - although the spiral bound notebooks remain constant.

Why not just any old rollerball and exercise book? What virtues does this particular marriage of pen and paper have?

I’m not entirely sure, and the magic of paper and pen is something I’m reluctant to parse too closely – I’m self-conscious enough as it is. But I think given how seriously I take the novelist’s task, the idea of sitting down to create art (as outmoded a notion as that seems to have become) is somehow helped along by the just-right elegant alignment of the materials you’re going to use. After all, you can’t expect to make a decent coq au vin with an old, stringy chicken, can you? I just find that the nicer writing tools force me to approach the the work with just a bit more respect and care – it doesn’t feel so easily disposable. Although, of course, everything we do is.

Do you recall when you first tried this combination? Was it a gobsmacking epiphany, or just a simple choice that slowly became a ritual?

I don’t. It’s more I sort of woke from a fog one day and there it was, I was a man of particular – if not peculiar – writing habits.

Can you give an example of a passage in Harry, Revised that was handwritten in this way? Can you notice the difference, or is it all identically 'Sarvas'?

Sure. The chapter in my novel in which Harry forges a college diploma is the chapter I referred to above. Written entirely by hand. Reading it back in the finished book it doesn’t stand out, largely because it’s been revised any number of times. But when I look at the original draft, I can definitely see differences. It’s still me, all right, but as someone who types around 150 words a minute, there does seem to be more deliberation in a handwritten draft. I’m a bit more restrained, I think – which is not at all a bad thing.

And are you a pen and paper proselytiser? Have you converted loved-ones, friends, colleagues?

I’m not. I’m always suspicious of those who proclaim their pen-and-paper ways too loudly, as though they are trying to give their work a gravitas that it might somehow lack had it been generated via word processor. I treat it like any other intimate detail – I don’t offer it, but if asked nicely, I’ll share. And now I’m off to Paris, to promote the French edition of Harry ... and, of course, to buy a new pen.