My phone can type 80 words per minute. My laptop autocorrects my grammar, predicts my next sentence, and saves everything to the cloud before I even finish thinking. And yet, somehow, one of my most treasured possessions is a thin rod of hand-twisted glass that holds exactly enough ink to write about three sentences before I have to dip it again.
Make that make sense.
My obsession started, of all places, with a Japanese music album. I fell in love with Yorushika, a Japanese band whose albums That’s Why I Gave Up on Music and Elma are essentially love letters to the act of letter-writing itself. Fountain pens, ink bottles, handwritten journals: they’re woven into the entire storytelling world of the albums. Listening to those albums, I became convinced that handwritten communication was one of the most romantic things a person could do.
The problem: fountain pens looked expensive and intimidating, and I wanted to try approximately fifteen different ink colors without committing to one. So when I wandered into a bookstore before a six-week study abroad program in Boston (I was a freshman in high school, freshly determined to write farewell letters to every friend I was leaving behind in Japan) and spotted a beginner glass pen set sitting quietly on a shelf, something clicked. It was affordable. It was beautiful. It worked with any ink I wanted. I bought it immediately.
That was the beginning of a situation I can only describe as: two glass pens, twenty bottles of ink, and zero regrets.
Here’s what I didn’t expect: the pen didn’t just change how I write. It changed how I think about writing, time, and attention. Here are five things a glass pen taught me that no productivity app ever could.
1: Slowing Down Is Not the Same as Wasting Time
The first time I used my glass pen for something real (not just testing it on scrap paper), I was writing a farewell letter to my best friend. I had maybe an hour before I needed to leave for the airport, and I thought I could finish in 10 minutes.
I did not finish the letter in 10 minutes. Instead, it took half an hour.
A glass pen moves slowly. You have to dip it every few sentences, hold it at a deliberate angle, and press with a light, intentional touch. Rush it, and the ink skips. Tilt it wrong, and you get a blob where you wanted an elegant cursive loop. The pen quite literally will not let you be in a hurry.
At first, this felt like a flaw. Then I realized: I was actually thinking about what I was writing. Not typing to fill space, not drafting and deleting, but choosing each word before my hand committed it to the page. The slowness wasn’t inefficiency. It was attention. And attention, I discovered, is a completely different thing from speed.
2: Tiny Differences Started Mattering A Lot
Here is something I am not proud of: I own three bottles of ink that are, to any reasonable observer, the same shade of teal.
They are actually not the same shade of teal. One leans slightly more green. One has more shading when it dries, meaning it pools darker at the edges of each stroke. One has a subtle shimmer that you only notice in direct light. These distinctions matter enormously to me and to no one else on earth.
But something interesting happened when I started noticing ink colors. I started noticing everything more. The particular blue of an evening sky that’s not quite navy and not quite periwinkle. The way certain paper has a faint cream tone that makes ink look warmer. The texture difference between cheap copy paper and a proper journal page under a glass nib.
When you slow down for one thing, your brain seems to slow down for everything. The world gets a little sharper at the edges. I’m not sure any mindfulness app has ever done that for me as effectively as arguing with myself about whether a particular ink is “stormy teal” or “dark cyan.”
3: Mistakes Became Part of the Art
One thing you can’t do with glass pens and ink is use Control-Z.
The first time I smudged a letter — dragged my hand through a sentence that hadn’t fully dried — I stared at it for a long moment. In a Google Doc, I would have fixed it in half a second without a second thought. On paper, in ink, the smudge was just… there. Permanent. Evidence that a real human hand had moved across this page.
And somehow, it was fine? More than fine, actually. The imperfection made the letter feel more real. More mine. Handwriting that looks too perfect starts to feel a little cold, like it was generated rather than made. But a slightly uneven letter, a tiny ink blot where I paused too long: those are proof of presence. They say: a person was here, thinking, on this specific afternoon.
I started approaching my journal pages the same way. A crossed-out word isn’t a failure; it’s a record of my mind changing in real time. The page holds the whole process, not just the final draft.
4: Letter Writing Became Something I Actually Did
Since I started using my glass pen, I have actually sent letters. Real ones, in envelopes, with stamps. Sometimes, I add a beautiful flower as well.
There’s something about the physical commitment of ink on paper that makes me follow through. Once I’ve dipped the pen and started writing, I’m invested. I can’t just close the tab and come back later. The ink is already on the page. I might as well finish.
If I’m being completely honest, dipping a glass pen into an ink bottle makes me feel like I’m writing a fantasy novel with a feather quill. There is something deeply, embarrassingly theatrical about it. Tilting a little glass rod into a tiny bottle of violet ink at 11 p.m. is not a normal thing to do, and I think that theatricality is actually part of what makes it work. It turns letter writing into an occasion. Something worth doing properly.
The friends who have received these letters have all said some version of the same thing: I didn’t know anyone did this anymore. Which, honestly, made me want to do it more.
5: Creativity Stopped Feeling Like a Performance
I used to have a complicated relationship with journaling. I’d buy a beautiful notebook, write three entries trying to sound profound, cringe at all of them, and abandon the whole thing.
With a glass pen, something different happened. The pen itself is so pretty: transparent glass, hand-twisted grooves that catch the light, ink flowing visibly through the spiral tip. I want to use it regardless of what I’m writing. Sometimes I just doodle. Sometimes I write a single sentence and then stare at the ink shading as it dries. Sometimes I write something I would never show anyone.
The pen gave me permission to create without an audience in mind. Not everything needs to be a polished product. Some things can just be the quiet record of a Tuesday afternoon, written in a shade of teal that I am perhaps the only person to care about.
I find myself staring at the grooves of the pen sometimes, for no practical reason whatsoever. Just because it’s beautiful. Just because I made something with it. That’s enough.
The Conclusion: Slower, Messier, and Worth It
A glass pen is, by any practical measure, an inconvenient tool. It’s slower than typing. Messier than a ballpoint. More fragile than either. It requires ink, careful storage, and a certain willingness to occasionally stain your fingers.
But maybe that’s exactly why I love it.
We reach for analog tools in a digital age not because we’ve forgotten that better options exist, but because “better” depends entirely on what you’re trying to do. If the goal is speed, efficiency, and volume, yes, use the laptop. But if the goal is presence, being here, in this moment, making something that carries the specific weight of your attention, then sometimes the slower tool is the right one.
My glass pen didn’t teach me to be a better writer. It taught me to be a more deliberate person. And in a world that keeps asking me to do everything faster, that feels like a genuinely radical thing to learn.
What began as admiration for a story told through music eventually became a hobby that changed how I think about writing, creativity, and time itself.
And if you ever find yourself standing in a bookstore, staring at a glass pen set and wondering whether you need it, let me warn you:
You probably don’t.
But you might end up with ten bottles of ink anyway.