How to write like Neal Stephenson

I was standing in the futuristic, multi-story atrium of NVIDIA's "Endeavor" building when I saw Neal Stephenson leaning against a railing.

"I bet you're not a lefty," I said.

The award-winning science fiction author had been a speaker earlier that day at Google, which was hosting Imagination in Action's Next Revolution of AI summit, a two-day conference event packed with experts from the upper echelons of tech, venture, and academia. At Google, he talked about how he oscillates between techno-optimism and techno-pessimism with increasing frequency, how he believes our education system is uniquely vulnerable to being hacked by AI, and a startup he's involved in, Whenere, that's using AI and the Unreal engine to enable people to create interactive stories in their favorite fictional worlds – starting with Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

He'd also spoken about fountain pens, and that caught my interest. "The ballpoint is an atrocity," Neal had said onstage. "It's the Newton of writing instruments," he added, perhaps exaggerating slightly for the benefit of the audience.

In that onstage conversation, Neal pointed to the advantages of writing and editing on paper: You can actually edit faster on paper than in a word processor: All you have to do is cross out a word and write something else.

And, he says, he resents the constant "helpful" intrusions of modern word processors: Google Docs constant offers to help him write "almost make me homicidal," he quipped.

I can relate: I appreciate the grammar and spelling suggestions, but the persistent pushiness of Google Gemini is as annoying today as Microsoft Clippy was in the 90s, just with a less goofy mascot.

Neal switched to writing with fountain pens for his three-novel Baroque Cycle, in the early 2000s, and has stuck with these somewhat retro writing tools ever since. I read once that he liked to write with a Rotring, which inspired my first fountain pen purchase, years ago. But the Rotring I got never worked well for me, and as a lefty, most of the fountain pens I've tried have been somewhat cantankerous, unpredictable beasts. My hand is forever smearing the still-wet ink as it passes over the lines I have just scrawled, the nib seems to catch on the paper occasionally, the line is unpredictably variable, and I walk away with the side of my palm well-inked. I like to write personal letters and cards this way, but they often come out looking like Charlie Brown's letters to his pen pal.

That's why I wanted to ask Neal about how he writes. But his response that evening surprised me: He is in fact left-handed.

As we continued talking and starting walking to the conference room where we'd hear a few comments from our hosts, Neal pulled a Moleskine-style pocket notebook out of his cargo pants, clicked open a Pilot Vanishing Point, and started writing. He was looking to examine how he held his hand, which was very overhand. That mean he holds his hand above the line he's writing, with the pen pointed back toward his body.

My grip, while overhand, is not quite as turned over as his, and that may account for my ink-smearing tendencies.

He had said onstage that he tried using expensive paper to see if that might encourage him to write more concisely. Instead, it turns out, he writes just as prolifically as ever. The draft for the complete Baroque Cycle is several feet tall. Later, by email, he told me that the paper he prefers is inkjet paper from la Scuderia del Duca. At about 50 Euros for 100 sheets, Neal admitted that it's pricey, but added that it's basically his only novel-writing expense, and at a few hundred pages a year, it's not too bad.

Neal also shared some more information about his pens. "My current two favorite pens are a Diplomat Aero in Flame, and a wildly over-the-top Visconti Homo Sapiens Earth Origins pen in Fire. The Diplomat Aero, because of its massive weight and zeppelin shape, tends to fall out of pockets and get lost. The Visconti is so ludicrously expensive that it never leaves the house."

I appreciated the chance to meet one of my science fiction heroes. Many of his books have been influential and inspiring to me, as they have been to many. It's common to hear Silicon Valley tech pioneers say how they were inspired in their internet careers by Stephenson's visions of the internet in Snow Crash. His book Diamond Age is newly relevant to aspiring education revolutionaries who want to create an AI, like the primer featured in that book, to educate the world's youth. And Anathem brings to life the story of Jeff Bezos's 10,000-year clock, a real-life project that I got to write about when I was at WIRED.

Now that I know how Neal writes, I'm excited to give my small battery of fountain pens another go. With better paper and a better grip, I'm sure I'll be cranking out novels in no time.

How do you write? Put your comments below or email me and let me know.