Fountain Pens In Fiction

[Blue_Moon]

I happen to be friends with a rather famous sci-fi author. I'm going to show him this thread and see if I can get him to include fountain pens in the novel he is currently writing. I bet he'd do it.

 

Name please. You're not name dropping because you were asked.

[arrScott]

An otherwise excellent novel, Vacationland by Sarah Stonich, tripped me up a number of times by referring to characters dipping their fountain pens frequently while writing. Urgh! It's the kind of picayune error of detail that's much more likely to break my immersion in a story than the most outlandish conceit of plot. Give me ice zombies on the far side of a thousand-foot ice wall and I'll buy into the idea; tell me a middle-aged lady at a fishing lodge in northern Minnesota is dipping her fountain pen in an ink bottle every few sentences as she writes her memoirs longhand, and I'm ready to throw the book at the wall in disbelief. If it doesn't have a fountain, it's not a fountain pen!

 

But that aside, Vacationland was maybe the best novel I've read since Chad Harbaugh's The Art of Fielding.

[moylek]

An otherwise excellent novel, Vacationland by Sarah Stonich, tripped me up a number of times by referring to characters dipping their fountain pens frequently while writing. Urgh! It's the kind of picayune error of detail that's much more likely to break my immersion in a story than the most outlandish conceit of plot. Give me ice zombies on the far side of a thousand-foot ice wall and I'll buy into the idea; tell me a middle-aged lady at a fishing lodge in northern Minnesota is dipping her fountain pen in an ink bottle every few sentences as she writes her memoirs longhand, and I'm ready to throw the book at the wall in disbelief. If it doesn't have a fountain, it's not a fountain pen!

 

 

Maybe it's a sentimental favourite wit a broken filling mechanism?

[jdllizard]

Name please. You're not name dropping because you were asked.

Name please. You're not name dropping because you were asked.

 

He is a very private person and I don't want to post his name or it will show up on Google searches, but he lives in a place where "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

[Baric]

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

It been many years since I read that one. Might be time for re-read, it will seem almost new.

[arrScott]

 

 

Maybe it's a sentimental favourite wit a broken filling mechanism?

 

Given the context of the story and the role of the act of writing in the narrative, then it would have been a mistake for that detail to have gone unmentioned. Also, at least one other character elsewhere in the book is depicted as repeatedly dipping a "fountain pen." It's pretty clear that the author just doesn't know how pre-ballpoint pens actually work,and envisioned anything with a nib being equivalent to a feather quill pen. No biggie, really, but it was distracting to me.

[jdllizard]

It been many years since I read that one. Might be time for re-read, it will seem almost new.

It's a classic and I'm lucky enough to have a personalized, signed copy of it, as well as one each of his other books (all also personalized and signed). A collection I cherish.

[jdllizard]

Funny thing is, I had no idea who he was when I first met him. Was probably 2 years before I knew who he was. Super nice and generous guy.

[Vgimlet]

_{In Gini Koch's Touched by An Alien (2010) the main character uses her Montblanc to kill an alien by stabbing it in the eye, thus starting her Alien Adventures.}

[jdllizard]

_{In Gini Koch's Touched by An Alien (2010) the main character uses her Montblanc to kill an alien by stabbing it in the eye, thus starting her Alien Adventures.}

 

Never heard of it, but I like it already. Reminds me of the Joker killing that guy with the pencil in The Dark Night.

[Blade Runner]

I happen to be friends with a rather famous sci-fi author. I'm going to show him this thread and see if I can get him to include fountain pens in the novel he is currently writing. I bet he'd do it.

Cool!

A fp would be a nice analog touch in a sf story. I hope the author "gets" our interest in fps.

[jdllizard]

Cool!

A fp would be a nice analog touch in a sf story. I hope the author "gets" our interest in fps.

 

I've already talked to him about it, and he certainly gets it as he is a big fan of mechanical watches. And there is, oddly enough, some overlap in the vintage military watch world and the fountain pen world (maybe it's just the similarities of hunting down your grail pieces and the obsessive search for something that's "just right" whether it be a certain pen, ink, or watch) , and he has included vintage mechanical watches in his books before. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if FPs show up in one of his upcoming books. He seemed intrigued by the idea anyway.

[distaffcreations]

"Certainly my dear!" said the wizard, very anxious to oblige her, and pleased to be able to show that he really had some magic, and was not an entirely useless official (limpets they call them in sea-language). He took a little wand out of his waistcoat-pocket -- it was really his fountain-pen, but it was no longer any use for writing: mer-folk use a queer sticky ink that is absolutely no use in fountain-pens -- and he waved it over Rover.

 

From J.R.R. Tolkien's Roverandom, a posthumously published piece originally told (then written down) for his boys. My daughter read it at school and insisted that I post this excerpt here.

[Blade Runner]

Thank you for that distaffcreations.

 

 

Here's one from an amazing writer from Appalachia, Ron Rash. It's from a short story called Servant of History.

"Wilson opened his valise and took out the fountain pen and ink bottle, a calf-skin ledger. He set the ink bottle by his chair, opened the ledger, and wrote, Jackson county, North Carolina, United States, October 1922."

 

I think the author slips, when he writes later, "Dipping his pen into the ink during a refrain ..." I guess he meant to say a dip pen rather than a fountain pen. The story is still fantastic.

[distaffcreations]

Thank you, I will look for that author, hadn't come across him before, but sounds like his topics fit in with other interests I have.

 

I need to get a look at the opening page of Greenglass House again and post it here; something about smugglers and illegal green ink cartridges. I'm still trying to imagine what would make green ink illegal.

[Minty]

A Montblanc Meisterstuck fountain pen once owned by Victor Hugo figures in The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon.

 

Don't start vast projects with half-vast ideas.

[moylek]

A Montblanc Meisterstuck fountain pen once owned by Victor Hugo figures in The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon.

 

Don't start vast projects with half-vast ideas.

 

?

 

Is it a book about time travel?

[Wolverine1]

I have gifted Ted Kooser, former Poet Laureate from Garland, NE, a Parker 51 pen. I havebeen told that he uses it. But, so far, he hasnt published any poems about hos Parker 51.

[Blade Runner]

"Serena opened the saddlebag and removed a Waterman pen and a small spiral pad.....

'I'll make a wager with you,' Serena said to Hartley. 'We'll estimate total board feet of that cane ash. Then we'll write our estimates on a piece of paper and see who's closest.' 'How much are we wagering?' Hartley asked.

'Two weeks' pay.' "

 

Pemberton's Wife by Ron Rash

[Tanzanite]

In the first Bridget Jones movie she writes in her diary with a Parker Reflex.