Gosh, I do love my special pen. Not content with being a Moleskine notebook addict, and unable to write in any other kind of notebook (the paper’s never as smooth, they won’t lie flat) I simply must have my special pen.

I looked for it for years. I tried all manner of disposables, gel inks, rollerballs, fountain pens, ink types, and even pencils. But nothing ever felt right. You need it to have just the right amount of heft when you hold it, so that it’s light enough to hold for hours without cramp, but not so light that you feel you’re trying to pin down a helium balloon. There must be no splodges, nor false starts, where you scratch at the page before the ink starts to flow. For me there had to be no cap either, as I’ve a habit of trying to store them in my cheek like a demented hamster, which is simply unpleasant.

And then I found it.

It was the last day in Tokyo, and we’d been saving up a trip to Ito-ya, the seven storey stationery shop in Ginza (reviews in English). Heaven for paper geeks, marked by a giant red paperclip on the side of the building. We noodled around the paints and exquisite papers, fingered the stamps and inks, marvelled at racks of elaborate envelopes for giving monetary gifts, and then I found myself in the pen section.

It’s a serious business in Japan, stationery, and what is stationery without a pen? Frankly, if I couldn’t find a pen in there, I had no hope. They have everything from the cheapest biro to the most expensive fountain pen. As it turned out, it was incredibly simple. I drifted towards the Pilot section, since I have a fondness for their disposables, and picked up a simple ballpoint. Slim metal case, push button action, 0.7 ballpoint. I was smitten almost instantly.

Now, a funny thing happened when I started writing this post. I thought I ought to do a search on the web so that I could point you in the right direction, just in case you were curious. When I was in Tokyo I bought a couple of refills, just in case, but since it really wasn’t an expensive pen, and I knew I could get Pilot pens in the UK, I’d always assumed I’d be able to find a replacement, in case the worst happened, and I dropped it in the Thames or my son threw it onto the train tracks.

Wrong.

No matter how I searched for a Pilot Cavalier I kept coming across fountain pens rather than ballpoints, and pages of people discussing ink colours and replacements. I began to fear that it had been discontinued. In order to track it down I ended up on the Pilot website in Japanese, where I used my rudimentary knowledge of katakana to locate the exact pen, copy the model number and finally do a search that led me to a site where I can purchase a replacement. I spent almost two hours doing this rather than writing this post, and am so tempted to buy several pens so that I need never go through those two hours again.

So my intent was to talk about having rituals, and the way using particular objects is a way of preparing the brain for particular tasks, and instead I became so distracted at the possibility of never being able to lay my hands on this cheap pen that I more than demonstrated that other writer’s cliché, the one where we’re all superstitious and cranky. More about rituals another time. Perhaps once my parcel is here from Japan.

Show me a writer who doesn’t appreciate nice stationery and I’ll show you a baker who doesn’t like cake. People who write love their tools, and nothing gets the heart racing like a new notebook. The promise in the empty lines, the smell of pristine paper, and the smooth feel of unmarked pages; before you write a word there’s a writing future where you didn’t screw it up and you’re not a complete failure as a person. (Show me a writer who never thinks that and I’ll bake you a cake myself.)

But this is why the beauty of the new notebook is also the horror. What if you write a terrible sentence? What if you have to cross things out, make spelling mistakes, use a pen that bleeds? What if you do all the usual horrible things you do when you write because you are imperfect, and a learner, and you can’t craft a beautiful sentence at all? Why bother when you are not Chekhov? Why write when you can’t be brilliant?

And so there the notebook sits, gathering dust instead of thoughts.

It’s the love getting in the way. Did you know that? The love you have for the words, and the way the great ones make you feel, gets twisted into a peculiar reverence for the special pen, the vintage Corona typewriter, the paper that everything is written on, until you come to understand that you are so unworthy you shouldn’t be touching these things until you are a better writer.

Here’s the thing: you will never be good enough. You will certainly never be good enough if you don’t write, but even then…

It’s true. You may as well accept it. You have an ideal in your own head, and you’ll never be quite as good as you wish you were, because no one is. It may be that in among the writing you do today you find one perfect sentence, and you will feel like a giant for a split second until you look at all your other sentences, but this is a common feeling among writers.

I have one trick to offer you, to get you to open that new Moleskine and start writing:

Open the book in the middle, and draw a picture.

It doesn’t matter if you can’t draw. Draw a self portrait. Draw the cat. Draw the house you wish you had. Draw your favourite ever shoes. Draw the view from the window. It’s important to draw because it isn’t writing. It’s not about words, and getting your craft right. It’s about spoiling the notebook and clearing the mental barriers you’ve set up. Look – here’s mine:

Now the notebook is effectively ruined, you might as well put some words in it.

What happens to time? I could tell you where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing, but the time I lose track of is the stuff that falls down between the cracks. The half hour while you’re waiting for the washing machine to finish, or channel hopping on the TV, or surfing the websites you last looked at an hour ago to see if there’s anything new (hint: there isn’t). All those half hours where you’re not doing any writing.

I recently identified the thirty minutes between half eight and nine as the most reasonable chunk of time for writing. It’s after the dinner has been made (probably) and the dishwasher done (possibly), and before I begin to feel too tired to wrestle with words (about 9.15). The trouble is that just identifying the time is a little like setting your alarm for the exam in the morning: it makes you feel ahead of the game, but you’ve still got to get that shit down on paper before you’re done.

In a quick trawl around the internet I was swiftly disabused of the notion that it takes only 3 weeks, on average, to settle into a new habit (any habit, not just writing). The real number is more like three times that, 66 days to be precise. This is how long it took for participants of a recent study to feel that their new habits were difficult not to do.

This is the holy grail, isn’t it? When you’re climbing back on the writing horse the saddle is a long way off the ground, the leather is creaky and new, and those stirrups aren’t where they should be. What you want to be doing is swinging effortlessly into a warm and worn patch of hide that exactly mirrors your own ass.

The odd day you miss doesn’t matter in the long term (so no need for unnecessary guilt) but it does help if you’re rigorous in the beginning: early dedication is rewarded more quickly with a sense of ‘doing without thinking’. That way any slip ups further down the line will feel more like exceptions to the new regime, rather than falling back into your ‘usual ways’. Or, in other words, yes, you’ll have more enthusiasm in the beginning but hopefully that won’t matter.

We talk about habits as if they’re separate to us, but really they’re just how we are, what we do, how we behave. We like routines (coffee in the morning) and a bit of predictability (Friday is takeaway and a movie) and changing a part of that is an effort. I’m at the point where not changing it is starting to feel like an effort – my routines are tired, and unsatisfying, and it’s affecting everything. I don’t have the energy to do anything, because I’m not doing the thing I really want to do.

So. Effort shall be applied. Habit shall be formed.

The best way to see how you’re doing with something new is to track it – there’s a link to a chart below but I’m just going to use the two pen method in my writing diary. Red means I missed it, blue means I did it. I’ll let you know how I get on. In 66 days time.

Read more: How Long to Form a Habit?

Resource: Habit Forming Chart