It’s unusual to read such a detailed comment on the act of writing by hand.  But once you have the paper chosen and the pen filled, it’s an absorbing motion.  And such care taken by someone who is writing letters he never sends.

‘He cleared his bench and began to write. He loved to shape words with a pen on paper and he formed the letters with as much care as if the paper had been a plate of silver.’

Source: Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2008 (1940)), p. 188