Ignorance is bliss. Once your office supply third eye is open and you discover that there are wooden pencils out there that don’t suck, the agony is finding them in regular supply. Most office supply joints and big-box stores carry a few different kinds of pencil that range from garbage to “pretty decent”. But rarely will you find one that’s squarely in the good category.

So then it becomes an issue of brainstorming places to look beyond the most obvious. I’ve had good luck at art supply stores. The problem is, they have so many damn pencils, in all shapes and sizes, with all manner of weird core material, and they tend to be marketed, packaged, and organized in a way that makes sense for artists (as opposed to writers). So it feels like they don’t have that much to offer to those of us whose whole lives aren’t a dark room or whatever.

But allow me to state the obvious…any pencil can be a “writing pencil” if you, ya’know, write with it. Still following me? Here’s one that will blow your mind: a drawing pencil with a HB/B/2B/etc. core is exactly the same as a writing pencil.

I write that with sarcasm but I’m not judging, because it took me a while to figure this out…and when I did, I felt a mixture of wild giddiness and complete embarrassment. I felt dumb for having walked past so many fun pencils that were hiding in plain sight, but super stoked to have so many more options at my fingertips. All kinds of models brands I’d heard of but thought I’d never find in town — Tombow Mono, General’s Kimberly, Koh-i-Noor, and more.

So if you’re looking for an upgrade for the writing sticks in your pencil bag, try an art supply store. Don’t be discouraged if they only have a few offerings in the “writing pencil” section; keep walking. When you get to the million cubbies filled with a cornucopia of pencil varieties, stop! Then narrow down your choices by filtering out the “hardcore drawing pencils”– look for the sections for graphite cores, and then cubbies for the most popular writing grades like HB or 2B (unless you wanna get wild and try an 8H charcoal or something — in which case do you, Boo). They’ll likely be sorted in theory but in practice lazy shop clerks and indecisive patrons have probably mixed them all up. Eventually, though, you’ll find what you’re looking for: a cool new writing pencil.

Sorry to write a post about something so obvious, but I sure wish someone had told me this when I was on my pencil honeymoon and all bummed out that my local art supply store was sold out of Blackwings.

There you go. Mainline that shit.