Writing is thinking. And no machine can do it for us

How do I know what I think until I see what I say?

E.M. Forster

I am coming back from Barcelona by train. I am writing these lines in my notebook. Yes, these very lines you are reading. I am writing them with a blue ballpoint pen while Sant Andreu streams past the window: rooftops, antennas, half-lowered shutters. The train trembles, and my handwriting trembles with it. I do not mind. There is a truth in that trembling: thought is never entirely steady, and the hand that writes knows this before the head does.

Writing is thinking. I say it like that, without qualifications, because the sentence needs that nakedness. I am not referring to the scattered, fleeting leaps with which the mind moves from one place to another when we are walking or waiting in line at the supermarket, but to something else: the deliberate act of placing one word after another, knowing that each one is a decision, a crossroads. When we write, we are not transcribing what we think: we are discovering what we think. I still do not know how this paragraph will end. I do not know it either as I write this word, nor do I know it now, as the pen moves toward the next sentence. And it is precisely here, in this uncertainty, that thought lives.

I lift my eyes from the notebook. In the seat opposite, a teenager slides his finger across the phone screen, video after video, without stopping on any of them. We are both on the same train, both heading to the same place, but what we are doing with our hands could not be more different. I think about all this, and I think about children. It is not that children and young people write little. In fact, they probably write more than any previous generation. They write messages, posts, comments, stories that disappear in twenty-four hours. They write constantly, compulsively, with their thumbs. And it would be unfair to say that all of it is empty: amid so much digital writing there are also attempts to say something of one’s own. But the architecture of the platforms where they write works against them: it favours speed, reaction, forgetting. Everything has to be said in a few seconds and for an audience already scrolling on to the next post. It is a kind of writing that slips and slides away, not because young people are superficial, but because the environments in which we write today are designed for superficiality.

When I say that writing is thinking, I am not talking about that kind of writing. I am talking about another one: free writing, voluntary writing, the kind that is born from the desire to say something you do not quite know until you write it. I am talking about diaries, secret notebooks, letters that may never be sent, notes in the margin of a book. That writing which apparently serves no purpose, and which perhaps for that very reason serves every purpose: to think, to feel, to know who you are. A child writing in a notebook is building a place that did not exist before. They are doing the slow and necessary work of learning to inhabit language, which is another way of saying that they are learning to inhabit the world.

A few days ago, an editorial in Nature bore the title, precisely, “Writing is thinking.” If even a top scientific journal feels the need to remind us of this, perhaps the problem is more serious than it seems. And now, at this moment in history, something new appears that complicates, even further, everything I have just said. Generative artificial intelligence can write in seconds what would take us hours, days, or weeks. I do not speak of it from a distance or from distrust: I use it every day. It helps me draft emails, organize notes, solve all that mechanical prose that professional life constantly demands. I am neither a technophobe nor a nostalgic. But after months of using generative AI every day, I have learned something that seems important to me (and perhaps very obvious): artificial intelligence helps me solve, but it does not help me imagine. It helps me communicate what I already know, but not discover what I do not yet know. And writing, truly writing, by hand or on a keyboard, with doubt and the blank page, is exactly that: discovering. And the more demanding the writing is, the more it asks of us, the deeper the discovery.

The temptation, of course, is enormous. Especially for the young: why suffer before the blank page if a machine can fill it for you? The answer seems simple to me, almost brutal: because when the machine writes for you, the one who stops thinking is you. Every text we delegate is a thought we will not have. Artificial intelligence does not steal words from us, it steals the effort of searching for them, and it turns out that that effort was exactly where thought lived.

But deep down, we already knew this. For years, we have championed reading, and rightly so: we have filled schools with libraries, launched campaigns and projects, repeated to the point of weariness that children must read. Perhaps the time has come to champion writing with the same force. Freinet understood this clearly a century ago, when he placed at the centre of his pedagogy an idea so simple it is almost embarrassing to repeat it: let children write whatever they want. His free text was not an exercise or a composition: it was a space where the child writes because they want to say something, not because they are told to. And those texts, born of desire rather than obligation, were precisely the engine of all learning. What we need now is not to invent anything new, but to listen again to that intuition.

I look out the window. We have already passed Granollers, and Montseny appears in the distance, with that patience of an old mountain. I think about what I have just written, and it seems to me that something is missing. Because if writing is thinking, then there is one form of writing that is thinking in an especially intense way: poetry. A poem is the exact opposite of a text generated by a machine. It is a place where every word is there because it has survived all the others. Every line asks for rhythm, asks for sound, asks for a precision that prose often forgives. Poetry does not admit chatter or padding. It compels us to discard, to compress, to listen to the silence between words. I have written poetry for years, and I know that every poem has forced me to think in a way no other form of writing demands of me. But it is not only thinking: it is also being silent and listening, allowing to emerge what you did not know was there —setting in motion what María Zambrano called poetic reason.

A child who writes a poem, even if it is brief, even if it is clumsy, even if it ends up in the wastebasket, is thinking with an intensity that I find hard to locate in any other school activity. They search for the right word to say what the moon is like, or why the dark frightens them, or what they feel when the dog licks their hand. And in searching for it, they discover that they knew things they did not know they knew. That is what poetry does: it illuminates us from within. And no machine can do that for us, because machines have no interiority. Nowadays, machines can generate sequences of words, but there is no mind or consciousness inside them thinking those words. The illumination is not in the finished poem but in the process of searching for it, and to search for it, one must have interiority: one must be a person.

The train pulls into Girona. I close the notebook. The lines I have written are full of crossed-out words, arrows, and comments in the margins. The text is neither clean nor perfect; I will have to revise it before publishing it on the blog. But I chose every word myself, and in choosing it I thought something I did not know, before then, that I thought.

Note: This post was originally written in Catalan and published on April 17, 2026. The present publication is an English translation.