I knew there was magic in that pen as soon as I gripped it. It looked plain, and modest, and simple, black with small gold details, and it was perfectly balanced, perfectly poised to lay out on a blank white page strokes and lines of the pictures I could see so clearly in my mind. Acrylic paints and clumsy brushes couldn't do it, spattering the wrong shades of colors in all the wrong places, watercolors bled and fumbled and watered together into incoherent messes, pastels had led to disastrous, child-like creations of haphazard dashes and dots. Markers, crayons, and colored pencils I cannot even bear to recall.

Page after page after page of paper had ended up in the recycling bin. All the tutorials and art teachers in the world could not help me, as I knew from bitter experience. Oils – a failure. Charcoal – a smudgy muddle. Frosting images on cakes (I was getting desperate at that point) – inedible. Silk dyes – a public disgrace (I was politely abandoned by friends following that). But this.

This fountain pen, I knew, would change all that.

I could sense it in the midnight-black ink, in the perfection of the snowy page, I could feel that the crystal images in my mind would finally be released into the wide, awed, and awing world, to finally give me the title of Artist that I had yearned for ever since infancy, stretching my pudgy fingers towards the van Gogh on the wall above my crib. Its metal tip would be my claim to fame.

Sitting on the edge of my seat, I took a deep breath, dipped the pen into the ink, and gently began to draw.

“Well,” said my long-suffering, long-working art instructor (the only one I had convinced to stay), “I suppose you tried....”

Exhaling, I could feel tears and heat starting to come to my face. The pen! This pen, I had been so certain, would be the key! But no, yet again, the landscape I had been holding so clearly in mind's eye was disgraced by my attempt, distorted and melted by my clumsy hand. I simply couldn't do it! Once more, Artist soared out of my reach on the wings of failed attempts. Once more, paper was destroyed with a startling cruelty. I almost destroyed the pen, too, in my fit of irreconcilable rage. The instructor stood out of the way calmly, as I threw the scraps with all the strength I could muster towards the almost-full recycling bin (they fluttered downwards five feet shy). As I stood and stomped in an absolute tantrum to pick them up, I gave vent to my frustration, for so long repressed. You may judge for yourself, but I now think I must have been quite eloquent in my expression.

The instructor stood stunned.

Turning, he ran out of the drawing room. At first, chagrined, I supposed that I had somehow upset him, placed the last straw upon his back, so to speak. Just as I was ready to chase after him and apologize, he came running back, huffing and puffing with all the force of an old steam train, holding a sheet of - “Binder paper?! Whatever would I need that for?”

“Here!” he panted it, placing it on the desk. Utterly disoriented, I sat down, and stared at the blue-lined, semi-transparent thing. “But how am I supposed to draw on this?” I questioned him. “Take your pen,” he said. I picked it up, still not quite sure what was going on. “Write the landscape,” he told me.

I, caught off guard, obeyed him.

A full half an hour later, my words and ink ran dry. Twenty or so sheets of binder paper lay in front of me, still drying, covered in a delicate black filigree of spindly letters. The instructor's eyes were glowing as he picked up the first one, and began to read. When he finally placed the final one down, tears were starting from his eyes. “Why, it's amazing! Superb! Unmatched! That was a perfect, no, a magnificent, a glorious, an – an -”

“Astounding?” I supplied.

“Yes, yes, an astounding description of the Alps! Why, I still feel like I am there, in a meadow! Is – is that what you were trying to draw?”

I was too embarrassed to answer.

And so, after many long and trying years, I received the title of Writer.