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Neal Stephenson's guide to writing books with a fountain pen

Ellsworth Toohey
Jul 23, 2026
∙ Paid
Petar Milošević / CC BY-SA 4.0 (Wikimedia Commons)

Neal Stephenson writes his novels the way people did in 1850. The science-fiction author of Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, and the thousand-page Baroque Cycle has composed nearly every book since about 2001 with a fountain pen on paper. On his Substack, Graphomane, he says the handwritten manuscript for The …

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