The first money I ever made as a fiction writer came from a short story I wrote in my pocket notebook. Written in a coffee shop while seated at the bar, waiting for my boss to show so we could go shoot footage of vintage warplanes, I penned a tale that eventually won me my first Danny Lee Lawrence award—and $500. What we writers would call “a good start.”

I like the Squared/Gridded notebook, to help me sketch, or to help me organize into rows and columns, or just to help me divvy up the page. And every single day I write in one of these. I have stacks of completed notebooks in a cigar box, and I carry several of these on all my travels. I never leave home without one close by.

In a Paris café, surrounded by people speaking a language I could only understand in short, slow bursts, I sat with a notebook and jotted down bits of wisdom, things I was grateful for, and half a page of stream of consciousness about where I was, what I was feeling, and who I thought it made me. Sitting alone in a foreign country can be intimidating. But holding one of these pens, gliding it across the page, seeing the glisten of the ink—it’s comforting. It feels like I’m doing something ancient and grand and beautiful. Because I am.

I prefer the Navy Blue version, and I get Pentel’s blue ink cartridges for it. There are other colors of both pen and ink. But for me, this blue is the color of my inner sky and my sense of personal peace.

I noticed something on a trip to Vegas—I had a stand-in.

Scanning through the photos on my phone, I started seeing the pattern of a location, a scene, a setting … and a backpack. The backpack. My backpack.

And it hit me that this pack I carry everywhere I go, every place I travel, is a stand-in for me in those photos. It becomes the subject when I need something to give a scene context. When I need a metaphor to cover the story of me in a place, at a time, exploring the world.

I can’t find this exact backpack anywhere. But I’ve found one that’s pretty close. I’m hoping you’ll take it with you and make it a metaphor for your own stories, in the places you go.