The Pen Is Mightier Than The Cursor

For most of my working life, writing meant emails.

Thousands of them.

Presentations, reports, meeting notes, spreadsheets with the occasional sentence squeezed into a comments box. Words were my tools, but they were almost always typed, edited, copied, pasted and sent at speed. And let’s be honest, if any of you work in the world I came from (marketing/technology) you’ll know that often those words were simply the regurgitated slop of whatever was the current industry fashion. Somewhere along the way I realised I'd stopped writing in a way that allowed for actual ideas to develop. The sort of writing that begins with a blank page rather than a blinking cursor.

Coming back to it has been harder than I expected.

There's a slight awkwardness to it, like returning to a musical instrument after years away. The first few attempts feel clumsy. Thoughts don't arrive in neat paragraphs. Sentences refuse to cooperate. I find myself crossing things out, staring into the distance and wondering where the next idea has gone.

But then, slowly, something changes.

Writing stops feeling like work and starts feeling like thinking.

Throughout my career I had a phrase that my colleagues became very familiar with: "I think much better with a pen in my hand than a keyboard." Some people instinctively understood what I meant; others looked at me as though I was being a little eccentric. After all, we worked in a world of laptops, dashboards and PowerPoint.

But I was never talking about efficiency.

If I needed to write up a meeting or reply to an email, the keyboard won every time. If I needed an original idea, solve a difficult problem or untangle a complicated thought, I'd reach for a notebook almost without thinking. There is something about seeing a blank page, making rough sketches, drawing arrows between ideas and crossing things out that allows my brain to work in a way a keyboard never quite has.

Perhaps that's why coming back to writing after so many years has felt so rewarding. It's reminded me that writing isn't simply a way of recording our thoughts. Often, it's how we create them.

Interestingly, the science appears to support that feeling.

Researchers studying handwriting and typing have found that the act of writing by hand produces richer and more connected patterns of brain activity than typing the same words. Forming each letter requires fine motor movements, visual processing and memory to work together, creating stronger neural connections than simply pressing keys. Other studies have found that students who take handwritten notes often retain ideas more effectively than those typing lectures word for word. It's not because handwriting is somehow magical. It's because writing by hand encourages us to process information rather than simply record it.

That doesn't mean keyboards are the enemy. I'm writing this on one. Modern life would grind to a halt without them. They allow us to communicate faster than ever before, and that's no bad thing. But speed isn't always the objective.

Sometimes the value lies in slowing down.

A pen simply can't keep up with your thoughts. That turns out to be a gift. It forces you to choose what matters, to pause before committing words to paper, to leave gaps where ideas haven't quite formed. Somehow, in that slower rhythm, thinking becomes clearer.

Perhaps that's why so many writers still begin with notebooks and why journals continue to survive in an age of cloud storage. Or perhaps it's simply because there's something deeply satisfying about watching your own thoughts emerge in ink.

One of the unexpected pleasures of starting Literatea has been rediscovering writing for its own sake. These blogs rarely begin on a laptop. More often they start as a page of untidy notes, arrows pointing in every direction, sentences crossed out before they've had a chance to breathe. They look chaotic to anyone else.

Reading introduces us to other people's ideas. Writing helps us discover our own.

So perhaps the next time you make yourself a cup of tea, leave your phone where it is. Find a notebook instead. Spend ten minutes writing whatever comes into your head. Nobody else needs to read it. There doesn't need to be a point. There certainly doesn't need to be perfect grammar.

You might not produce anything worth keeping.

But you may just discover something worth thinking.