[WILF] Sharpened pencils & dull tools
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Welcome to What I Learned From… “Each pencil hides inside it thousands of drawings. The artist's job is to discover and make these views of new worlds visible.” ― Alejandro Mos Riera What I Learned From …In third grade, we all wanted to empty the pencil sharpener. It was bolted to the wall inside the classroom closet, the kind with a crank you had to turn with your whole little kid arm, and those two rough little rollers inside that looked like a cross between gears and tiny bear traps. Every time you fed it a pencil, it growled. We were slightly terrified of it. But we still lined up for the chance to use it. It wasn’t really about the pencil, it was the ritual. The scrape, the resistance, the scent of cedar and graphite. The fine curls piling up in the little tin bin underneath, almost too delicate to touch. We’d empty that tray like it held pirate gold, even though it was really just sharpener-dust and the corpses of snapped-off tips. I don’t use anything nearly that dramatic now. Just a quiet little prism sharpener that sits next to my notebook. It’s plastic, with a clear bin that catches a few rounds of shavings before you pop it off to dump them out. It gets the job done. Still, I find myself reaching for it even when the pencil’s point is fine. I’ll give it a few twists just to feel that subtle catch, the slight resistance of blade against wood. I like the way it slows me down, a signal something’s about to begin. That’s what started all this: me sharpening a pencil, then pausing with it in my hand, wondering how this little ritual has managed to stay part of writing for so long? Turns out the pencil itself is full of stories. The name pencil comes from pencillus, Latin for “little tail,” originally a fine ink brush used primarily by artists. But once people started using graphite to sketch and write, the name stuck. See, graphite was once mistaken for lead, hence the word “pencil lead,” and the older term plumbago, which sounds like an herb but just means “black lead.” It wasn’t until the late 1700s that scientists started calling it graphite, from the Greek graphein, meaning “to write.” Graphite is one of the softest known solids, a crystalline form of pure carbon (even though it’s dark and opaque.) Made of flat, hexagonal layers that slide easily across each other, the slipperiness is what makes it so good for writing; but it’s also what makes it so fragile. The same carbon atoms arranged differently make diamonds, the hardest natural substance on earth. Yes, the pencil and the diamond are made of the same stuff. What changes is how their pieces connect. Before we had modern pencils, people wrapped sticks of graphite in string or sheepskin. Later, in the 1500s, a pair of Italian craftspeople began carving wooden casings to hold the graphite steady. Eventually, the French chemist Nicholas-Jacques Conte figured out how to mix graphite with clay, fire it into uniform rods, and produce pencils that didn’t crumble or smudge at every touch. With that, the pencil stopped being a novelty and became a tool. Of course, anyone who has ever used a pencil knows, if you are going to be using them regularly you’ve got to keep them sharp. At first, people used knives. Carefully whittling the wood away by hand, learning just how much pressure to apply, hoping not to snap the point at the end. It worked, mostly, but it was unpredictable. If you went too far, or not far enough, or caught the graphite at the wrong angle, you’d ruin the edge, have to hack it all back, and start over the new sharpening process. Which is why the sharpening tools came later. By the 1840s, a French inventor named Therry des Estwaux had developed a conical blade that allowed the pencil to spin against the cutter, shaving all sides evenly. The design took hold. Over the next few decades, sharpeners were mass-produced, refined, exported, and occasionally even improved. The one I use now traces its lineage back to a carpenter named John Lee Love, who filed a patent for a pocket-sized sharpener that had its own built-in shavings compartment. It was compact, clean, and portable. Something you could use without needing a desk or a clamp or a janitor to unjam it. Every so often, I get a perfect sharpening, especially with colored pencils. You know what I’m talking about. The kind where the wood peels off in a single, unbroken cone—like a tiny spiral sleeve, painted at the base and clean at the top. I used to save them at the corner of my workspace, little trophies of artful precision. But eventually they end up in the trash, and the pencil always gets dull again. That’s the thing about sharp points. They don’t stay that way. A pencil is meant to be used. It wears down like a river smoothing stone—slowly, inevitably, and by design. Not because it’s broken, but because it’s doing what it was made to do. It isn’t built for long sprawls of creative flow; it’s a tool that forces you to pause. To chase the ritual of sharpening. I used to think that if I took care of my tools—if I used them gently, kept things in order, didn’t push too hard—they’d stay sharp. But the more I write, the more I realize how often the edge goes soft. Not from neglect. From use. And that’s the job. We don’t sharpen because we did something wrong. We sharpen because we’re doing the work: We carve away what’s dulled. We notice the drag. We pause. We turn the crank. We keep going. Maybe I dove down this rabbit hole because I’ve been sharpening so many things behind the scenes this month. Or maybe I just love those little spirals of sharpened pencil, in a cluster at the top of my workspace, reminding me that even in the pauses and refinement we can make beautiful things that prepare us for the next go at the page. Previously in This Writing Life …All the good stuff you were meant to see but probably didn’t.
Worth Reading …The pieces that made me pause last week.
Notes from the Masters …Craft advice that holds up, straight from the ones who lived it.
Prompted: Your Move …A spark from this week’s essay. Use it to write your own. What tool or ritual helps you signal the start of a creative session? And what happens if (when) it stops working the way it used to? Glossary of The Forgotten …Because life’s too chaotic for bland words. Spall [spawl] (n.) — From 17th-century mining slang, spall referred to a chip or splinter struck off a larger rock during excavation. Rooted in Middle High German spalt (split), the word evokes physical labor, edge-work, and pressure. A spall is the debris of labor; that which is left behind when tools meet tension. Sorta synonyms: flake, fragment, effort’s echo Use it for: Pencil shavings. Paper scraps with five false starts. The way grief splinters, but leaves something reshaped. Try This Thing …No promises. Just a potentially brilliant shortcut or two. Recommend Me a Book shows you the first page of a novel, without revealing the title or author, so you can decide if it grabs your attention before knowing what it is. It’s a fun way to discover new reads purely by the writing, not the hype. The Final Chuckle …Serious writing deserves unserious endings. What more could you ask for‽ ‘Til next time ~ Elisa PS - If you're riding out these changes with me, here's how to help without spending a dime: Skim emails for 10 seconds (appeases the email gods), click interesting links (algorithms love curiosity), reply with even a "Hey, this was great!" (good for my soul and deliverability), or share WILF with fellow word-nerds. Small actions add up. |