“Use number 2 pencils. Get a good pencil sharpener and sharpen about twenty pencils. When one is dull, grab another. . . .
Write in a hard-covered notebook with green lined pages. Green is easy on the eyes. Blank white paper seems to challenge you to create the world before you start writing. It may be true that you, the modern poet, must make the world as you go, but why be reminded of it before you even have one word on the page? The lines tend to want words. Blank paper begs to be left alone. The best notebooks I’ve found are National 43-581.”

—Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing, 1979.