STATIONERY PASSIONS Claire Watts

This month, author Claire Watts shares her stationery passions with Anita Loughrey.


Claire Watts is a SCBWI member and editor of Words & Pictures. She has been a writer and editor of nonfiction for children for 25 years but only started to write fiction about five years ago. Now she has self-published three YA novels which are realistic dramas intended to make the reader go, “Yes, that’s exactly what it’s like.”


In an interview with Anita Loughrey, Claire revealed her favourite pen is a beautiful small, red Shaeffer pen which she has owned for years. It is so special she hardly ever uses it and when she does, the ink tends to have dried-up, so she has to clean it and find the ink before she starts to write. But she also really likes to write in pencil. She loves the way a pencil slides across the paper. She also likes fountain pens as they force her to write slower and put more thought into it.


When editing, even her own work, Claire uses a green pen. She says green is less scary than a page full of red ink.

She prefers French notebooks with a grid instead of lines. She finds that the grid makes it easy to organise her thoughts and arrange what she is putting on the page. She buys them on her trips to France.

This article is abridged from an original interview on the Papers Pens Poets blog. You can find out more about Claire and her stationery there.




Papers Pens Poets is a blog where writers can share their passion for all things stationery. It is the brain child of SCBWI member Jo Franklin and co-run by her and SCBWI’s membership coordinator, Anita Loughrey. The blog contains reviews, articles, and weekly interviews with a wide range of authors, covering books of all age ranges and genres.

If you are a published author or illustrator and would like to be featured on the Papers Pens Poets blog, please get in touch.

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