“Of course Neil Gaiman uses a fountain pen.”
In case you haven’t seen Flavorwire’s roundup of famous authors’ (non-computer) writing tools, it’s pretty great. Neil Gaiman owns over 60 fountain pens, which is not surprising, and Hemingway on pencils is so Hemingway: “Writing it first in pencil gives you one-third more chance to improve it. That is .333 which is a damned good average for a hitter.” Stephen King and Judy Blume write longhand, and here’s the ink recipe that Jane Austen used for her quills:
“Take 4 ozs of blue gauls [gallic acid, made from oak apples], 2 ozs of green copperas [iron sulphate], 1 1/2 ozs of gum arabic. Break the gauls. The gum and copperas must be beaten in a mortar and put into a pint of strong stale beer; with a pint of small beer. Put in a little refin’d sugar. It must stand in the chimney corner fourteen days and be shaken two or three times a day.”
That ink recipe sounds edible; I’m in. If you are into this sort of thing, Marilynne Robinson in her 2008 Art of Fiction interview talks about splitting Gilead between a typewriter and a notebook and writing Housekeeping completely longhand, after starting off that way in Rhode Island:
I had several days there by myself in an otherwise empty hotel, in a little room with Emily Dickinson light pouring in through the windows and the ocean roaring beyond. I had a spiral notebook, and I started thinking about this situation and the voice. And I started writing.